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Nightfall
In the sad hotel that drinks a swamp, You breathe malarial air and enjoy Frog music piped in from the dismal swamp. Bits of your life measured out in bars, Your thoughts gripped in clamps, Your lips pierced through With fish-hooks, locked shut, Silenced over the stab of a clipped Tongue that stabs the steel bar clutching The teeth gnashed for dinner. You dunk salt balls into the soup Of bitter tears raging through our land. Fried cockroaches, rotten beans Baked in the perennial salt Whet your old ulcerous hunger As you journey from nowhere to nowhere Stopping at the sad hotel that offers No respite to despotic tyranny. For many years you have silently swallowed The bitter cassava of tyranny Served to you at dagger-point.