A Broken Fountain Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Streams spurt up a face
turned the beaming mirror facing
a crater's bubbling core
rumbling like an unharnessed engine,

its horses racing too fast
for the carriage of life between
an elephant's rushing legs,
a man full of life's trash loads.

Streams spurt up
the uneven contours of a meadow,
his cheeks building mountains,

his smirk has lost
to snarling gnawing beasts
within shards of him.

Within an eroded valley
of him, no soft embankment
for spine and elbow to lean
and flow through a culvert

stretched out like a narrow lane
within the slums
of a physiognomy grown bushy.

(ii)

How sprayed within himself.
How glazed with a coat of sun's corona.
His overheated cheekbone
flushes out hot water from a geyser.

He's rolled himself out
to his only pillar, the girder carrying
a roof built by hanging clouds,

when rain showers pour down
with unbridled spearhead legs.

How preyed by surrounding hue
in the lush bush of scratches
from hands of thorns does the chameleon
of a man crawl within himself.

How spread like beach sand
is the flattened mind
laid out to breathe under pounding soles.

(iii)

How splayed the collapsed tall beast
hatched by burning pain,
only flames of a swelling pea fowl's tail
fan and garnish with a broken gloss,

a rough skin coating the gorges
only he alone tries to fill
with firmament's softer clay

man's tunnel of a pipe,
having burst for a rush of water
sweeping sludge

and debris into him, a rolled-out
carpet in his living room
embroidered with his bleeding shadow,

his sofa seat sitting behind him
like a kneeling prisoner
on roll call for an execution,

as the hangman
of a dead-end tightens a noose.

Time too runs out
of his fog-filled watery spread
a brook breaking its way
out from eyes carrying stones.

O his eyes turn mossy.
O his face is weedy, lush grass
and undergrowth creeping

out of a bulldozed smile
only one and a half mile stretched.