VONANI BILA

(for Tebogo, retired prostitute, now drunkard & whore)

Dahl street 

Pietersburg

sex workers are burgers

We chew the fresh ones 

Rosebud catwalk girls

Those with protruding pointed breasts

She lurks stoically

Through the red light zone night 

Eyes pierce the dark

Glowing like a firefly

A nocturnal creature knows 

Begging is suffering

Men unfurl in dark beam-lit cars

At Holiday Inn block 

Tycoons pout in the street 

In sex hunt missions 

Caress prostitutes

In the dark moonlight shadows

Prostitute with long braids & made-up face 

It's money that wins when she opens belts 

Sucking, sucking

Dicks of unashamed rich males 

She has an obsolete heart

Burrowed by a crucible of joblessness 

Flooded by cascades of helplessness 

She screams in the dead of the night 

Pietersburg is hopeless

Absorbed by humiliation 

Leaders live here, sick!

Dahl Street

Pietersburg

Friday, Saturday, Sunday at dusk

I listen to birds chirping in willow trees

I'm a handsome jita with a fully radiant aura 

I buy a plate of pap & livers

Where the downtrodden drown in booze

Day in, day out

This café is a bar, a dining room - a dancing hall 

No broom to clean up mountains of dirt

Humanity at risk

White shopkeeper with a staccato coughing gun

Do you feed your children with this poison? 

White shopkeeper with a staccato coughing gun 

Is this what you call business

When you feed black people with poison?

Poison man 

Run, run, run 

Go home

Before the sun goes down

Dahl street 

Pietersburg

Revelling fatty boom-boom drunkard

In tight jeans 

Sniff snuff 

Bloodshot eyes

Dread-stoned woman 

Eats cigarette

Ke a o rata buti

Vandag ke tsamaya le wena

She joins my table Lots of empties

Disturbed by a red coke tin

Disgusting!

(Sure, a gallant poet should not support a Coca Cola regime

I wanuna wa njhani wa ku nwa namuneti?)

She shows me cheap condoms 

Perhap combined with femidoms 

She blows the condom, a balloon 

You may use them

But they burst

Flesh to flesh 

Fondle my breast

My nipple

I’m ready for a blue movie fuck

She rubs my genitals ... 

Voetsek!

I wish I could shout

Tired loose decolourised ghastly breasts ...

Me?

Here there's nothing erotically enticing 

A little sigh

She is hungry

Throws her unwashed fingers 

Long dirty nails on my plate 

Picking last piece of a liver 

I'm angry

You’ve just had sex

30 minutes ago 

Makgosha

A man I'm sharing a table with, shouts

Halala!

She asks for a Black Label 

She drinks yonke nyakanyaka 

Castle, Lion & Hansa

Kudu, Elephant & Leopard

She does not drink tea, coffee or Coke

She's 22  years of age

Vulnerable to Aids

Living days on hold

She has scars on her face

As if bitten by mad bulldogs

Here, on my mouth,

I was bitten by my parasite sister 

Fighting over a man we were sharing 

Here, on my neck, I was sjambokked 

By a man I have two kids with

Her face is like rough dirty washing 

She has a hole on her left thigh 

Stabbed with a bush-knife

Victim of gang rape

Dahl Street 

Pietersburg

People say she was flamboyant in her young days

22 years, still young 

Inglorious

No rosebud girl here 

She has matric - F

Passed without distinctions 

She is an endangered species

Two children and one beneath red earth 

Several aborted in the backyard dump 

Granny is a pensioner

Certified mad

She has destroyed her sight with poison 

Granny is a pensioner

She takes care of her grandchildren

For six months

Granny’s been without money

Government tracking ghost workers

Dahl Street

Pietersburg

Tebogo came to Pietersburg

To study secretarial courses 

Left two children in Bochum 

Swimming in dirt

She can't type a word

She never finished the course 

Cause known to everybody

She dreamt of glitter & leather wear in the hype of fashion

Never desired to wear plastic as blanket

In chilly Pietersburg & sell fruits in the street 

To forge life with humble beginnings

Never desired to toil as security guard 

That dead-end job

She hawks as a sex worker, drunk 

Sex for cash

In Bodenstein street 

Bok Street

Boom Street 

Dahl Street

Home is a bundu Bochum

Hope for growth & development is zero 

People share water with animals 

Children have children

Give birth in the bush 

Tebogo has two children

The big one plucks crops on a farm

The boer warrior and settler in khaki-clad

Beats child's bum with a gun's butt

Claims ignorance of child labour

Aredzi!

Dahl Street 

Pietersburg 

Drinking is my life

Struggle is Mandela's life

Tebogo, me .. 

Life is already wasted

I wish I could kick the bucket 

Become a worm beneath the soil 

Life is wasted

Washed away like the debris of the sea

I live in a derelict possie 

With bullfighting hobos

Unfaithful men growl in sex-death bed 

Lives mercilessly wasted with my bush-knife 

Nothingfor mahala

Money buti!

I sleep with every man who's got a dick 

Pay if you have zuk

Bustling cargo trucks carry her as provisions 

For a long journey

Until Musina 

Beit Bridge 

Harare

She's making money 

Bottling it in booze

Dahl Street 

Pietersburg

Wrinkled homeless scruffy-looking men

With climbing-jumping smiles & laughter

Ha-ha-ha!

It’s water moholo

It’s mud chommie

Tlov’tlov

A pig-pen

Help yourself in the toilet

With sunlight

This one has lost the juice 

She’ll give you drop & ticks

Dahl Street 

Pietersburg 

Tebogo

Tough like chigwana root

Hard like steel cable

You've seen bellies ripped open with knives 

Prostitute running naked in the night of gunfire 

Tebogo

You have survived Hillbrow, iron-hand men, guns & drugs

You have seen prostitute's blood, gristle 

Bone & running urine

Tebogo 

Prison girl

You survived police animal brutality 

Bochum, trace her whereabouts

A snail never loses its trail

Ag shame Tebogo

Prostitution rips through hearts like this ...

Ag shame Tebogo

South Africa has the best constitution in the world 

Black woman's rage

Life is a steep hill

Dahl  Street

Pietersburg

Eeh, the beerhall is stuffy

Satan has taken over the world saints

Ku nuhwa khehele

Most are water adversaries

Their armpits smell, rotten eggs 

They wear dirty takkies

Dance s'pantsula on smoking dust 

Blasting kwaito moves with nerves 

Socks and underpants thick with dirt 

Some dance with unzipped trousers 

Some kiss with dagga-darkened lips 

Burping the stench of beer

It stinks like shit 

Love has no borders

Just kiss those donga-road-like gums 

Sleep and snore choiceless man

There are no bathrooms in this beerhall

We use grey wall & leaking trees for emergency 

Taxi men hang out there

Washing spotlessly their over-decorated red & white kombis 

Wasteful guns protrude on their waists

Strong necks, bellied men, toughies 

Remind me of dreadful taxi ride slaughter 

Chisa nyama

Woza mtwana 

Hearts of lions 

Vat en sit

Can't sleep alone

Tight like an okapi

Here, we dance house-jikeleza

On urine-reeking ground

Here we dance to blasting tunes of kwaito

On blood- soaked floor 

Strangers, beware 

Swimming pools are dry

Green rugby fields are dry

Seshego se botse boshego

We are entertaining ourselves

Wa lala wa sala

U huma kwihi m’fana loyi?

Phashasha

Dahl Street

Sham festival of life lost 

Wasteland Pietersburg 

Leaders smoke Cuban cigars

Fidel Castro's people are literate

In Holiday Inn, they buy beers with credit cards 

Next plane to US

With navy blue suits hobbling from one meeting to the other

Trapped in crony capitalism 

Cellphone gods

You make me numb & dumb

Can't you hear the wailing screams of dying souls 

Souls siphoned in despair

Cracking graves of ancestors? 

Cellphone gods

Why mimic white man's ways

Engulfed in conspicuous consumptionism? 

Savannah shopping mall offers her no hope 

Cellphone gods

Come wine with me

This running urine in Dahl Street 

Come dine with me

This hard shit in the ghetto.