The Swimming Face Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Mr. Jason, you're attired in soft elastic plastic,
its edges hard like sharp-angled ice cubes.

Always clothed in haze and swaddled
in a dusty or over-greasy smile,
in which you swim, a piece of pearl settles on you.

Spinels carry your face to mid-day's skin on a blue lake,
only a long-tailed whydah flying over it,
shooting its shadow to the dim depth of still water.

On the lake's snail skin surface, shimmering
like the moon's glass face bounced off a mirror,
every ripple stands out, circles and curves flying out
of your grin to land
a faceless beam on the young man

stretching out a well-packaged hamburger
in that McDonald's, where everyone
carries the same doughy mask, nobody
grabbing the flour and yeast your baked face is made of.

(ii)

Who are you? Where is your face? You have it
buried in an underground shaft
you've have scooped out so deep past a water level,
where everyone must swim
to fish out the aquarium fish hidden under the rock
you often dress your face with.


I have never seen your smile without
the frog-back's ruffle and sunken cheek's leaking hole
of a scrolled saucepan leaf, nor the hidden dent
of a flattened-out donut still sizzling in grease.

Still putting on a glazed beam in a crystal saucepan
under a sharp-eyed sun. I see and stroke
nothing but a polished earthenware cover
hanging down the expansive field of your face,

the ray-straightened stretch
smoothing to a screen of pixels spinning with floating life.
You float with that life on a screen.

Your parietal bone hidden in its stone
carries your frontal cap,
that face always curved down to your toes, a mole
in a burrowed home at your back.

When did you pocket a bit of your face,
leaving most of it to sit
behind you like a hat worn face back, its bill pecking
and scraping your occiput's edge.