The Man Poem by Felix Bongjoh

The man
The man coughed
And squeezed down
In his pocket
A phlegm-laden smile.
Traces of blood
Lined his napkin too.

The man's tightened face
Was an old tree bark
With traces
Of crocodile skin
And proud overfed barnacles
Punishing smoothness.

The man sneezed
With a scream to awaken
The dead,
His hands wet with storm
From wiping
His mouth: Jesus stood by me,
I suspected,
Firm in my girded guess.

For when
I got to know he was neither
Mourning with a wet
Face, nor taunting
A disheveled spirit,
I saw him
As a flash of light.

He was neither
A crocodile
Ready to devour
Vulnerability,
Nor a parasitic barnacle.

He was not a clown -
Not a fainthearted freak
About to scamper away
From the rest of the world.

Not a retreated gecko
Nodding his head
In full view
Devising a plot
To scamper off to nowhere
In a tiny pod.

His pockets were swollen
With mini-bibles,
Whose words flattened their sizes
To small pads of love,
Which he distributed
With balloon-light fingers to those
As vulnerable as he,

The white-collared champion
From jail's frail nest
Spreading holy candies
He hardly tasted,
The only good well basted
The vulnerable tasted
In their own dungeon of naivety
As porous as a nest.

And in that nest,
As stormy as the wind shears of worry,
He felt rejected by the very confession to a crime
He had never committed
That left him in his own hollow,
Persisting into a stone
No quarry of appeasement would ever blast.