Poetry: Shuffling by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

Imprimaturing silence among us is imputed to shell shock in the mud season,  where the mounds haven’t changed in shape or size after the flood with its household materials,  office refuses & rotting vehicles,                                                               everywhere looks zonked by such a fancy shirking, you’re curvy people tend to codify steps someone is pointing to the man they’ve shot dead

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fully fledged fulmination in your owner’s legs, the frump stands in the way dancing to welcome you,                          I wear my image, it’s a bigger version of me, not to name the formidable array of women  from the landing agglomeration. Who’s a ship down there doesn’t concern the sickos

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large fruit bats & fruit flies feed on the remains in the backyard that houses someone’s grave

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imbibing silence, the shrinking violet opens the gate for the imbecile

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a family is named among composed clients, consumers, & communities

a black-&-white photograph                        somewhere a figure of God is the bloated corpse floating with a halo around his black head, the vultures of him are pasted on tv screens for the large consumers

& prices of everything are just a blip.

 

Clouds are blotting out the sun & you’re bolstered up from where you’re                           the plethora of materials reduces nature to an alien entity somewhere of clatter & buzz, somewhere of gape & gloat, something is bonedry                          in all the fibers of our being, in the most uplifted sphere, the land is locked in mud

 

someone is silent, someone is beating someone with the rifle across the back somewhere about the point where his braces are buttoned his face is mystified & the actual brutality & irresponsibility of the coldly new class power are framed

 

whose tears are you owning to pay before everything is wrought its formation??

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Whose tears are you nesting in the honey socket?                                                                                                        I’ve eaten my breakfast in silence.                                                                                                                                I’m still looking outsider the window to see the man in red bandanna,                                                                         who’s still riding on his red BMW bicycle with your elder sister                                                                                   & I wish I could say hello to him.

No. They’re carrying his bier on four shoulders.

Nobody screams. Nobody wails. Everything is silent                                                                                                   & the world too is silent. I fill sockets with tears that belong to you.                                                                            Now that I’ve gotten myself on a wooden platform to stand very tall, let my failing eyes                                             follow him through the crowded street in the woods. I’ve faith                                                                                    in my failing eyes. I’ve faith to see

when I can see human skeletons hanging on branches of trees

& nobody wants to look at. I thank you that I’ve nothing doing this hour except that I’m just

looking                                                                                                                                                                                                     & I can stand here alone still looking at you. But the distance looks a bit iffy

 

this morning. & the man who wears a blond wig is going away to join                                                                       those who’ve shot you in their strange masks                                                                                                               & someone replaces him to join the woman                                                                                                                 who’s coming out to meet you.

 

 

I can still see the white egrets somewhere;

& all the windmills are all there;                                                                                                                                   & all the hanging poles are all there. We close                                                                                                              the gap between us. I can see the old expression of your smile, however,                                                                    is by no means unpleasing to those who’ve just shot you dead,                                                                                    as may be supposed but it’s no variation whatever.                                                                                                       That’s why everything starts under these acacia trees.

& under the acacia trees something is happening

& the land guards are growing in size in their skeletons still dangling under trees & nobody wants to see.

 

 

I’m alone watching or looking. Because                                                                                            you always say that you’ll never die.

& I hope you’re sacrificed for the good things that are yet to come in the future.  Now who’s the

one riding on a bicycle going? He resembles you

when he smiles with a minimum of entropy,

& there’s no such sterile or toxic waste or non-decomposing litter in his productivity.                                                 I’m alone here looking at the bioregion you’re                                                                                                         & I’m sometimes confronted by people who’re not believers.

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Secretary bird soars high & high reducing the future & the current shape a mere extension of growing consumption the clock is recapturing communal life

& slowly accumulating African elephants for fossil fuels we remain ensnared in the global warming when making dolls (black dolls, white dolls, coloured dolls, etc) are answers you’re writhing in agony a wry smile from every corner for your Miss X we make sense in the new nonalcoholic, nonfat, nonsmoking, drug-free & caffeine-free body       everything holds steady at a slim 29 percent pretty boys slide through of pages of everything we read, he’s one to be named again

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah, who is an algebraist, artist, and author of more than 200 books, works in mixed media. His most recent poetry chapbook is Kind Haven (The Operating System, 2020). His poetry, songs, prose, art, and hybrid have appeared in numerous journals, including Beautiful Cadaver Project Pittsburgh, The Meadow, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Rigorous, The Decadent Review, Folk Magazine, Wards Lit Magazine, Cadinal Sins, zines + things, Juked, Juke Joint Magazine, The William and Mary Review, Helen Literary Magazine, In Parentheses, Genre: Urban Arts, Roanoke Review, filling Station, Hawk & Whippoorwill, The Indianapolis, The Sandy River Review, Blackbox Manifold, Cordite Poetry Review, Amethys Review, Rogue Agent, Whimperbang, Emerys Journal, Night Music Journal, Cantos: A literary and Arts Journal, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, Thirty West Publishing House, Aaduna, Terror House Magazine, Ygdrasil: A Journal of the Poetic Arts, Castabout Art & Literature, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, Hooligan Magazine, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Otoliths, Oddball Magazine, UTSANGA, Pithead Chapel, Wingless Dreamer, Meat for Tea, Fireflies’ Light: A Magazine of Short Poems. and many others. He lives in the southern part of Ghana, in Spain, and the Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.