Uncertainty Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Thick like a banyan tree trunk
dressed in slithering snakes
of roots carrying
albatross sheets of branches
and bee-ribbons of leaves
to fly, buzzing
through straits of clouds,

I grind myself,
half-torn,
in the feathers of a wind.

Only woolly threads
of winter smoke
hang and slither down,
licking my pain
on a window pane.

I'm blown off
through craft
and draft and shaft,

a fly paving a route
through taupe-thickened air,

another weave
of a blanket with fur
from a lion
that has never roared
to devour thunder,

chimneys of silence built
out of spirals of breath.

(ii)

Another day stares on
like an ownerless dog.

Wags its tail
to drop off ashes
from a careless balcony
without rails

but dressed in dust
to mold bricks
for a wall with no window.

The wall rises
on crates and racks of beer
and deer
rushing out on high heels

to feast on steel flowers
growing
shrubby stems

carrying baskets of berries
bloated like the deal
of a bobcat widening into
a gorge, the mouth

sinking into a crack's fissure
by the fire
from which no smoke oozes out,

no brittle scars
of cinder fan embers.

But the bloody sinking sun,
leaving scarlet stains
on a sheet of shredded cloud,

the arched melting deer
murmuring between
the bobcat's teeth closing up
like two storms caught
between a geometer's breezy compass,

golden patches of honey
scorched into cinder
under the umbrella-covered hearth
of a kneeling tree,
an oracle dying beneath a regolith.