Closet In The Air Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

It's been a galloping
afternoon with many suns
and moons, stars
of flashed swallowed rays
spat out into air.

From a sky of splashed
cotton closely woven
into each other over a dark
smoke of earth,
the world hangs on a bleached
hollow breathing out cold.

Its cold. Its thorn-
pricking and skin-digging
cold, I hear the neighbors
bark out, through holes
it's cold, needling
cutting stitches through blood

across the latticed silence
of cream clouds,
a painter spraying
a sprinting daisy
hue of clouds across.

What clucks and rattles
through fog- and powder-
drowned trees,
no breeze riding
with a choked whirr?

What stretches out
white flannel sheets
across air sailing in
with freezing feathers

to rub and brush me
with icy palms
of cold tacked at my skin
with sticky wasp teeth?

(ii)

Neither sunlight nor
moonlight in the afternoon,
but a splash of dawn,
a cream-lined dark gray
hanging down.

From alabaster lines gently
swinging white
ruffled drapery of air blowing
in cold with creeping
nibbling and biting teeth.

Freezing me up
on a winter brightening day.
Air wallows in wool
not warming me up.

Not blowing
a stretchy-mouthed furnace
into my tit-pecking chest,

all cold and folding up
into itself for more warmth
that only melts into cold.

(iii)

I have exhausted
my closet,
as I sit with a cardigan
over a pullover,

a chin-swallowing
turtleneck
and cashmere sweater
that do not lift me
out of the cold.

In the closet across
the hallway,
no more woolen outfit,
nor coat, whose sheep won't
not bleat on me,

as the lion photo on my jacket
roars off the whizzing cold.

Through the croaking
window pane
with brown froggy eyes,
I check out what outside
air is wearing.

And see strings and knots
of woolen threads
dropping with twisted
and folded hanks,

as it snows heavily in layers
through air tunnels
carrying cream and pearl jackets
of sticking snow jumping
down from tree tops.

Snowflakes thicken, as a closet
of white woolen outfit
hang down. But the thick flannel
and wool of snow
won't keep me warm,

as it snows without cream flowers
to sing into my ears
warm rhyming lines
to tie me up into a warm knot.