Nest At A Pier's Seaward End Poem by Felix Bongjoh

Wear a king's crown, hara kiri,
the soft storm that tows off a man to walk
on a peer standing

on mantis legs. It rolls and spins
on broken millipede wheels,
when a fat train hoots.

Train shrinks, a flattened arthropod,
rolling on millipede legs,
tires wobbling like a shore's panting wave.

Locomotive thins out into lightning
falling to saw off a thin slab,
tracks, the slippery slithering snake.

At the end of a pier by a high sea
simmering with hisses, the world's whistles
take over a clarinet's death voice.

The pier shoots into a scarlet
squiggle, a horizon shrunk
into a thin blade, an arrow bird puncturing

sky's crystal. When sky rumbles,
nobody hearing a love's whisper,
a peony grows a bird's crow burning - smoking

into a man silhouette of a man
thinning himself out into worm,
the stone man iced

from soft cushion body of a worm
into a mountain boulder
flipping out spear arms and blades.

At the seaward end of the pier
a sky falls. At the pier's edge
a soft hedge flips the man over

a broken beam. The pier under water,
a man towed back to lie down, nest
in the stomach, a bird whistling -

whistling out, a whizzing wave
dying at life's shore, a ballooned shell
with no silver-eyed snail.