Decent Wage Poem by Thabani Khumalo

Had I been a young man when my mother was a seeking girl -
had I been standing at a corner where
the youth converge to weigh up their compatibility issues -
had I seen her eyeing on me with a covertly possessive weight -
had I seen her radiate garishly above all the beautiful girls at the meeting there,
I'd have smuggled by the boys and hid my face from her inviting stare,
we'd obviously not be in a logical rapport except for the image given the eye.
At a notice of such, my father fled,
he ran too late, in vain, to find the least about himself
and he manfully flung off a daring scary height
of a protruding branch with a strong noose around his neck,
perhaps, if he clung-on another full hour,
he'd have begun to implode inside his royal head.

My body cannot recover from the difficult labors of a past life
and my head cannot find good room for my thoughts to be quiet and alone for some reasonable amount of time.
I am, soon, about to commit felonies I never wished to commit with my bare hands
because I have toiled through ten years, of my life everyday, against the burning sun,
faraway in a foreign country, to get nothing but chauvinistic insults and darning pain.
Grown men gather in my name to deprive me of a juvenile livelihood,
that I may be taunted with mockery
when I'm bereft of wheat bread from a small diesel truck,
they consent alone and decree that my flesh is not incumbent of a decent wage.

I have come to know this one thing beyond questionable doubt
and I've seen its truth in more than one physical practice:
that many people in the world feel happy to see me suffering,
and I'm not at all satisfied.