After A Rumbling, Popping Day Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

He sleeps with moon arcs
dwindling into ellipses
sketching silver doodles and scrawls.

A ball of moon crawls in,
whistling through the window,
settles on moss sheets,
an undulating shamrock sea.

Swimming with a swimmer
drowned in steep sleep
ferreting out a deep volcanic valley
diving into a gorge's floor.

As he creeps with the red
rhododendron of a cut
still splashing scarlet rags,

the growing leaning hibiscus
ear of a wound, the scorpion
left to spread crab legs

and nibble and bite him off
into a breaking cave of shredded sleep

through dying schemas of daylight
in smoke still smoldering with his thoughts
in a hearth of blood.

(ii)

Rumbling out the day's volcano.
He stands on its mouth,
slipping off a tilted slope gliding
into sleep's hearth core.

Catch him, bundle him up
into your armpits.
Rub him through a tunnel wheezed out
into a smooth lawn of sleep,

his bed expanding
into a cornfield,
over which birds pluck guitars.

Blow low trumpets
that still leave him floating
over ashy sheets,
his blanket galloping off

to the gates of a pop-holed night,
a denizen fleeing
from his red shadow caving out

a crocodile's yawning mouth
of a flowery bleeding dawn on a mountain
by a sea with no fish

but the pulled-out shark's mouth
to drown a zephyr-wrapped fisherman
in a shallow basin of sleep.