Saddle Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

By a lion-tailed hill running along
at the jagged edge
of a deluge, he sat on a saddle,

a rockhead pushing forward
like a galloping horse
fed by a broken hose of breath.

Its no highland, but the low
land of a raised seat,

the saw-edged sides of rock,
his weevilled rocker having holes
with ants crawling
on a million tied and glued legs,

their arms amputated
by a thirst for more nectar,

only wood dust flowing beyond the edges
pointing prodding fingers
at feathers from fleeing birds.


(ii)

A galloping, kicking horse
that makes only inch-long strides
is a hill sitting on its roots,
crawling through a slab of foamy wood

planted into a carpeted floor
with roots extending to the kitchen,
the center table a mountain.

The mountain stands under
a sky of starry flowers, orchids
carrying midnight's nebula

by the hill of the man reading a newspaper,
in which his death is announced,

but he's seated still - he's
stretched out like an abandoned lake
on a sprawling crater

still smoking an earthenware pipe
sculpted from an old volcanic explosion.

He's seated still and stolen from himself.
With the nerves of a chameleon.
And he only sighs like a swift wind.

He only whispers and mumbles
to a hollowed-out, husked, dusted

and shelled air lying
on the clean-shaven moments
of a moan tunneled through
the breaking trumpet of a choke.

(iii)

And on a cloudy brawling day,
when winds and storms had
lost their staccato voices
to stitched songs of nightingales and canaries

by a sea of flowering plants,
the hands of a droning
hum stretched out a stormy hand at him:

"We thought we'd buried you,
but here you sit
inside frozen walls cut off

from the ink-umber jungle of a cloudy world.
Stand up now, and stick your hands
Into chains woven for ages for you".