Sobbing Candle In A Breeze Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(watching a burning candle slim down to a cream patch) .


(i)

Blaze, sputter, spit. Sizzle.
Crackle and sputter,
sighing softly with a tweet,
a bird flying off to a nest

with the glowing charcoals
snipping and pinching you,
as melted beads of pain flow,

glued to your wiggles
crawling on pimples
of hardened and clotted wax.

Whisper out the nibbling
white ants of wax patches

pinching and burning you
with biting needles that stick
and pinch and itch,
as wriggling moments tick.

Fly the grass yellow
dancing butterfly
of your flame to float and flow

through the thick nimbus
of you, a cloudy smoky sky.

(ii)

But you have none, as
your suns roll on the floor

with alabaster drizzles
dropping like white fleeting flies
to your swollen heavy toes.

But don't stutter
in your mumble,
as you waste and break off

in streams of sobs
and scales and scars,
beaming blisters
bursting out on your body.

Pouring down your cheeks,
a collapsing snowy cloud
settling down on your toes.

Sneeze out cream patches
in your lace ribs of wax,

heavy clouds dropping in thuds
gluing you to a floor heavy
with a waxy mountain of needle bites,

as you drag your feet
under the half-sun spat out
by your pushed and pulled-out sputter
bringing your flame to a black-out.

(iii)

O widow, a wobbling melted
trunk of a candle clotted
into an ivory elephant grass stem

thinned into a wobbling
collapsing stem flipping out
stretched lace leaves of wax.

Now you're dwarfed
into a stomp
of a candle standing on lumpy streaks

and a cotton sprinkled mass
of clotted bumpy wax,

your husband a tall sturdy tree trunk
carrying a candle flame,
the sun in his new world of light:

O blot off those streams of pain
shot by needles and arrows
from your husband on a river-stretched trip.