Back To A Lonely Cubicle Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

It took him one brisk
stretch of an hour
to race back home panting

like a horse. He was back
to his fort of stars
and a bright night moon.

But his compound was a desert
after his children
and grandchildren had dragged
themselves back to school.

They'd heaped themselves
into an overcrowded
bus cleaving their steel-bonded ties

with Cha-ah into pieces
of brittle buddies splitting
into sprinkled bits.

Leaving Cha-ah in a world
of his, unclothed like a worm
in a moon on earth -
no whisper, no sigh, no rattle.

(ii)

In his cold misty home, no
giggling child igniting a race
to frolic with stars at night,

as he usually sat and watched,
blanketed by a sprayed grin
warming him up
with a thick cloak of family.

Tonight the warm children
were cut off from him
in a big house slimmed down
to a cubicle of loneliness.

(iii)

Cha-ah swims and ambles
in a flat bleached desert,
no dune of clutching children
rising into a climbing peak

on the arms of each other
only to break down to the floor.

Only a desert now stretches
its flattened-out quiet strides,
as he sits down,
scrubbed by a hollowness

of silence. Grilled by the heat
of loneliness and the chills
of a blizzard of empty shells

rubbing each other
and clinking against a wall
on a slate of ice, his bed
of doubled sheets unfolding no sleep.

He stretches himself out
between sheets
that give him
only coldness snatching
off those cotton balls

of children's hands that used to
fill him with stars
from a firmament of children
now gone back
to their far-flung world
of scribbles and scripts.