Summer's Clean-Up Again Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Spring is about to swerve
a corner to the gates
of summer with golden rays
and splashes of sun.

Light cruises in sheets
of splayed gold and beams
and films of glued rays
pouring balm and rubbing lotions
on a lake's sky skin

stretching out to touch a stitch
on a bouncing horizon
thinning down and stretching out
like a novice's accordion.

With its marabou stork
wingspan, light runs through
to corners under the sink
full of night and shadow nooks

for insects with fight-back
punches and karate kicks against
any stretched gloved hands
for a scooping cleaning.

(ii)

The tiny creatures carry
only quiet clicks, the only arms
they flip at lumps and bumps
of cleaners' fingers and elbows.

And police weeps of broom reeds
and sticks and the wooden
muscles of broom handles

butting parched insects alive
in their whole skeletons and dots
of phalanges blending
with legs of light crawling in

under a melting davenport
with stealthy question marks and dots
of light's cut-off limb flying
through branches and leaves
drowned in lakes and rivers of light.

But in the trombone's voice
of a shifting piece of furniture,
expanding a lane into an avenue
for a brush cleaner machine,
patches of gripping light

stick out their muscles of heavier floating light
to punch back at the maracas
of an old vacuum cleaner with a sore throat.

And in a drummed and chimed bout,
the cleaner loses a round
with a knock-out punch from a blob
of silver-beige light, the only stain

on a bamboo floor no detergent
or wheezing mouth of a spray can remove.