Solitude's Tryst Poem by Felix Bongjoh

Solitude's tryst
(i)
Swinging in anguish's trapeze
Across life's circus,
I'm locked up in a tryst
Of closed eyes, where
Blind-deafness
Relishes its savor of solitude
In an open court, birds
Expressing their desires
Under a clear blue sky.

Where a clock chimes
And hours shift backward
Into the ancient history
Of glorified mummies.
Reposing in the depths of a pyramid,

Where a gentle breeze
Shines the sun's robust fist
On Proconsul's cousins and nephews
Murmuring in the retreat
That history gives our lives.
Under a tree where hand in hand
We also murmur to ourselves
About the ship of sadness in which we've
Sailed all along. Until resignation
Sets in, brandishing
A dangerous weapon. But we do not budge.

Hanging in there. Hanging up
Our sorrows on imagined window panes
From which a verb
From a crow's beak restrains us from reaching
The cigar-like edge whistling
With smoke from desperate nostrils
To torpedo the ship of our desolation
In a crowned solitude.


(ii)

What silence explodes
With isolation,
As we reluctantly realize
We've reached grief's dead-end,
Where hand in hand, our partner,
The shameless figure
Of solitude dressed in a shadow of itself,
Takes us into self-absence's back yard to plant
Daffodils we may never harvest
In the desert of self-denial.

Then draped
In solitude's shabby tuxedo
In a brief ceremony
Marrying an anemic frustration to fate
And to our intrepid partner,
The babel of dusk-to-dawn drunkards,
The balbutient passage
Of a prolonged harmattan,
The hubbub of an open market
After which, we mumble with a river of a passion,
Over which birds fly us
To the loudest gear of our solitude.

(iii)

Where is the next tryst:
In a bough across the valleys
On the other side of Boyo
Or in a palace court,
Where feet tremble amid the rumbling thunder
Of den guns
And joyous shouts outshouting each other?
Or a din after a touchdown
At an American Superbowl?

Neither nook nor shade
Under an isolated tree across the mountains,
Neither the dark tent of an overbearing night,
Nor the quiet corner of a hidden room
Are solitude's glorifying tryst.
Only the noisy open skies and fields where birds sing
In grief's desert
Offers the mouth that blows a trumpet
With the low discrete tone
Of a raging flame.