Time-Off At The Beach Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Stretched out to the borders
of myself, sky the only boundary
between an expanding garden

and a lone jungle goateeing
a drifting wriggling island all rock carrying a hat
of crawling shrubs and creeping grass
under dented and pierced air.

In the storm the trees quiver,
gripping earth with deep roots.

In the sun, palm tree leaves melt
into cracking stretching fingers
stroked by feathers of wind

and whips of a galloping gale,
as life crawls with gastropods and worms.

I look at myself firm in my rod
of rock planted and stitched to a sea bed,

silt the blanket downing me under
a mass of sea. Shifting under a world's seat,

the porpoise the thick woolen thread
gluing sky and sea with a jump.

(ii)

On a bench by the shore stretching
itself like a seal carrying its face of prongs,
life scoops me with the whiskers
of a beast rolling more than me in me,

out of me like a drifting log of wave,
a thousand waves of lumber and lumber jack.
Waves, saw the world with warbling teeth.

Sink in the jack saw into flesh,
your roaring trunk of a sea whisking emerald
leaves and silver petals of splashes,

as sea expands gardens within its perimeter
and I sip life's salt, breaking
into pebbles and sand carrying full shells,
its tenants carrying the world on their heads.

How sun falls down
with a heavy luggage of heat breaking
my back, waving at me the whips

of life flying with wings of lightning to cut
and quarter air, a fisherman pulling in
a wave-battered canoe,
as I swoosh myself out into the wind brushing me,
stretching me out a stiff slice of storm.

(iii)

I bulldozed myself to a bench
to ride the sea with spiraling waves
rolling on fast wheels

on bumps and potholes of waters, as a sun shoots
me with pebbles and sands of light.

I crane-lifted myself from an itchy couch
onto a shore flinging over blankets
of waves and sheathes of sun

poured on me to melt me more than
a quiet hearth at home weaving faces with faces.

Here I lie by a sea shore
flung out far from the goateed island
without bleating goats.

Without mooing waves,
as cows of storm butt me,
milking me with no brushes of rest, but folding
me up into a log of myself,

a storm back from the shore, a hurricane
in a twirling couch still wriggling
out of a sea rocking sea shore I did not ride,
but got crushed by its flat tire.