Laughing Cackling Road Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Sun with a sharp brush,
you polish and beam
earth's rolling carpet
with facial wrinkles and pimples.

And belly stretch marks
through deep
chortling puffing ditches.

You're bloated. You're constipated
with rocky and plastic grins
lengthening your stretch of road.


The road carrying
my feet is a wriggling
guffaw screaming
and barking at me.

Each step I take tells it
not to grin back
at me, but it widens its smile
with a deep gong's mouth.

As I tramp my way
off and drag my legs
through with a sweep
and a hop and a jerk,

the road cackles
and lets a giggling cough
jump at me,
flip out a rocketed skip

with the singing forewings
of a grasshopper

from a deep sinking hole
that rises quickly
with a hunch back.

(ii)

The road keeps on
asking me to smile as I pass,
for a loud laugh

like its jack-sawed giggle
tearing and ripping open
my mouth into the ditch

that cuts across the road,
the tarmac shouting
with a saw-edged mouth.

How many trenches
more will you
scoop out with a wrench-drawn
laugh pouring out

afterlaughs with the feathers
of a wobbling drunkard?

(iii)

The tarred stretch
pounces on
to cleave and shred
its face into a broader smile

and a crater's shout,
its deep throat
sinking another tunnel of a laugh,

more cracks splitting
into giggling, chuckling lanes.
Axing off a fatter laugh
across its large crack of a mouth.

(iv)


Go on tiptoeing tar
on the edge of your own laugh
tottering down a culvert,

where a world's detritus
crawls like crust and gunk
of rheum from a fissure's eye
that cannot see

and drink the world
with the wheezing exploding
balloon of a dragged laugh

Do not clown at me.
Devour me not with a grin.
You're just carrying me
on the canyon skin

of your bitumen-pomaded
arms and chest
powdered with dust,

as your mouth only widens
your ballooned mouth

into the swallowing
viper fish that once
tore off an elephant shelf
into the Gulf of Aden, as an earth

stretches across to Yemen
with the roaring
laugh of a waterfalls
and a dragged shriek.

O growling crocodile
lurking in a crack choked
in the culvert of a wild laugh,

punch your way out
of a hippo's cave-mouth

struggling to swallow the world
with the slippery cackle
of a cracking road
running into the spidery smile
planted on a face, as more cackles
are heard by my bulging eyes.


Djibouti,2007