Always With Me Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

She's my friend by me
with me, dashing
forward with all my steps
ricocheted off sunlight.

Under the sun
she walks with me,
crouches quietly
with me, floating
as she drifts and glides

to a flat-sprayed soot
over a dead
short-tailed sole,
its eyes and fins
not those of a plaice,
nor any fish,

but a sprayed quiet
lady at ease
with her flat-bellied crawl,
all bright day.

Fishing in the dark spray,
her baited hook
catching only me, as I budge.

And she crawls
and rolls slowly over
with each step I take
under the sun.

(ii)

Under a sun's cartwheeled
long-armed rays,
she's my bodyguard
reaching the door before me.

And begins to unlock it
with me always
a few ticktocks late.

Crawling to sneak off,
as bright light melts
into a waxy translucence
and cooling tinder
wearing a dark cloud
with no star from a spark.

And when I plump
down myself into a bed
that swallows me
with crab-gripping sleep,

my eyes stitched
to a clipped, tacked point
of numbness.

Then she dies out of
a gluing love until
the following day, waiting
for me under the sun.

Under the jumping
fingers and palms of the sun,
we set out for
a stretching trip, as she
dashes ahead of me,

or trails me pace
after pace
with a spy's smoothness.

And under an eclipse,
she unchains herself
from me in a flash, making me
grasp she's a flirt

always melting off
with the dark
until she slips off
with my crawling shadow,

when sun burns itself
out into pitch night.