Old Man In A Hospital Bed Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Brown grasses of wrinkles
curve and curl and swell
on a face in pain, Ayeah
a hollow drum and barrel of himself.

Between tall trees and shrubs
of relatives surrounding him.

Between two rivers flowing
by his ribs down his thighs
shrunk into sticks and piths, life
rolling on pads not felt.

How leaves from a tree of breath
roll and fly off to springs,
from which geysers spurt

into streams running through
his wet cooked body,

cold air hot, as the ceiling
sinks down to his wing-stretched chest.

(ii)

What fire burns in hearths
of muscles as light as ash
and as thick as the clay

on a potter's wheel tended by hands
not strong enough to rake pins
off a floating and sinking body.

How squeezed-in eyes
see double limbs
of every standing pair of legs
shifting in the mist of a farewell

too thick to be said,
when lips weigh as heavy

as a mountain of a head
one carries, laid out in bed
in fragments of a wooden pillar
chopped into angled pieces,

(iii)

needles of his pimples
scraping and crushing him
into a crocodile's mouth,
nobody sees, nobody hears

but the pain that hands him
over to the whispering

river of silence, in which he drowns
with a sob like the dry chalk
of a teacher hitting a full stop
on the stretchy blackboard of a night,

a crawling sentence
in squiggles yet to be ground
to a cut-off choke.