Deep In Your Mantle Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for a studious Boston terrier)

(i)

In your soft-speaking fitting
balaclava, you carry a comet's
tail of cool cream light
sailing down your cheeks

to give you an overgrown smile
running for half a mile
across the city into a park, where you
sit in the fort of open air

closed to yourself
like a studious student in a cubicle
cramming for a prized place

in a star pulling a zephyr
into eyes and ears,

your buttocks standing
on thick books feathered with time
driven by the wink

of a strolling peregrine falcon
on a blade-edged snaky
stretch of crawled lightning.

(ii)

Pushed and tossed over
by a firefly's torch
piercing through blanketed nights,

nudged by a thousand thumbs
digging into a deepening mantle,

you lie down numbed
by a storm lifting you
with a tornado's laddered
towering hands poking

a meteorite's path to a widened mouth,
drinking the world
into your snowy eyes,

each eye a sun bursting
out of a dark nimbus cloud
to scan the world

with a loop from a blaze of Venus
flipped over and over
by a butterfly's wings.

(iii)

A thickening forest
hangs in the drifting cloud
closing in sacks of gems

tightened with the timber hitch
to sink you down
with your quiet arrowed gaze
to the mantle

sealing the only chrome key
of a cloud from your sleepy eyes
to unlock the world.

Wake up now, it's time
to flip open the world
from a sky's book of clouds

when your wink
opens a lengthened chapter of thunder
with your snarled groan.