His Shoes' Holes Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Early bouncing morning
grumbles amid rising rumbles
on squeaking leather rails,
as customers in their trains
ride on a coarse path,

their broken lives, pressing
their feet hard
into a parched brittle earth

full of mumbling pebbles
and tossed-off beer caps
under caterwauling cobblestones.

(ii)

Mid-morning lands its feet too
on crocodile-bark roads,
canine-mouthed bumps rising.

The sun in its heating engine
thumps with passing feet,
breaking tilted shadows
it has sketched and baked

in its sizzling oven
over the heavily trodden passageway.

The cobbler's store has spun
and swirled into a crowd
shuffling to enter a church door,

but find its way to the lit mouth
of an erupting crater,
as a cobbler receives an unmolten crop
of itchy hairsplitting customers.

Still very hot in their magma.
Still wriggling out
of their overheated bodies

full of pasted blisters
and scalds from quaking twists
in their typhoon-like lives.

But life continues on a path
of butterfly wings

(iii)

On a high-shouldered front desk
in the cobbler's store
sits the slain bleeding animal
of a pair of shoes

glued to each other
like conjoined twins
showing off
their wounded bodies:

deep holes like the sun's orifice
shining with the dark pipe,

through which a man has squeezed
his life like a narrow-nested bird
trotting through lava-laden streets.

See those holes sinking into soles.
A man's head may fit
into each of the deep caves.