To Mantovani’s sweetly played Elizabethan Serenade
my day quietly fades away with 2 documents pending:
an irate man claiming poverty though he still has a car
sadly an older model - furiously denouncing a security
guard terrorising his wife and he at a clinic they attend
because they are gravely ill - and can only survive due
to the medicine - and a letter by a local Mad Hatter
Who professes to be The President thinking he has a
World-wide Empire and everybody is ready to fulfil all
his wishes; not that I mind - the mental gyrations may
be good for keeping the grey stuff in shape, but after-
wards some over-zealous colleagues dig in & change
everything to pass official time & returning everything
to sound like original, literal, home-made Afrikaans
This Secret Spy disguised as plain government agent
isn’t inspired at all as it leads to naught as the Biblical
Ecclesiastes says; assembly-line work lacks all charm
this Spy needs an assignment with violin case holding machine guns to take out ALL messing with my words;
changing my the flow of my sentences then destroying
my interpretation, nullifying my work & relegating me
To the plane of the damned - this will be a wasteland
when I’m revenged on these mine enemies who’d kill
melodies & strangle free-floating terms simply to earn
their bureaucratic salary while turning in these public
carousels of repetitive administrative activity…
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem