The Most Annoying Song Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

I grabbed a triangle's voice
after winds had played
an idiophone, as they rubbed

and bumped bamboo stems
into each other's chest.

The moon's gold
sheets had sprayed themselves

on my bed
after the sky had unbolted its eyes,
following a thunderstorm.

The rabid dog of a thunder
soon after broke rocks
into a climbing truck's rear

and stitched wagons
had played a euphonium and a tuba
at a cartwheeled tumble
of the groggy and ballooned truck.

(ii)

After an uphill climb
into a warm hearth of sleep,

I fell back into a desert
of sun-dried parched eyes.

Ferreted out from a sprawling
desert of insomnia
on a bumpy road
to the heightened tower

of a nibbling drowsiness
without a mouth
to swallow me, whole,

into a soft-voiced
brook of sleep hitting no wall.

(iii)

But as the stream's
lulling babble took me
on a smooth ride,

and I was smoothly descending
the sharpest gradient of sleep
into a gorge of numbness

and into the droning
and whistled snores
in the dome of a sprawling sleep,

a mosquito's cello-backed alto
poked my ears softly,

pricked them again and again,
and, as it delivered
the smoothest cello tune,

my ears came close to bleeding
with a bulldozed smack
from my palm, which had grown

into a flexible pair of scissors
cutting off no mosquito's wing

but an elastic stretch
of sleep shredded into pieces.