Bunkers At The Sea Shore Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Before going to bed
last night, I dug a hole
into my inner self.

Into it I dumped
the horned
beasts of the past

that poked me
with prongs
and continued to scoop
out all the clay

that held my bones
and flesh
together, as I gathered
my hollow self
to a walking skeleton
on the sea shore

with little blood
to face the poking jabs
and uppercuts
of a past year, the elephant
I could not ride,

always slipping off its trunk,
as it tramped on me
with its heavy feet,
squeezing me out of my breath,
but never knocking me out.

(ii)

From a mound of sand
a turtle shoot its way
out - and I help it

waddle back through life
on sheets of rolled-off
waters that carried
it in a silvery sun-glazed flow
back to a home
somewhere in a sea's bunker.

I rolled on, on the wheels
of my stroll through
a flock of shore birds, spinning
light in their eyes

to take off in a swoop
to the towering heights
of a cerulean sky
planting sapphire seeds
of another life
I don't know and cannot sip

like the fresh breezes
of this shore rolling me
through broken shells,
snails crawling out of them,
but stopping short.

From cracked bunkers
and armors of life, I see
life crawling back
in a hardened coat,
building wings
on their whorls to race
and fly, creeping
to a safe bunker, no blind

tramping feet
smashing them out of life,
as their upper tentacles
shine bright torches

along paths that push
and pull them back
to bunkers

amid stacks of dead leaves,
wind-lifted to build a home
for the creeping homeless
walking on broken legs.

(iii)

From the pneumostomes
of snails, I can now
breathe, as I walk down
the beach, pumping air
into wings to fly me

elsewhere among slashed-face
fishermen wearing
masks of slithering wrinkles
still cutting through
the flesh of the only smirk

they still carry
on their puffed-out cheeks,
as I joke about a star
falling from the firmament

to toss them back
into the bunkers of a hope
that fish will
pop up from a sleeping sun

to shoot them out
of deep bunkers of water
inside whirlpools
sinking life deep down to silt,

but rising back
with the fish to build back
flesh on fishermen's cheeks,
as they paddle off

in their canoes, their hands
light as fins of fish
to flip them through waters
to catch the very fish

that build them new bunkers
of life, as a sunny morning
soon covers itself
with night's blanket at mid-day.

How night jumps up
from a sleeping sun
to fill fishermen's hollow cheeks
of deep wrinkles

with a clay of hope to mold
back a grin on fishermen
that shelters me in a bunker,

a hollow dug by a past
filled up with air
from paddling faces in new wings.