Flowers Under Clouds Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

She smiles hydrangea lips,
when a lipstick dapples off
her wet lips with light,

a thickened-and-sprayed sun
the flamy towel
from the shiny rolled-out end
of a bleached dawn.

She grins orchids when
her white teeth
fly and jump off at you
with an oval good morning
full of snow-clothed stars,

her mouth rounded and curled
into figure eight lying
on her double-wheeled back

to flick out with a drawled howdy
rolled off with the round wings
of a sailing sun just after a light rain
has washed its hands off.

(ii)

Withdrawn into her cloud
of bustard-winged shirt
floating over the rocky taupe banks

of pants that pant through
a choking gale of eyes
rolling in the shells
of hidden peeks and arrowed gazes,

she settles at her desk
on a cotton patch of lightness,
fitting her with wheels

that roll off the keyboard
of a wallowing screen growing

into the nylon mist
of rattled memos and papers
racing to a shark-mouthed in-tray.

(iii)

As light dims and floats
through the window,
all gold seized by the expanding
feathers of gray,

she dives into a pending closet
of darker shirts
from a full out-tray of thrown-out
drafts and unsigned memos.

Her cubicle grows dimmer,
as a windy sigh erases her face beams,
her face expanded
into the pyramid of a frown,

the large widening cloud,
dressing her up with a shadow
of herself, carrying not even
the shredded petal of a butchered smile.