Cocoon Of Pain Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Wall by my bedside
blowing out into a cloud
hanging on its arms,

feet touching floor,
a rug pulling the world
into lattices weaving them
into small windows.

Over these cracks
from the high-shouldered
stretch of a wall,

I rest my neck on my chest
pulling my eyes
to capture earth's red mantle

beneath this running rug
pulling legs out of a crater,

the carpet stroking
my soles to the edge
of a marbled smoothness,

where feet drag themselves
on the spinning trip
of a merry-go-round.

A trip to the fire
of a kitchen fluting
a kettle's alto, its mouth
bearded with smoke.

Rising to touch
an expanding ceiling of age
goateed with cobwebs
hanging down

with tentacles crawling
to the marsh
of a watery floor gripping
ankles with gluey ropes

trailing a spine
wriggling on an earth
out of wiggles
blowing trumpets of pain.

(ii)

Sinking with every
red flower burgeoning
from red particles
of coals, embers shaving off

white hairs into ash,
when pain still hangs on
with burning red tinder.

Bunker on my wall,
a bastion of prisoners
squeezed into a dot.

In a cloud a thousand
chained sprites tightened
into a knot, a botch

housing a thousand soldiers,
a dungeon having
squeezed prisoners to a still dot.

(iii)

That cocoon spins
no stork to bump out
with a kite's wings
flying me off to a child's
sky world,

when a cocoon on a wall
squeezing me in,
whispers into my ears
an aging hymn of glued love:

"I'm a narrow-headed
case-bearer trailing a bagworm,
an insect pasted
to lick the fire of pain,

as a rolled-up and knotted sick man
still cannot writhe
out of a bolted dungeon".

And the sun no longer
drops with silver showers
to churn me in a bath tub
of chills and crawling icy hands.