How High Shall I Jump Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

As high as the highest towers of air
beyond sky-scraping peaks
to push me back down with heavy studded boots.

I'll land on any poking finger
and leave the earth quaking with lightning-struck
folks, their withered feet breaking into pieces.

As high as a the top of Mount Fako
on a breeze's drift. On a smirk's storm
amid flowery stars in syzygy.

Let a ditch be dug into a grinning cheek
rising into the smooth dough
of the moon glistening brighter than sun's teeth
flipped out from the thorns of a crown.

And when a lightening's trajectory lights up
a thin blaze to snake
through in sky's translucent plastic,
let your jump not break your neck, but flip out

helices of sparrows to fly you
to castles in a wind sipping blood and gore.

And when the storm swings
its ball-muscled arms along a track carved out
by a slithering wasp doing the waltz with air,

the jump should rise higher to flowers
bearing fruit under wheezing gales.

By the tip of a lava's tongue, let the snake
in the grasses of a dictator's gaze
hiss out the arrow of an eagle's beak to pierce
a leaf hanging from sky's ceiling.

(ii)

Break the sky with a rocky
head, pouring out shards to feed
walls of recalcitrance
with razor-lipped bites and stuck needles
in bleeding flesh growing red roses.

Everyone burns in a harmattan wildfire
set by a dictator with the blaze
of a crowned wink,
a red smoldering eye, no tinder for a bonfire,

but the whistle for a stormy gong
in a hurricane's tree branch's wing, the flap
of the star-eyed eagle.

Says the dictator: Jump as high
as the tip of my sword flipping out the bird
taking off to land with clawed wheels

on the denizen carrying a bull's trumpeted horn,
as a hamlet of crawling ants
wipe off ash and gossamer fibers of smoke

from torsos thinned out
into walking broom sticks, their mouths
too large for heads
full of coconut water pools,

in which a monarch swims at will,
when a sun dives into a horizon, drowning
in a drifting storm wave's reach.

(iii)

Jump as high as the arrow
from the dot-sized sparrow of a sneeze
flipped out from a monarch's boulder-carrying tic
pushing everyone to crawl

on a star dropped on the tip of a breaking rock,
when trees and leaves crack in the sun.

And folks scoop out memories
from the deep rumbling barrel of smoldering fire
popping with sparks
carrying the message of reddish blue insects,

a monarch punching out words
from the crawl of a crowned cataglyphis.

Stitching the Sahara to the Namib,
as the Kalahari crawls in
to widen a tiny Waza wing on the monarch's desk
with the sandy words:

I rule with the spasm of my itchy muscles
that sends you picking leafy papers
from the tree of your office desk,
as you sigh in the thick slashing storm of your departure.