Cotton Balls To A Ceiling's Gate Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

I sleep on cotton balls of light,
swim in them, climb
on their staircases to St Peter's Gate,

Paul watching as a hill
spins on his head, and I'm left
to wallow in a flame.

I'm left to fly with a match stick of words
flying out like butterflies

to the beehive that stings a poet
in a cubicle into the bloated dust
of bees humming man's beginnings.

What mountains roar on my chest…
What kites peck me
for a piece of love rolled

in Uncle Night's cigar and puffed out
from the pipe of a grandfather

curving his back to the curved scythe
curving out skies from banana fields,

flowers of bananas
mined from the deep earth,
on which I tramp digging into foot pillows.

(ii)

Roll me over between
mountains of pillows scooping out
the squeezing track to pull me
under a candle light's brow.

How the melting wax
of a soft pillow stretches my arms
through Arizona's canyons,
skies of Sahara planting light on my brow,

floated air ceilings of Namibia
carrying me with a Jacob's ladder

to touch moon's candy skin
as I float on stretches of ice
in the middle of a winter night.

(iii)

O river of sleep, canoe me
down the strait of my bed

to the lips of Mount Fako to spit me back
onto the mountain of my bed.

Pull me down O pull me
to the gold-lit shore, where a candle light
rides dawn's fire

perched on its sky on a sheet of paper
flipped over by a breeze
of blue starlings stretching my blue sheets

down to my toes writing a verse
like a trotting sparrow
across the hall of a beach's landing strip,
a chopper yet to lift me back to bed,

orchids and stargazers
having taken over my ripped sheets
floating in a pool of light,

from which I jump out
to grab a bearded book of Shakespeare
and Baudelaire for gems of schemata
in a bag deep down a gorge.


Here's the whirlpool
in a glass of water
weaving bubbles of clouds

for a rocket's takeoff
to roar in the eyes of a BIR soldier
mangling the bones of an Ambazonian toddler.