The Hunter Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Night is unveiling itself
without a sparkle
from its hanging lachrymal
spinning black lake

on a cheek blown out
into the heavy laugh
of a child's surgical smirk.

Not even the flying dot
of a star from the farting tinder
of a recalescent hearth
passing out only quiet wind.

Nothing perforates
sky's thick skin, as it thins into
a dry black leaf

clicking brittle moments
riding on still wings -

like the mid-night aircraft
planted in one mass
of a frozen spot. Cruising.

(ii)

The sun in the head
has died and buried itself under
a jungle of broken books

sitting on shifting stools,
a desk puffing out only fog and ash.

Only its drifting wings
have taken a nose dive down
a wave-smacked bank,

a sleeping face of rock pushing
itself out with impala horns,

the skeleton of a deep
winter evening.
Nothing jumps to the eyes
waned by a figurine of me.

(iii)

I'm lost in the hollow gong
of paper, when thunder
smacks and folds up the sky.

I'm crumpled into
the dry ball of a sweaty fist
in an oily burning

itchy hole, where an ant
has grabbed the door
to its home, my lap swelling

a lens and a trigger
to capture a giraffe -

not the tower I've been building
brick by brick, since a moon
showed me its closet,
bright linen carrying stains of stars.

But it went missing
In the herringbone weave of a night,
its flesh of zebra-fish

buried behind a dark hilly moon,
a hunter lost behind
the thick drifting clouds of a desk.