A Smile Walking Miles In A Flash Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Drop a smile on tawny dust
and pick it back up from the face
of a lake in ripples and squiggles

licked by a thousand butterflies
and stars from sparkles of water.

Drop a smirk on stashed ash
sitting on the hot bench of a hearth
built of metal and chrome,

the flowers of a fire leaving red plumeria
and yellow silk rose petals, grains
of coals still burning to a finish.

(ii)

Whatever stars fall off your face
land in the ditches of a temperament.
Sun that slips off your eyes
lands in a tunnel piped into a sewer.

The smile flies off to land
and stroll on shoulders and palms.

The smirk flips over and over
to chop off a chunk of heart,

breaks the crust of a simple salute
to scoop out mulch
for a ridge and the seed that sprouts
onto a shore off bounds,
an unwanted breeze crawling
with a mantis' stroke.

(iii)

A smile or smirk is the rope
that ties a queen
with a cruising question
choking her like a hangman:

did his glowing or withered
face flower
not jump over the wall
separating a bow from a towed pull?

Did that man not creep up
my brows with a crane
to offload a cargo
from a main boom head

with a thin parceled message
of love plucked off like a feather
from a lilac-breasted roller?

Did he not flip off
a flash of lightning

to tear a foamy mind
into a lasting emerald lane
to end at a dead end?

(iv)

Queens and kings are many
to pluck off a flattened-out smile
like a space ship carrying
some gold-sealed baggage -

guess what, just some candies
in a ballooned package to deliver
the goods of buzzing nectar

bottled in a narrow-necked glass
that breaks into pieces
like a piece of hot earthenware
dropped on spiked rock.

By a typhoon-hit shore, a puffin
skips out from that smile
to pick up a bloated mass of soaked earth
hatched by baked clay of a smirk.