Reign of the Quisling-Rodents

PAIN

26 Of a Himalayan dump – where a woman in red headscarf Squats in a quickie of urinary relief – A ragged urchin ferrets for lunch Afflictions come to a head for these Leech-infested siblings of mine; accursed sons Of a gelded soil; these thousand and one faces Uniformed in the fabric of glum looks; These countless gaits Held in place to a shamble By the gravitational pull of privation And hunger connives With solar anger to make the famished mistake A slender mirage on the road For a serpent across the tarmac PAIN Another moon dies As they say No pay. Seated by her three-stone fireplace A needle-like housewife and her broomstick issues Await the simmering little pot – Of scanty maize grains and weevil – to cook See what abjectness Is reflected in the waters Of this river Taking its rise From my eyes, 27 Coursing down my ugly face of stone To the corners of my parched mouth Yet five more moons have died As they would say Still no way Hands with palms of concrete Making money for ethnocratic mouths to devour See what enslavement Is reflected in the waters Of this stream that takes it rise From my brows Coursing down my hideous face of stone To the corners of my parched mouth There, where trickles merge How many decades more To live to drink from this confluence of tears and sweat, Salt to salt Or shall it stay thus Till dust comes to dust? DRAB MONDAYS I note these drab Mondays going by lately; The privation-skinned race of days; The boundary days between arid and horrid times And in the dried-up palms of the hands of These redundant brothers, wilting away in the privatisation sun, I see, reflected Like things in a mirror, ...