Fading Specks Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Snow-white sheets of clouds
trailing racing fleeing patches,

these fleeting sparks
over centipedes and millipedes
of dangling scripts

and drifting squiggles
O fading specks
and feathers flying out
of unfolding crawling breezes.

O ashy scribbles
on old papyrus
we cannot read
with unfiltered loops,

the continued masks
we wear, sprayed creeping ants
of shredded selves

nibbling off our pores,
as we hang
on thin breaking filaments
on a cruising albatross's tail,

threads sewing us back
into a thick rolled-out strip.

(ii)

O unfolding straw-woven mat
with a sisal end
hemming in our unraveling
threads of love,

on which we sleep,
leaving alone
on a wind-blown feather

the new coronavirus
thinning out into the mist
treated with shady nooks

under whispering trees
and overstretched
swinging legs of clouds.

Fall, fall - fall beneath soles
into caves that drum,

as we take every cheating stride
of elastic social-distancing
racing back to tie our ankles further

as we totter and fall
over mountains of bumps
on the daily streets that tie us

from door to door
in the closely-knit plenum
of a rolling sea of love
with shores that open doors

to news shores
beyond the breaking arm of a couch
drifting under a candelabra
of stars holding us together

on the beach
by a garden of peonies and stargazers,
our new spectacles in the clouds.

(iii)

Let these clouds break
into a green pasture
of hunter and fern leaves

in the rolling garden
of a gaze at close quarters
over stitched shoulders
rising into unshaken brick walls.

For when they collapse,
breaking into new specks
and rivers of dust,

we'll swim, breast stroke
over back stroke
in the muddy waters that tie
us to specks of clouds.