Cough It Out Poem by Felix Bongjoh

Cough It Out
(i)

Cough out a storm
diving down your throat,
as it carries the slur

that slipped into your tone
and left him burning
in the wildfire of a cloud.

Cough out a lump
of the dust that rose
from a deep
pothole of a lyre,

the high desk from which a warbler
rolled out the world
under the huge wave of an elastic tongue.

Sneeze off the dark night
of a lung
squeezed in by the stench

of an exploded ire
shining like a beacon
by an aircraft that has missed

a landing strip
and melted into an eagle
pecking at a castle's beard
in an old jungle.

(ii)

Cough out with the landing
bullet of a laugh,
the wound dissolved
in the tailed scarlet of dawn.

Cough out the smoldering
sky of coals in a hearth
deepening into the sinking basement
of a widening crater,

when sun lands with hawk wings
to peck at the volcanic debris
of a chameleon hitch flying off
from a rotor of light.

An albatross wingspan of daylight
flips over into a hard slate of night,
a ray curving into our throat
to be coughed out
on a bridge stitching night to day.

How charcoal wings of night
in a Venus chamber of daylight
spin a comet to bandage
off a nimbus behind the plaster of an eclipse,
when a smirk sits on a cough's high chair.