Are there words to describe an afternoon
Heavy with sweat, stained right across with the smell of horse-shit,
When, emerging from the fashionable cafe filled with
Self-consciously defiant adolescents,
Kitty parties, matte-lipsticked by occupation,
Kids squealing from delight and perversity,
Corporate lowlifes ascending the stepladder,
Old acquaintances indulging nostalgia and immodesty,
And waiters padded with airconditioning,
To a tossed-up, breathless day,
With vendors at streetcorners cooling off by
Masquerading as louts before unlikely customers
While crows fly intensely by, missing your head entirely by chance...
Strolling along demarcated pathways
Alone, which neutralises the clichés, and
Habitually looking past lovers who glare suspiciously at you,
But miss the other walker who is feeling himself up while
Peering around a shrub at a couple kissing under a tree,
Utterly unselfconscious.
Another, behind, circumventing his own aim even in his head,
Loiters purposefully after you,
Except to where you navigate dung-clumps
To stare up through the branches of a fifty-foot tree,
Or stop to wonder whether you know people you recognise.
Lazing along businesslike roads to read a poem engraved
In an economically-semi-painted wall, sipping
Plum gin from a coffee thermos, eyes sly-sided and watchful
For the man who yells, suggestive, from the gas-cylinder truck
At midday, when the sweat rides to the point of the chin,
And another man blushes, asking the way to a children's park
When what he needs is a 'urinal, Iamspeakingfranklymadam,please
Don't mind, hein ?' While you, overjoyed
That he is not going against a wall, direct him
To an all-women's petrol pump for more blushing.
Crossing roads while looking back,
Feeling tips of raindrops delicately press the point
That water turns white transparent, and walking home
At a pace that defies the shower of
Incredulous sheltered looks, and the angry exclamation-question
That did I have to do all this walking, put on this show of bravado, just now ?