A Poet's Late Dinner Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Night is splayed into entrails
of sky sparks slithering in syzygy
through hollows of a nebula
to blot off blood from bleeding veins.

The bee of an ailing sky stings
the cobweb skin of a thickened crow,
but explodes into a mass
of small cabbage whites dishing out

carnivorous meals, an open tray
of sky flushing out egret lumens
from a moon's overflowing candle
tossing off a quivering white lamb.

But all is tone-on-tone light,
while my pen changes tone in floating ash.

Where's the fire? Where's white briar
after white briar, when sky is burning flowers
and plastic smoke spews only more light?

(ii)

Through the sprayed beams
of a wind-drunk bouncing window
etched by slats and panels
into disciplined alleys of light,

the moonlit night swings
through its hot fire of candle-spurting stars
to land on my page with wings
of ash flying from a cooling hearth.

But my pen burns; my pen pops
in the heat of a marbled white.

The night sits on like a blight of thought
polishing a dish of white lambs
from a cracked moon in a spun bowl,

as I sail off in the ashes of white butterflies,
my wrecked ship a dry ink-pot.

The bleached night sits on my page,
a splash of gargoyle,

a crashed white butterfly with no black box
to tell the story of a bleeding poem,
all parched bones and no beam of flesh.