By: Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah
No, not you, not even you keeping a distance between our past & future by adding a yard to the yacht, hands melting away. Is it because I’ve been bribed & cajoled? The height of this whirlwind is short among the trees behind you. Sitting in the dust for almost 2 decades to build your daily discourse & that anticipates a lose in all flights, you whitewash faces with masks & marks. Moths & butterflies are the things we ever wanted to know & codify the recipe if the noodle is too thick that one can taste with your tongue still in the saltwater to see the sauce is well to save the wedding. We burn the day after rolling & cutting the dough & begin the marriage after many years of marriage, the crowd breaking into the military commander’s cellar waiting for the next move to open the phrase of drinking, his best wine. Riots break out in Salt-upon-Street, the programme is posted. Sophie, her second-born has died suddenly, aged 13 months. The obliging passengers spend the night in the terminal. We paint on this wall that divides the backyard in graffiti. At the next point a cat in us tries to interrupt the passersby. We add enthusiastic smiles to the wood with yellow space that falls on the brain. Standing a little farther away in the life of someone, we continue with reds until someone stops at an appropriate distance, is a responding to hide behind the evening sun.
Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is the author of new hybrid works, "The Sun of a Solid Torus", "Conductor 5", "Genus for L Loci", and "Handlebody". His individual poems have appeared in more than 70 journals and anthologies in US, Canada, Australia, Israel, Scotland, Ireland, Croatia, Serbia, Japan, South Africa, etc. He works as a writer, journalist, artist, teacher, and abstract algebraist. He lives in the southern part of Ghana. "...I do not talk much about my poetry. I always want readers to the dig for themselves. However, my art emerges from primitive(ness), more-modernism and surrealism. I hate using isms and I cannot hide from this act. The poem is almost about human conditions that spring from critical issues between a tragic and a ridiculous. Thus, I look at the nature of dream, daydream, memory, myth, fantasy, hallucination, magic realism, surrealism, insanity and religion. Here, one is maintaining himselfhood among the chaos, the death of his soul, of the art, of isolation and its experiences, of the flesh and spirit, of the change of growth, of his artistic mind, of his strange and abnormal residents, of his intellectural misfit, etc, of the chaos of materialism. I offer the primitive facts as the human existence in this world."