A Walk On A Desert Stretch Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

This over-woven pebbled
knots of a stretching rug
of earth unfolds and stretches out

a hardened core splitting
into pieces of me,
creeping rat-tailed
and dog-eared cobblestones

running and ambling
into a parched howling lake

grown into ripples
of rolling dust and hickory mist.

Folded up and laid out
on a rising table of sandy earth
sitting on stools of bumps,

standing on quivering
scarred palms of earth.

(ii)

Earth hardens and thickens
into a mammal's flesh.
Splayed into swells of a dead reptile.

An undulating wave
of land molded by lumps of dust.

O silent crocodile
back with no steam of life,

no breath but a feather
of wind left to stray.

And crawl in a growling
and whistling silence
with lizards of slithering dust
taking refuge in loops

and ellipses sketched by sun-dug
cracks on culverts.

(iii)

Catching only more
dust and sun-dried grime
in one layer of floating brown.

Frozen into a frog back slab
skipping with me,
as I walk bouncing
through an unclothed ground,

my flattened sandy floor
laid out like thickened rust,

a mat unpolished
by air to undulate with beams

leaking slowly from
a sky's hollowed-out emptiness
full of crawling spiders of dust.

(iv)

And heavy wood and hickory
skin peeled off
an unclothed flesh of earth.

O soft legless shadows
crawling on tawny
and penny earth covering
clay-plastered sores and scales.

Heavy wheels of feet
and paws and hoofs
of broken bicycles
have ground and compacted
scorpion scratches

into stitched flat centipedes
carrying pebbled bumps,

every sticking finger
of stone-spiked gravel

melting into a leveled-out floor
of cemented and plastered
tray sliding into a tray.

O solitude clean-shaven
and splayed to bleed
with heat waves and hanging dust -

Is this a mat of loneliness,
this dissected stretch of air
hanging over hairs and feathers of me?