Ditch-Dark Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(for prisoners of rock)


(i)

Ditch-dark past
fire's midnight
at mid-day

a staying lightning
from pneuma,

no clouds, but a slab
of sky dye
never dying the sun-dyed,

but unspraying
the eye
with beamed night
puncturing soot

into a wall
of nimbus
spinning spinels
of cotton's snow

built of sun
without ray,

but light from head's
bonfire shining
with coughed-out coughs

cleaved on sputtering lips,
a candle, the wax
of sun in full cloak
of fire melting

night over a crater's
drumming cauldron
into bricks
cemented by breath.

(ii)

High roofs ride
a galloping sky
rising to ice

hot with the fridge
brewing fires
of breath and breath.

A yawning crater
erupts, ejecting
a sturdy body of soot

from parachutes
of giggles
bleached teeth

bathed in stone suns
breathing
out the only stars

to shine tropes
with a shone sun
beneath a pit,

the storm blowing
with wind
fanning them
out of the fire

that swallows
no stone's croaking rock
of a man, but builds
a boulder of him.

Builds dim stars
rising to towers
of arrows shot
by night's light

cemented by sparks
of cackles
and chirps

greasing grasshopper's legs
into pillars holding
sky tight into its crown
of night, a full-bodied yawn

to explode into a comet
of sunlight

breathing in soot
beaming with
mind's bowl filtering out
hard specks of night.