The Last Stop

After years on his route

He sits still in humble shade

Reluctantly idling

In a lower gear

He sits still in humble shade

Slowly surrendering

To the winged passengers on his arms

The browning of his lawn

He starts slightly in his seat

To the four o’ clock

Tsik tsik tsik of his neighbor’s sprinkler

Bends a foot out of the encroaching sun

After years on his route

He reverses further from the road

Foot off the pedal- out of the sun

The last stop

A Moment with the Maid

Grasped in furrowed hands

The clothes are wrung waterless

And hung in Transkein hot wind

By arms reaching up to high wires

Plump brown antennae

Over the exuberantly coloured cloth

That wraps her

The berg wind carries her Xhosa song

Gathering the smells of lawn and linen

To the young white boy sitting on the steps

Behind the prefabricated house

That pretends it’s in suburbia

Or anywhere but Umtata

She hangs his Superman t-shirt

While he crashes plastic trucks

Dear Jungle John

Dear Jungle John

Recall the devil

That allowed you to

Forge the alloy of your inventions

Who assassinated your last

Obsequious nerve with an

Eyeful of possibility

That twisted you around

A thorny sprig of reclusion

To toil over what

You would uniquely, shockingly

Usher to matter

Ask it to come round

All love

roy

The Big Cheese

The hospital

As a child I called it The Big Cheese

The Joburg General

Yellow and holey

Swiss Emmental

I recall

Disney on the children’s walls

Unavailingly dampening cries

Softening needles

Doctor’s lies

Watched by Gentlemen

Not Sleeping with Avril

A sleepless Sunday night

The vapid Avril Lavigne line

Singing Radiohead at the top of our lungs… something something na na na

Washes onto the morning sand

And finally dissipates mockingly into the grains

Releasing my brain to the flogging of the alarm clock

The worries that tossed and turned me

Between midnight and six this morning

Chuckle as they reveal themselves as trivial

Avril stuffs the worries and her song into a punky Burberry bag

As I stretch lamely for the alarm

See ya tonight fucker!

She dawdles away across the sand

Turning to give me the finger