Strolling All Day In A Room Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

I miss no stretchy public garden
with interwoven shrubs
and tall dusty laddered trees
waving graffiti of flying leaves
and ribbons of finches,

woodpeckers and sandpipers
riding gray sheets in the air.
I miss no grumbling doves often
Gawking and laughing at me
in their sleeves of oversized wings

I miss no rivers of gaudy cars
flowing down the streets,
rumbling through sleepy corners
and slithering through quiet towers,

as chains of folks break out
into crawling life, every dude
a loose thread
from a triaxial weave

of folks splitting themselves
from one another
like dry cracking leaves
falling off petioles on thick branches.

(ii)

In my room I'm showered
by rays of sun from a bulb hanging
on sky's edge,

a ceiling pulling itself in
like coagulating wax,
a candle still stuttering with light,

walls closing in
and tumbling on me.

In my crackling cave, my eyes stroll
across palisades of shelves,

pierce through trees of hangers
dangling with leaves of bow ties

I've not picked throughout
a season in bush of clothes and old magazines.

My brain too has taken me out
for a stroll in thick jungles
across roaring rivers, over which my bones
once froze, as I dangled on a hammock.