Where Had He Been? Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The weather on faces was cloudy,
Folds of black wooly and polyester patches
Running through scorpion legs
And dented pedipalps of swimming smirks.

In tawny and pecan clouds of dust
Sprayed by rushing feet,
The young man died but raised his nutted face
Against a storm of rifle butts.
He dived into sky on expanded earth, nimbus
Clouds engulfing him, clipping him

With the molars of heavy fists fastening limbs,

His chained fists tethered to a shrieked oath
Pulled out of his torn reedy glottis
And a forced confession flowing
Out of a bloody mouth feeding a river,
Its tributaries red streams jumping out of slashes.

(ii)

As he quivered in taupe hands, men
With ropy fingers tightening
A crab-grip on his breaking throat.

The young man bleated and wheezed
Out a call, but crocodile hands
Flipped out from umber and tawny sleeves,

Limbs growing hills that tumbled over,
Piercing his foamy and pithy skin,
Which twigs and clubs licked at will
With lashes landing on a bass drum of a spine.

They tightened a knot on his golden link
To life, a platysma slab screaming
With cracks and coughs and a choke,

A bird flung by the wind to witness
The young lad, as he moaned and hollered.
But it parroted only twaddle,

Leaving the young man to a world
Up a mountain of burning, piercing grips,
Until he folded himself in clouds
And pedaled a canoe through a deluge

Of net-caught and scampered-off thoughts
That flung him off into a braided bush.
A bird bobbing a red bonnet wheezed like a stone
From the woven and knitted hands of an urchin.

(iii)

Red cardinal, hurl us through
Your flight-burnt path. Throw us down
A deepening valley, a low hill
Where sniffling and whining winds nest.

Flap your wings, cruise.
Steer your wings to an anthill.

Trot, trot. And it tumbled
Over a bunch of vine-stemmed grasses,
The bed of a log or a man?

Air's shrill song squeaked with a cough,
Howled with a yawn
Until the chopped log blasted out
The trombone of a twaddle.