In A Thorny Flower Bush Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Pick a flashy blinking flower
to gaze at you
with a stargazer's eye
when a moment's belt floats.

And you must bloom and grow
into a bearded hawk
perched on a pole gaining height
with pipes of tornado winds

more than twenty-four
thousand feet tall - more than

a lightning's peak touching
patches of bloody clouds,
these lakes below a melting sky

when dusk grows gray beards
bleeding from a misplaced razor
on the rough face.

(ii)

There's no starry rosinweed,
its petals flaming
a desire over a cold hearth
by a bonfire of love

dimming fire flies and fibers of rays
from Sirius, yet to show us
full beams with a round smile

killing the oval cave
of a squeezed-in frown,
when clouds bundle up

and do not explode
into strings hooked into strings
of rain drops flooding cheeks

with stone grains only sowing
dangling and curving crow bars
to separate us from folks that hold on
to their common lumps of clay.

(iii)

In brittle clay stretched out
to a rope of dough,
no common grip holds.
In a string of clay

down a bushy slippery slope
we drop lose
from a grip in a flower bush
with snarling thorns,

cats lurking in undergrowth
woven into baskets of snares.

(iv)

In the tightening grip
of a roaring storm,
while our world flattens out
to cliffs downstream,

let an adjustable grip hitch
fling a stronger crab hand
with an adjustable bend lengthened

to pull heavy rattling wagons
of gusts and gales
down the mouth of an angler's loop.

And we bounce on and back
to the lose edges of grass
that eats up hands and eyes

and legs, leaving us to hang
on the edges of drifting flowers.

Amid stars of grief flooding
your face with soft strings of stones,

unfasten crab-gripped cheeks
with worm-driven curls
to stand you on steel legs, stars
of love melting us into light.