Issue 23: Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

Bracken Anarchist

Ashes from the evening hearth,

enough perfume in the air

to mould pollen count,

attracting butterflies

for the next pollination

in the street.

Spoons, forks, & knives

on the dining table are squeaking 

with no pointless violence,

the drought of voices is beyond the octave.

A shelter in a pore after the sweat.

Free market among brackens

around the frame-up.

 


Thefieldis filled in a green bottle

& the distance is rolled

liked a scroll,

it tastes Jeremiah’s tongue,

for that way, I am guided away 

in a colour that is out of use

around its length and size

and not more a shadow,

that particular release 

that is not managed well.

At 27 Rue de Fleurus 

a noon sun is still hanging

on the wall with Matisse 



A piece that is exchanged,

that is not remained in its left over,

its time is mismanaged.

I cut a long dress from the wall,

where the serene length

does not replace the dark place,

a crackle distinguishes

itself from scarlet,

a line is every colour

I present with a necessary waist.

So much weight stretched out

but a quite dark grey

not any argument afterglow.


Night Thesmophoriazusae

Now this sex strike

(on the part of your women),

cast doubts on a play I have spoiled with your husband

when we scrap and dress for your role is riotous.

We are black Demoiselles d΄Avignon,

the only street

to carry you to your earlier version of yourself,

finish this picture

and bring something out of yourself  

and stop knocking the walls around those mounds,

we demand honesty from colour construction

because everything I see is not hardly new,

I need your fist

which is clenching in my direction,

I erase the rainclouds in the sky tonight.

I am multiple reflections in that metal mirror

with each in its own right,

one of them tells the rest to melt away from behind the mirror line.

Tell them where I am when they think I do not belong to myself,

for I wear big eyes, painted,

flat and dull, a laundry list of questions.     

Paint the night with faces

and suggest Euripides to reveal his full teeth

before you for his energetic and highly literate fooling,

I need over eighty sittings to finish this picture

behind a mask left under your care. 

In this room,

a law is at its best,

becoming the end of a staircase floating,

children make noise with empty milk tins, falling on each other

from the background, children who refuse to sleep

because they have no eyes drawn for them to close,

we descend down from La Boule de Suif,

a phrase-chopper with a new appearance

and these confused young wives,

tell them what has happened in the midair

and I am listening,

tell them the tale stitched with sweat drops,

tell them when your father’s story is built under a grain of sand,

tell them when everything begins with a name

and we cross Syntax river

because Sisyphus has paid the tickets,

tell them when their hands are full of menstrual blood

and I borrow these hands to slim or thin

for extravagant cat shows,

this shoulder length wavy hair remaining in the whirlwind,

I keep the egg above the roof,

I keep the monolith

for the mongrel to watch,

tell them more in monocular angles.

No mimicry, no milch cow.

Just tell them when you mince the meat of this body,

the miniaturist mines the space above

without any portfolio,

carve the voice neatly,

I see your heavy hands,

let the birdlime path emerge

from this body like a whole song,

tell them the end, this visitant viscountess,

tell them the end of every sentence.

I am a schooner in my whole life out there in the full sea of silence,

I pretend to live at the dock and still wearing this visor and Viyella on the stage in roving,

I divide the semibreve from this semi-conscious semicolon from the chest,

I keep my bust from vista,

I am viscous,

vitrifying vivace scale,

I sing my virgin birth from this viol with enzymes.

Tell them and I am listening,

I am listening to myself.

I am a question and unanswerable.

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah (╥║│═╚╣╕╞│╬╕─╕╣│╘╘╞╚╕─│Ħ) , who is an algebraist and artist, works in mixed media. His poems have appeared in numerous journals.  He lives in the southern part of Ghana, in Spain, and the Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.


Copyright © 2019 by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.