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.
