Bones That Never Break Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Below the dark arches of a night,
I won't drink nails into flesh.

Hammer me into a bow behind
a smooth moon's spine.
Kick me into the shreds of bone

building me into a walrus' bloated yawn
making a silent whimper quiver
like a saw-edged whimper
landing on a sighing bearded sea bank.

Beat me into the rock of my brittle self.
And a flow of night
will sprout from a broken candle's lips,
as wax grows muddy and stony.

Watch sparks and shards
of me drift back in crystals and stars
building a candle humming
a light and the wallowing butterfly
of a two-eyed lantern awake

Smash me into barbed wire
of scribes and scribble floating
down a page dwindled into a sun ray
dancing with a rusty sword.

(ii)

Like the cloud-eyed canyon
walls of a spurting candle
wearing angle-edged
wrinkles and slanted winks I rise

from a cracking cackling regolith.
I stand by the edge of me
young as a fetus of light crawling

to borders of my shrinking
flesh and bones. A river of me
drifts me to smoking Andes rocks
puffing out smoking smoke

from a thousand-year young earthenware
pipe rolling itself over
and over. Let me puff out smoke
from noseless Sahara nostrils
grown dead and nooseless.

(iii)

Curl, flip over the slab of a tic,
a drawn-out ridge rising
into a bridge with breaking rails

from the Amazon to the Congo,
where shadows sink deepest,
pop up to surface
with the soaked face of a smooth hard stone

in a flowing hot sauce that soaks
my bread in the Mississippi
twisting burning scalded fingers
in the steam of a riot every guest must taste.