Crowd And Void Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Stretched walkway.
A river of folks, flows. Glowing
with fires on camp
and baseball shirts.
And colorful gowns
carrying sun and moon

to shimmer and glitter over
smoky country houses
and far-flung grasslands.
And forests breathing
out cave-mouthed parrots
and tube-beaked birds

twittering, shrieking
and singing in tones carried
only by sketched color
flying on chests and backs
of tight-lipped dudes
shooting eyes at jewelry,
beams talking loud for them.

How animals roar and bark
from folks' outfit
sprayed with jungle flowers
and the quadrupeds

that brandish their crowns
over their dry-leafed
crackling floors, as man soles
and dog paws leave traces
on eye-pulling outfit.

(ii)

The mall crawls and runs,
a grand hall of folks.
Sun-lit faces shower
themselves with beams
ignited by hawk
and dove chat and blather.

The mall spins, shops
jumping back to the same spot,
as folks stop by again
and again, peeking at shirts
and crystal-collared turtle necks
they've already seen.

The mall spirals with the same
folks darting winks
and glances at each other.

The same open-spaced places
swallow rushing, ambling
and plodding legs
carried by faces held high
to miss no gadget
hanging down with pulling beams.

(iii)

At the deep back,
an eagle-winged
elastic door
expands its armpits

to flush out
folks cutting short
their swim in crowds.

Flowing and jerked off
in concatenations
of folks squealing out for space.

And screaming
out sun and dark clouds
that hang on them,
as they go home.

(iv)

But Chah and Tubuo
walk out slowly,
their faces swollen
and wrinkled
with a storm of blood

still spilled and sprayed
at the alabaster air
around them last night,
as their eyes
devoured the TV screen.

They whisper to each other,
squeezed in to stay
within their own walls.

The world of the mall has
sunk and pushed them
deeper into a hollow barrel,

as they float and roll
and bounce along
across the volcano mouth
of the parking lot,
each in his own
palisaded fenced-in space.

A hollowed-out tunnel of life
mumbling out
a song to themselves:

War is the sinking
deep gorge
pulling down everybody

to float in a dark corridor
across mountains and seas.