Drill In A Dot Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Beatrice, the secretary, pumps out
frog eyes to croak at the Chief Captain's face,
as the horned sailor drags on
his dictated shards of a sentence running for miles.
The tortuous gibberish is abandoning ship.

She runs after the vessel with a shot gun
to stop the fleeing sentence slithering through
hills collapsing into valleys of commas.

From his gunport, a cubicle
dressed in winged moths of paper scraps,
the Chief Captain look's into a star's eye

digging in with no pointed spear
of finality, no planted peg
to demarcate bouncing streams of words.
And crooning stilted rivers

rolled off to spill into each
other's track and run into tall flames
no one can trim

but opening a door to wild hedges
on a page full of dust
and ash from the professional's
burning moments of hesitation,

where one dot like another
bounces into each other's orbit
like hail stones
freezing the flamy flag triggered by a dot.

On the man's sheet of paper
with no straight edge,
drill through a dot into dust
in trailed dusty grains, a desert

running with no brakes
to a shore on a beach's cliff,
every fat dot spinning
an apple dropping off a branch
right onto a boat's deck.


(ii)

Every flowing and floated moment
barks and groans out
the hand's flip on every desk
to trigger and shoot a word after word.

Drill into a dot, the bullet to stop
the enemy, more words flowing
from a diarrheic pen
or the keyboard rattling with a warbler.

Plant a quill into a dot
to wave the tail of a widow bird

and run your eyes
with no butterfly
wings of a nystagmus leaving feathers

from too many blinks and winks,
a full stop sinking the roots of a planted tree
that never tumbles in a storm of words.

Drill in a dot with no room
for a dash with a hoopoe's long lips,
but the round blob
of dung that cuts off a word with a stench.

Always drill in a dot.
Don't scratch it,
as it will grow feathery wings
and find its way to Neptune.