Diarrhea Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

In the prattling
wind, gold
and scarlet red
flowers yawn

at others
in their powder
and spreading
dust,
the whispering,

muttering
air stretching
smokes
of spiraling hue

multiplying
the world with
fires of clouds,

cerulean mists
waving
noisy tattles,

every diarrheic
mouth
policing each other
to cut off noise,

but a murmuration
of starlings
jump down
like arrows
from a diarrheic sky

to swell
the diarrhea with
ship shanks
of gabble
and babble.

(ii)

Unstitched streams
of notes flow
into crooning
rivers softening
the tone

with a canary's song
and the nightingale
chanting
too sharply

to be pulled in
by clarinet
and oboe of other
bigger birds

only to be cut off
by contrabass
flutes and bassoon
of an eagle-winged
storm across

the verandah
nesting
blathering beetles
of men

and tattles flying
from viragos
in their cloudy fires,
a large
eucalyptus tree

flipping
its wings of branches
and ribbons
of smooth leaves,

as feathers
of withered
macaroon twigs
bleeding
with cuts,

as plucked off
petioles
chuntering with rabbits
on home lawns.

(iii)

How the world's
diarrhea
is so mixed up

with jabber
from a storm
of baboons

that a surgeon's
scalpel
lays out the world's
entrails

on a table
to find too many
burning
red cactus aloes
of a more

flamy storms
of maundering
slabbering,
slobbering politics,

a disease
no antibiotics
can cut off
with breeze and zephyr.