Working Girls

How am I supposed to compete with Nicole, Fully Experienced who is able to stroke false lashes onto her eyelids rather than lose the wily moults to the back of a chair? Nicole, with her cream of know-how, certainly has a drawer of négligée and suitable apparatus for pranking Unlike 8 pairs of cotton briefs, stitched

Do engineers dream?

Do engineers dream of eiderdown chairs and perhaps a world without gravity? Do they poke with soft pencils at yesterday’s dreams and the monstrous dark in the bedsit? Do they skilfully rush to the day’s blasting rays at the stretch of a morning which never delays? — I know a few engineers and they are

Dying is probably easier than this

It’s Thursday, 06:15 You wake up to the alarm knowing you will never win an Olympic medal publish a novel that would win the Man Booker, finish your degree or even pay the last R150 you owe Woolworths. Your first grandchild will die before you and each of those candles you lit in the cave

Five Consequences of Repeated Actions

This month I once again neglect to pay into a pension, fertilize a good egg at ovulation or further my career. Untoward outcomes will result! In twenty years it will not matter that I didn’t write this poem today. — Not to fear. Come the end of next week, I plan to be on a

PROFESSIONS

There are all these Tonys of the world: Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Lebanese, Eastern European, who own sewing-machine shops, grocery stores, corner cafés and sometimes sell insurance. Anthony, Antonin, Antonio and the more Teutonic, Anton. But Anton was the opera singer after he’d worked for a while on the railway. — Another poem for possible inclusion