Between Night And Day Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for all Ambazonian stoics)

(i)

I'm the only prisoner,
the world swaying in a piece
of light hanging
on a shore's sun-lit

drifting bench flowered
with birds lifting wings
into right-angled flowers
flaming the spirit

between a burning howling night
and light from the burning
edges of my pillows.

Between night and day
only night crawls
through these young men,
all beads of light like me
when the bridge
from night to broad day

collapses with nights
of fear and stretches
of pangs and piercing
needles, the prisoner
to my hardening piece of ice
fleeing from his shadow.

The only split mirror
never screaming
into the shards
of an eagle-winged spirit,

when the eagle clips
its own tail, feathers
landing in a deep drum
of no day and no night.

Afterfeathers sinking
between deep pillows of light
into the rumbling night
of a gorge beneath my soles.

Beneath my neighbor's toes too
sipping only night,
when the head devours
strings of stropped sun
cutting off night and its tail.

Keep your beak pouting.
Keep pecking into cold
coals of pitch night
brewing bottoms of hearths,

light years off,
when daylight from
a glowing hearth
hits arrows of air jumping
into a fleeing sun.

(ii)

Where's the sun?
Where's a tail of daylight
to clothe the ash-clothed man
swimming in the clouds.

Where's the headlight
to pierce a piece
of night runs into night?

A sun rolls through
the night of my pocket
and drops too low to hang

in a thin air of night
on a floor beneath
my brow always night.

On a ceiling of cornea
that grabbed a piece
of the daylight
that showered a quivering
lad with night,

falling from a night
of pixels, when a chain-
glued spirit flies
with the albatross and the falcon

flying on streaks
of flagellation from arrowed
winks etching scars
into spines of rock.

(iii)

A piece of night rolling out night
stretched out tall
into scribbled notes
I fold up and seal
with a letter in squiggles
creeping, creeping

into a creased frog back sheet,
a moon ball, blurred
by shivering wet hands
whispers with a soaked bird
from Debundscha,
when I'm wrapped

in stretches of Svalbard's
cream-winged midnights
of sun after sun after sun
trailing sun lost in a melting eclipse.

But when I unfold
a wet lump, I find
a scratched memento singing

to the crowing sun
of a croaking dawn crowning me,
when it is pitch night,

the lady at the sunny party
late last night slipping
stars and moons into my dark
chest pocket melting

lumps of night into the daylight
that has never abandoned me,
as all is beach
in the narrow street of a prison cell,
light always devouring night.

Chase that sun deep
down the night of your chest pocket
poking skin to flee you.
Chase it. Chase the sun in the shirt
with albatross wings
of you into the soft sparrow

lifting you onto the ceiling
of a sunny night,

a one-eyed moon
standing dwarfed
between night and day like a candlelight
poking the eclipsed edges of sun.