Who's Knocking At The Door Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

A flying pop from burning tinder
flipping out an arrow
to pierce and drill through a wooden panel
with a stone's shoulders and chest.

A jumping pop from a tight-lipped cauldron:
Who's the chef at my door?
Is it raining, hammer on anvil, or the sun
has broken loose from its corona
burning it to ashes and tunneled-out soot.

Is it raining, brooms on marbled floor,
or earth has lost its axis
to a hook-handed thief in the nebula?

Clap trap at the wooden door.
Boom at the back kitchen
metal bar, from which Mr. Wind

blows and bites a knob
and a square long-sleeved handle.

And His Majesty King Storm
bolts through with a bulldozer's jagged hands
and the quiet walk of a gorilla
on the tree floor of my bed room

dangling with me, tossing me
up the ceiling, bouncing me over to the cliff
of my window on the twentieth floor,

its parachute, the earth's pull,
the sinking, sinking tornado of a free fall,
life free for all with a bolted door.
Life closed to all with a caved-out mouth.

(ii)

Coughing out teeth in the wind.
Spitting out a tongue full of song swelling
a drop of milk-hued tea
into a tumbling word with the fat mountain
of a verb firing a metaphor's bullet,

the convoluted net of a panting fisherman
pulling out the shark of sharks

that pulled ships into wrecks down a corridor
of hollowed-out waters,

where sea shuts its doors to a cliff
welcoming everyone on board for a trip
down the feet of a dancing horizon.

Who's knocking at my door,
when a mild gale is playing a clarinet
amid cymbals, tree branches
tumbling on corrugated roof with a volcano's voice.

The day explodes into a volcano's flower,
the wallowing flame of dawn
that knocks me out with a stormy letter

thundering out my uncle's death,
Mr. Covid 19 having hugged him at his island palace.