Next Destination Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

An explosion of bouquets
and flashy arrow-hurling cards
touch the bulls-eye of the party.
I'm bathing in the mouth-
watering colors of a Flaming Grill.

Heavy traffic in the streets
spins wheels from one pole
through a driveway to another
pole and back to the same pole.

The roundness of the world
buttresses a round birth day cake
with the coloring of a flying dove.

After a knife-twisting surgery
on each of our steaks
leaving little to the growling
dogs at the trash dump eyeing
every tic of all us in the fort

of our sparking smiles leaving
the comet of a cackling laugh
weave giggles into a caterwauling
trumpet blown by all mouths.

O lights, these pink petals
and gold butterflies in the mouth
of every candle each standing
also blow the drifting trumpet

like a tree of life on the pedestal
built by dripping thickening wax.

(ii)

A little kid at the table's end
bawls: What next? To the Shopping
Mall and to the merry-go-round
for all to sip life's roundness?

What next? Blow yourself out
through every street, every lane
through life's bowl of memory

roofed by a ceiling of stars
and sparks of fireworks, each star

a spidery moment stretching
into the sparrows and wrens
that eat them, angle after angle.

What next destination?
Where the sharp clarinet is played
by a chickadee, that soft whisper
that opens life's bowl of life

to the sky of the loftiest destination
of clay after a typhoon has ground
and carried its dust to a sea shore,
where life begins and ends
in the breeze of bowing muttering lips,
eyes shot to every star
by a stretchy bumblebee patch.