Nooks Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Let a night sky
fold itself out into smoky corners.
And hollow flint dents.
Let it punch itself
with a thousand stars,

each an indigo
bow tie lime flower
on a firmament-blanket
covering him
in a bed, as he rubs himself
against eiderdown pillows.

The flowered night sky
lying with him
in his flat desert piece
of bed is his nook,

a night garden growing
leaves and petals
from coughs and sneezes

that stir winds
to turn pulling smooth hue
into withered flowers.

Hammer-driven,
knocked out and planted
into his bed,
he's knotted down in bed,
as nuts tighten his waist.

(ii)

He squirms and wriggles
under the boulder
of his flat ceiling full of swells
wearing beams
from rubbing palms of moon.

But as he grabs the sky,
shaking it off
to let its ribbons and petals
of stars crawl on him
with their twinkling graffiti,

he's soon nailed, nutted
and spannered and wrenched
deep into sleep,

he's seized by study arms
that bundle him up
like tinder and burn him
into glowing snores, as cackles
from cracks of ashy wood.

He sinks into his deep tunnel
of sleep burning him
into a rolling log, as he rolls
into space under dawn's roof,

a flamy scarlet sky
burning him
into ashes expanding, waving
swan wings
to fly him sprayed out
in his gray feathery gown.

(iii)

And he works again
in the whirring nook
of a cubicle
squeezing him in all day
like an accordion.

Played by twitching fingers
wrapped and sealed
in ropes of pinching creeping ants,
his only sound of music.

Arms crossed round
his floated body with little air,
he builds a sturdier nook
by pulling in hundreds of suns
from the fire of a dusk

to float and flow with him
through scrolls of squiggles
slithering like the only snakes
he kills with a punch
by hand into a machine.

When the machine buzzes
and whispers
like stretched tree branches
in the wind, he waits
for another moon glow

to grow a tree of lime stars,
the only fruit he picks with a grin,
a nook for a buddy,
who swam and drowned in squiggles
throughout a plodding, crawling day.