How Deep In The Clouds Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

In the clouds of my sick bed,
when wasps pinch
and shoot needles through the flesh
of a cristatus plant bleeding
with flashing stars of in a torn sky.

In a deep trench of pain
dressed in wriggles and screams,
as walls of night break
onto a cracking spine,

and a nailed and hammered-in current
of burning heat runs through
my bones in drifting flames and ash

in a furnace of smoldering coals,
a fire's bite gripping
like tightened pincers and claws, flesh
a pad of foam no longer frothing.

(ii)

When thorns and crab claws
scratch and bruise the latex slab
of a tumbling sky,

no more room for sharp
penetrating eagle claws drifting me

in the saw-edged teeth
of a German shepherd drifting me through
a bed of porcupine quills.

And when a fire of pain
grows a rolling brush of thorns
across the back of night

ruffled and chopped into the red patches
of a dusk hardly finding its way
to the door steps of a full-blown night,
and the only pad of light

beaming under my pillow, as a storm
of lances cut through
the slim chunk of flesh left of a giant,

as I flip out tentacles
of my shredded fibers from the armpit

of a muscular pliers squeezing me
with the ropes of stratus clouds
spat out by a drifting nimbus.