Fuss Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Air's widening ceiling hangs
on a satin weave,
the plain weave of it edges

crocheting birds to fly
down a light gray corridor.

Velvety clouds bleach
into cream cotton hardening again
with baby blue wings
and the cyan that turns sky

into a high, the breeze
forced down chimneys
hardening our nostrils into walls
pushing back sighing waves.

(ii)

I sigh leaning against
the back of a street, a broken bench
gazing at crowds with back eyes
bouncing back at me
and the stretching hanging sea

slumping with me, a hand
crossed over my shoulders to sing
and binge on ringing birds.
And singe pads of sorrows,

a missing young man behind
the storm waves
brewing sangria and blood,

sharks of men flailing blood clots
off torn shirts fitting
into tree trunk pants frozen
into barks wearing sticky leaves,

twigs of me sticking out nails
to hammer in a surviving
slate from masses of rock from flesh

that won't break into red deltas
drained out - drained out
into an expanding sea of fright
blowing out a snail-trailed shell,

(iii)

this world, on which a king sits
in his high stool rising higher
than his drenched head hanging
above his clicking shoulders.

Shaking off wailing children
in the hands
of wheezing widows on the tip
of a swollen peaked wave,
a ridge and a hill of fire

from a tumbling dusk
bolts far-flung bamboo
and wooden doors to devour hands
in sipping mouths

lost to soot and ash
rising into the mountains
of a fuss, a king's crown
shining with the tall-edged flames,

a bursting star
touching down on the valley shoulders
of broken women counting
their toes in a forced crouch,

of which the world makes fuss as little
as a broken grasshopper's limbs.