Pigment Of Truth Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(from a sky's king)

(i)

Night turns on and spins helices
from an ink pot spilling
a thousand patches
wearing different shades of green.

What can be more pointed
than a wet nib's dot or scratch?

An asteroid and a comet
shoot their rolling frog eyes
through a plastic sheet

of sky swelling earthward
for everyone to see, as they blink

in chartreuse nail and needle tips
piercing a glass screen
into chards, starlets in flies' wings.

(ii)

Maggot-laying flies hovering
over a bowl of earth,
such are full-blown stars from

the nymphalis dancing with mint
and emerald dwarfs pointing
torches from their pigment.

A star from the sky's cream
of heavenly stars
carrying half-crowned men
floats on a wind-steered deck

round a king carrying
the wallowing flames
of a full crown outshining the sun.

O sun floating a house of light
gold-lined by a corona
of brightness steering an airship.

The vehicle of a sky cranks up
a rattling engine spitting out
sparks of stars,
lifts no badged passengers

with a virus groomed to kill,
but sprinkles mild germs
spat out by birds, a bunch of lies

burping with tall bright flames
from a melting candle
molded out of sham wax,
mud from chalky slabs.

(iii)

Let the gold-adorned king
in his chameleon gown
tell thin lies of chrome
to shake the world a little.

But let him not bend
a wind's arrow
shot by the rooted mouth of truth.

For the muscles of a typhoon
will wear him out
into mist and smoke dressed in sky,

when the king's knight
bawls out
none of the king's soldiers

turned Ngarbuh into a red river,
frozen bodies
in ash drowned in ash

from a fire as red and yellow
as the king's mouth of flying lies,
O sky's flickering stars.