Ecce Homo Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

In tightened gusts and puffs,
a hurricane pushing
hurled trunks and tails,

no elephant's trumpet,
no braying horse amid neighs.

Only a burly switches on
the rattling motor
of spinning woody
muscles driven by the bobbing
tree branch of a crusty hand.

In the whistled song
folded and unfolded
from the mouth of a wave

lands a swung brushing
elephant trunk
and the woven hide of a wind
and a knotted typhoon,

the thick whip tossed
with stone-swollen biceps
carrying a canyon's
slab and ball of rock,

the knot from a ship
shank hurled
by fisted hands
and a crawling tarantula frown.

(ii)

O Pontius Pilate's eyes
cut off in a storm
of lashings from slithering vines

and swinging
thousand-fingered branches

tightened by creeping
weeds and thorns

on stretched-out curves
falling on a shattered spine,
shoulders growing

into spikes and bumps
on a standing tree trunk, this man
breathing with a sealed mouth.

(iii)

Is this the rock face
shooting out only creeping

scarlet and mahogany
lizards of winding streams,
the only animal

left of a man standing
like a baobab tree?

How many martyrs
stand like a rock
on a rolling walking hill,
when bumps grow mountains?

How different is your face
from this dented board

and glass screen in shards
covering a silver sky
of a crushed and flattened smirk,
the zephyr of a flame

smoking out a smoky mask
of a man, who gazes off
at the bleached ashes of a sun
swallowing a day's smoke.

Turning back a crimson
brick temple and cheeks pouring out

a man's glowing love,
a figure garlanded with scars,

a sjamboked cloud peeled
off the face of a pomaded moon

hemmed by twinkling stars
on a gold screen -
O soaring flesh and bone
from brittle clay, Ecce Homo.