Ambling In A Couch's Breeze Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

In an elephant-sized couch
by a sky's multi-colored cloud,
a tightly bunched bouquet

on my drifting center table,
all is still like midnight in a quiet daylight.

All is legless like the tree
of magazines and newspapers
in a basket rising into a mountain
of old scripts trailing a world
on a jet's wings and rumble.

I stroll silently, sitting and rolling
between two flying cushion arms.

I walk through old squiggles
of poem, a sheep docked
too soon to take me to its stable.

As a shepherd roasts me
with a sharp piercing gaze
brewing a storm to swallow my verse,

I stretch out myself
into a drumming snore
pulled by a flowing body of water
carrying me through
my floating flowing living room.


(ii)

The river snails on, never
looking back at the hill that sent
it on its trip through slopes
to a watershed freezing into marsh.

A hunter of me peeks at furred
lightening across a valley,
but pulls out an arrow from his bag
to shoot at shreds of gray,

when the trembling-tailed
animal has melted into air
behind a rising streak of dark-gray cloud.

What barbs of feathers
carry me with winds flying
above a crawling river
singing a desert song of solitude?

Babbling with thick fibers
of water weaving spume
and spirals of froth
along edges of silt and clay?

And I sow only cactus
and giraffe-legged thorns
to canter with me,
leaving a hare of me to prance faster
than a throttled hurricane.

What leopard orchids
and flame lilies grip me, as I race
towards flowers glowing
with rainbows under an indigo sky.

(iii)

Mixed-up in my afternoon couch,
I creep into an ant,
the slow world flipped over
through an old newspaper spreading
its wings only slowly.

I lose sight of the sheep I'd docked
as it bleats and baas in a gale
in the tight-lipped world of my living room,

no breeze brushing its glossy fur,
that body of verse I've lost
to the hill of my couch, its contours
hiding the sheep's full bulk.