Waltz With Dancing Lady Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Dive and jive down
a slope-driven plane of darkness.
Night is still wearing
its grease and ink coat.

Dance down a floor of soot
through dark blinds of air
in a blown-out tunnel of night
dragging its fiddling feet.

We're coming. We're
breaking through sheathes
and films of locked night

scrolled down a pitch-dark handle
of night showering us
with falling us dark pithy wings
of a breeze-drifted jacket.

(ii)

Dome of night, carry us
through a stretching sea
of juniper waves

pulled by the wavy hands
of a cutting brushing wind.

And sheets of rolling waters
of fog-scarfed patches
and dark seaweed night.

After a flash of moon
that jumps back to its cave
leaving the road
to a black denim curtain,

the world is covered
in a black slab of darkness.

(iii)

Night tugs in seams into
baggy pants
of night grinding

feathered slabs of night
into the flying soot
of a crash-landing night.

Take off this dark hat of yours
erasing the drifting
obsidian shade
of your rising collar.

Our host, an embankment
sketches out the broom-legged
lady to join us for a dance.

And here we go, every
speck of pebble and sand
a guest on stage,

as we enter a night club, night
stretching itself on the back

of a desert, Baroness Dancing Lady
so hinged on pliable legs

that she flips out six other limbs,
riding the wheels of night,

with the dives and jumps of a waltz
flipping out manicured spincers

and fingers to nail a partner to dance
with her in Namib's desert
floor spinning thick clouds of night.