Bath Tub Poem
By Felix Bongjoh
Bath Tub
(to a friend on his birthday)
(i)
Cotton balls in sprayed winged light
Flying from a score of torch-eyed bulbs
Under the cascades
Of a morning shower,
A tub draining a bowl of chattering,
Sputtering water,
As a black-out’s eclipse strikes.
In the big basin-tub
We call world,
We’re worms blown out
To a million tree branches
And forests of ourselves,
As sprinkled and cascaded
Shower and bath
Of sun and rain stroke us
On a silvery rooftop
And the eroded ditch
Swallowing debris and silt.
Growing mulch that cracks
For a fire ginger to sprout,
Fluting to us to follow
Its arrow flame back to the topmost rock,
As it rises, a sparkled flame
From hibiscus and sunflower magma
Etched out on air’s stone slab –
The only arm-stretching flower we cannot pick
From a flame of festered pain.
Jump out of the bath tub.
Scale up and down a ladder slanted
On mountains of trunks
And suitcases and elephant-wheeled bags,
A million paths letting doors yawn.
(ii)
As time flows through the tunnel of life,
Cutting corners by hills
And mountains of nettles and daisies
In quiet drops in a barrel
Of hissing wasps and the buzzing bees
Splashing us hard water,
We sip only filtered drips
From an avatar’s lantern
In our sanctuary, bells of of a pointer tolling,
As we climb slopes to peek a star
In the wallowing nebula
shedding a trillion leaves of stars
To parade us through a path to a gate
And scale down valleys to a spring of tadpoles
By a river glistening with fish
We sometimes miss on a low floor of life.
(iii)
Even as we walk and sleep,
On life’s shaky ladder,
The podium of a rose’s bud
Pierces us, a flame’s tongue,
From a wind’s whisper at a crossroads.
In the buzzing pain of a flame,
Let us follow a track of fire
Still devouring its green edges,
Leaving a pebbled, boulder-ridden desert,
The bastion of never-seen lilies.
And a spring, from which drops
And chains of water rise
To touch a ceiling in a tower
Of lightning and rainbow falling back
To the bath tub.
Stand up and scrub off years spent
Missing a bullseye.
Roll out beads of years to come with clay
For the smoldering chessboard of life.
