Reign of the Quisling-Rodents

CITY OF LONGINGS

22 Shunned by disposal – are twenty or so seeds of beans Boiled in salt… Breakfast At lunchtime Sulking dancers move in time To the rumbling music of famished bowels, carved grimaces On sun-dried concrete faces. And how can misery-hardened cheeks Ever hold a smile to you? Come dusk, when seven or eight locust abdomens Shall roast in the dying embers Of decaying coconut peelings, It shall be suppertime again; Suppertime for them; lean beneficiaries Of a usurped bequest; the rib-caged inheritors Of a pilfered legacy CITY OF LONGINGS In the streets My head splits from The ventriloquist noon’s mimicry – In quadruple-pitch monotone – Of cars, machines, birds and man Underfoot, the market road Vibrates to the sonorous, grains-of-sand numberlessness Of human cackling in greed Ceaseless travails 23 Still there is time To watch the city’s council Bring down brick walls on hens and chicks, Blessing them and saying Amen Then suddenly, I realize How hard it is For the physical hand To wipe off sweat in the soul And I stand here Dying Of a mortal longing For Muanenguba’s evenings When the dusk Places a gag on the noise-lipped mouth of noon Sitting captive amid coffee plants, And awaiting freedom at the morrow’s wrinkling Of the dawn COMMERCIAL ON ROTLAND Once at your best Of summer holiday destinations Take a deep breath and Relax in the swindle-fouled air of Rotland Sup alfresco On a dish Of fish, dead In lakes turned black from this Massive spill of cupidity like an oil slick ...