Hollow Night Shrugged Off Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Past midnight and creeping
with night whistles.
Past closed-door snores whizzing
into a hanging transparent
hood swinging in a closet.

White whitening linen brewing
snow and closely stitched cotton,
all white, was whetting
swaying narrow-toothed saws

cutting light into pieces
of a brightened sky rolling
on light wheels into a wallowing
sheet engulfing itself slowly.

Piercing through thin films
of sleep. Earth has fled
to a crater up night's ceiling.
Shift, hanging. Drift, planted deep
into roots. Shift sitting
in your high white stool.

The doorless house outside
has broken down its walls
into a glass-roofed stretched pitch
gradually melting out
the world into a still frozen sky.

The crater deepens and widens
into air's new countryside
devouring every hue, but thin
cream nylon shirts and skirts
in a closet's space too thin
to grow thinner than its bleach.

(ii)

The full moon that strolled
in its swell, bulging muscles into
an expanding wave. Sits in a cubicle
dwindling into a sailing arc,

a lurking skeleton swinging itself,
the white fur of a curved
kitten hiding behind night's bleached
curtain pulling earth's green
and taupe and brown patches
of earth crawling amid soft whistles.

The full moon has ambled off
with sky's white elephant bulk
into the deepening jungle
of a winged nebula flying
through spun lace-white helices

steering a whitened silver glow
into a huge bubbling cauldron
in the nebula, a white night

heating itself to drop in melted
candle drips sailing down
with breeze-driven cream butterflies
and moths dressed in their ashes.

(iii)

Fly, fly - fly specks of white powder
nibbled off by cream mice
drifting a sky of white and cotton
feathers into the necks
of white ibises shedding off light
gray and pink feathers of dawn,
leaving far-flung lime dots,

stars in the nebula hollowing
out the night into a cream sheet
of frozen sleep on my bed
shrugging off the crater of a hollow night.

Leaving only roasted stones
and parched sand
to swallow my far-flung melted dreams.