Add And Subtract Your Steps Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Arithmetics on the street.
How many steps off?
At what angle of my cliff of me
Do I tilt onto a friend's smile

trudging miles across
one meter of a jungled stretch
as stretchy as my hand
and as planted as an anvil of stone?

That tree branch of a grin
also brandishes knives of surgery,
each slash the line of a wrinkle
that writes a verse,

each reef knot stitch
the leg tightening ant crawling
to deliver a sting
of eagle-winged corona virus.

Jason, how should I wave at you these days?
With a storm wave's hand
drifted to the rumbling belly
of a stretched-out sea?

With shears running across my gaze
to trim waves from curves, as I rush
to the jagged banks
of your face pimpled with a frown,

from which a frog croaks
and barks until you hear and see me?

(ii)

Sparse tufted jungles of folks
grow weeds flying above earth's
drifting table standing
on wobbling legs taking mantis strides.

Break off your shadows
drifting towards shards of me,

shooting dark arrows
under my feet hot
with biting ants from your crawled grin.

Shoot down a breeze,
as it pastes on my cheek the palms
of a burning sun
from a smile on the ice
of a gripping frog stuck by a frown.

Between stems of dudes
trimmed down from heavily-leafed
trees of hugs spreading branches
that once crowded the streets

into snubs on floating, drifting islands
on shores covered
by umbrellas of suspicion
and albatross wings of armors facing
facing a sneaked-in peek.

(iii)

Sky has tumbled on the street,
everybody departing
from each other in a storm of gazes,
all dudes noseless urchins.

All dudes in their cabins
riding tarmac, eyes too cloudy
with padlocks hanging down their locked faces
grinding the Arithmetics of distance.

Astronauts walking on the street,
you sit on angles
of drifting waves sending you back

to sky's cubicles of men and women
tiptoeing far-flung walls
of dudes at their dropping brows,

the corona virus splitting dudes
with an axe and crow bar
to stand on separate islands
in the stretching street.