Beach

Sitting on a beach 2,000 miles away.  Funny how the sun feels the same  in both places.  In Africa someone’s washing flaps about a hard brown ground.  I’m thinking about the colours of the shirts.  Are the cuffs and colours frayed?  Washed out thoughts hover three feet above warm sand.  I lick the remains of a chocolate ice cream. Watch the sun slide into a wet blue envelope enroute to your noon.

Airmail.

I can hear the high-pitched jangle of tinny township blues coming from cramped and sunless kitchens.  The sun too big to squeeze through small windows.  In the mealie fields & tall dry grass, whole generations are tending cattle.  They suck absent-mindedly on yellow stems.  Watch the sun in a slow drift to Argentina.

People sleep there in the afternoon.  White Panama hats line adobe walls & snore like buffalo under Indian tapestries.  Ice cream drips to my elbow.  Cattle are tended.  Stems get sucked.  Toes tap to smoky saxophones.  While the sun does all of these things for us, someone is tied to a chair.

Blindfolded.