Life Pedaled And Glided Through Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

A veil of Minnesota's sealed lips
quietly drifting an Anechoic Chamber
of snails and gossamer cobwebs

flaming silence into a heightened
church congregation's pause
has spread and sprayed its wings here,

leaving sandstones and sand-dunes
of sprinkled folks on a moon.

Only stars of flickering light
bounce off hills of distanced folks

riding high horses in elastic space
melting and leaking off
with wide-paced distanced strides.

Outside over mountains of glass
the far-flung street's gloss
and beams in the sun

shoot and dive through
the canyon walls of sky-rises,

Uranus having taken over
the baton from Apollo

to shower the streets again
with bobbing swords
of rays hoisted and lowered

to throttle traffic back
to a virus-free life not so iris-free,
flowers of rays from gazes
filling the street again.

Pushing it, towing its legs back
to its gleaming, chained pace
swelling through a tarmacked strip.

(ii)

Acheron's underground
river world is steering a traffic,
a quiet crooning river
of bicycles and joggers

and mantis pedestrians
pedaling and gliding through
sidewalks, as they walk sneakily
on mouthless wheels.

Floating hoots and whistles
flap wings of sidewalks
to glow with the color of t-shirts

flipping open eyes
to devour in large chunks
what mouths cannot grind off
with parroted crawling chats.

(iii)

Masked faces hold out
no hands to stop slaps
and brushes of singing sun,

streets stretching into
open-sky tunnels and dotted folks

distancing themselves
from each other
with fattened fog
and mists of silence stropped

to heave loosened chains
of legs walking too close
to each other to keep bells
and gongs of alarm quiet.

Only silence grows tall,
whispers and mumbles dwarfed

to street canopies of bitumen
tramped over and crushed
as they caterwaul with dark voices.

(iv)

And as handless gesticulations
with cranked-up wiggles
crawling on folks with pinching ants

and soft motorized
rolled-on and flipped-over nods
and scissored no's take over
to trim and slice off

lips and mouths that once spun
helices from rotor faces.

A sun-stroked taupe hue
flows with a traffic of silence,
flipping out on curls
and arcs of flowered smiles,
butterflies flying from face

to face, as sun-stroked bouquets
of color hand out rainbows
to folks not yet crushed by a covid bug.

Only wallowing plastic
bags of light hang on,

no more fireworks of teeth
to sprinkle sparks
of chats among lusters
of tentacled faces,

their limbs cleaved and quartered
by the sunshine and afterglow
of tunnels of light along corridors
melting into zigzagged peeps.