I sleep the sleep of the just;
The heat and the dust
of the whitewashed grimy township cease
To exist at the turning of a page;
Yet the skeletal mind is really not
Its own world.

I roam in the Hararean cold nights,
Homeless yet home, hungry yet driven,
Satiated, into the alleys of the creative impulse.
As I try to snore the world out of my mind,
Communal bath gossiping and quarrelling
Pubcrawls into the doldrum of my career.

Vocal I am, like storm-bewilder'd
seas,
As I wonder in the dusk with chanting
streams;
Among a blaze of lights,
With tawdry music and cigars
Are my skeletons and women
Dawdling through delights.

Guns into mimic thunder burst and
boom;
And mirthless laughter rakes the
whistling night;
As I lug my clay-sucked boots as
best I might;
Along the street; sometimes a bullet
sing,
And drowning shells burst with a hollow
bang.

I dip contented oars and sigh
and sleep;
I stir, shifting my body; then the
pain
Leap like a prowling beast and grip
and tore
My groping dreams with grinding claws
and fangs.

Sitting in the gloom
Of my quiet attic room
Harare goes rolling all around,
They puff their pipes, calm-hearted
Thinking how the revolution started;

Rifles crack and bullets flick
Bones are smashed and buried quick
They can hear me, they can mingle
Radiant folly with my jingle
War is but a joke for me and them;

I jostle and climb to meet the
bristling fire;
Yet burrels of guns tire
As green masked men with
fear, bruised by the knuckles of
the jungle sire.

I turn my dull sunken face to the sky
Haggard and hopeless.
The stale despair of night, must now
renew
My desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope
for peace.
© Danny the Writer