My Feet In Marsh Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

The day a thick lump of clay
stuck to my feet
after I'd tramped through the marshes
of shoes sprinkled in the closet,

scooping out the pair of shoes
that swallowed my feet

like a boa constrictor
hanging on to its prey.
The snake has squeezed my feet to a pulp.

I've walked in marsh. I've squirmed
in the tight clay of crawling mud,
the day a boulder sitting on a worm,

the heaviest shoes I've ever won,
the deepest large-mouthed
barrel drumming and gonging with pain.

(ii)

I'm now a spider spreading myself
in the smoldering hearth of my feet
wallowing in a deep pit of fire,
crawling rabbit-eared flames I swim in

until I'm drowned in my bed, a pool
of storm-pushed needles and nails

hitting the eroded banks
of nibbled soles carrying frog barks
and an overgrown shore of skin,

shifting tinder and cinder
to burn me with a blacksmith's bellows,
my feet still stuck

in the marsh of shoes
that have barked
and growled all day,

leaving only a clarinet of pain
to flow mellifluously
through wooden nerves,

with a maracas mauling
my ears, my eyes

carrying basins of soldier ants
bathing me in corona-hot water
outside the sun,

eagle-lipped rays pecking me,
cruisingme into a tunnel of night,

a flamingo-walk show,
scorpion tentacles
that thaw me
into a smashed roach

dragging himself
with jigger-eaten feet
not out of marsh.

(iii)

My friend, a duck in her gown
ofheavy feathers in a rainstorm
trudges, boots on her feet.

A duck in her dancing gait
inthe day's marsh
rides on threaded wheels
through floated air

in the narrow lane of a day parroting out to me:

I'm the galloping, wallowing duck
pedaling through
a marshy day
in my webbed shoes,

part of me stroking
my ankles with cotton feathers,
the soaked cotton marsh of a rainstorm.

You thin out
into a squiggle
in the rays
of a sunny day,

as you walk about,
a boa constrictor stuck
to soles trailing you
with the spinning jack saw of mode.