Flowered Detritus Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

A cloud has tumbled
to settle on taupe earth,
the roofless sky above
too high a ceiling to keep

it hanging on strings
it can no longer pluck,
as it wallows in its dance
to the rhythm of debris
creeping through its entrails

gleaming behind
a screen of strolling smoke
still weaving and knitting itself
into its thick fabric.

A cloud is sitting in the home
of a storekeeper, leaving
its room in the sky
to a hollow nebula still hollowing
out under a giant roof of air.

(ii)

There's too much space
up there, while
there's none in the store, a fire
having chewed metal

and sheathed covers, pushing
cement to bleed off
some of their cream ash.

A store that once swarmed
with gas bottles,
pots of paint, ceiling boards
and yawning bottles now sits
in a deep earthenware pot.

The store sits and waits
in a widening cave of jumping nails
and heavy hammers
with nothing to strike and beat
bones out of the flesh

of sheathed powders to plaster
and hold together walls
that leak with more khaki men

ambling around to set
more fires, as a man wriggles
out with curling vipers
of smoke hanging on his choked throat.

Cloud, cartwheel your way back
to your sky in pink flowers of dawn.

Fly back to your cubicle
in the expanding nebula,
crowned wild beasts
dancing with masked monsters.

(iii)

Climb back to your dome
on a silver castle of air
all stars and a feathered moon
breaking into shreds
of light over this growing flower
of earth in fire

above lakes that won't jump
with waters, leaving a gray
desert of the hardware store
to crawl in its debris.

But the rubble is yet to wear
another red and yellow
gown with flowers in lions' mouths
chewing every bit

from the deep bouquet
of burning and melting metal,
leaving choked air,
strings of smoke still tightening knots.