A Lamp's Mouth Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

A poet on a high rock told me
he loved reading in the dark,

carving out words lost in moss,
stuck in flattened splashes
of spat- and coughed-out gum.

Gripping an earth stone
under the glow of a cigarette's mouth
beaming until it loses its voice,

grey hairs of cinder dropping
with crawling white ants
and walking with wind's crutches
on the flesh of a floor.

(ii)

A floor is the sheet of paper,
on which a poet writes, harvesting ants
and shadows muttering

under the moon, as slippers and boots
scamper off when whistles blow
from a sun hiding in a hole.

A wick, the stone poet's pen
steers a flame to glow over dust,
pedals the tailor's pad
to stitch braided thoughts

clothing schema with brown helices
and the wings of a wandering
albatross. At last a ray flaps wings
to spill dust into the eyes
of the cursed muse sculptor.

A forehead's rub, an eyebrow's scratch
chops off hairs from the sun's
chisel to scoop out rays for a verse.

From a small match-stick flame
igniting rags of tobacco in a bowl,
the poet puffs out fossil clouds
to the moon and lands on a page
with the midnight sun over a lantern.

Drunk with night's sun, the poet
pulls down the 12: 01 nebula onto
his drifting page for a brisk walk
by the riverside full of sunflower stalks

through an unshaved garden, stealing
the soft alto of an agitated robin
on the brows of a leopard dancing
on one bruised and broken leg.

(iii)

The sun drifts a zoo close to his
Tree Torchiere, as he chats
with an Antique Floor Lamp, the Nickel
Finish Arc spinning to make blood
ooze out from the moon's skin.

Under showers of soft light spun
by a breeze from figs
and cantillating welwitschias
in the Namib desert, a firefly

flying the poet with a hawk to Mount Fako,
a lamp's flame the mouth
shooting out large yellow flowers

from the Sirius-spraying volcano
that breaks his trembling pen:
Sun from an overbright volcanic spray
scoops out burning bones in a war,

as a wailing head hangs down
from the tree of a woman's might
like a coconut dropping
from the tree's towering, stretched-out
feathered arms without a tear.