Moon Streak Fishes Out Poem Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Early dawn's splashes drift
into a hollowed-out mouth, sneeze
out silver patches.

The arm-stretched moon has yawned
and spat over the garden,
tulips bobbing
ball heads and slender waists

dancing around hibiscus
burning drifting shrubs
on pulled-out lawns flipping out
arms below trees.

(ii)

At my desk, balls of moonlight
spin over my pewter table lamp.
From a butterfly-winged flame
oozes out onto my page,

a sheet dressed in scribbles
and doodles
brewed by yawns and sighs
throughout the early stretch of a morning
running down a slope

into a valley popping a brown pebbled
and sandy desert with few bushes
and tall trees, from which an early riser
harvests lines running in his head

to take over the fireflies of a clear
stone-thought swelling
into the tentacled rock in a sea of octopuses
wallowing into a stony tree,

from which I'll etch out
lines for a verse,
but my head dwindles
into a dry bone, all meat chiseled out

by caves yawning out nothing
and tunnels leading
only to flat swamps,
no amphibian tossing up
its head and neck.

Only clouds of dry leaves
sail over films of seaweed water,
not even a tiny mud fish
of a poem to pull out.

(iii)

Until a moon streak bounces
like a gold gemstone flame
through the stretching corridor galloping
down a stair case,
its steak of light landing on an old bag file.

From which I pull out
a sky of highlighted notes, arctic stars
and cerulean scribbles
crawling up the giant anthill of a poem.