Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah – Bindweed Magazine

No Eloquence No Romance

A glimpse of life outside the next door may be useful in that bantering mistake as I point to this knotty proposal. I never venture on a second step. After confining myself to look watchfully at your suggestions, I apply myself to some pursuit that will lie too heavily upon my mind, heart and body but the more I do this, the more I feels my body very warm on its crisp surface and the more deep down is still cold. I want to see what is ahead of me in the street filling with shadows of the snowstorm. ―I’ll accept you if you can weave me a body, I hear myself saying to myself. ―Have you named any profit? I am asking myself. My face averts. My colour has gone. I am panting with fury. I stop my whole body sinking in a thin hole abruptly, putting my hands on the sundial to support this thought. I get quickly to the iron chair and sit down, still looking at the comfortable private house sitting on the boundary I have sketched to build and now dressed in dry ice like snowball shrub. I look at all other sketches of this life to see what I am now as the most splendidly ceremonious one before stepping out of any illusion. I paint my living wage for the factory boy and see everything coloured red. I look elsewhere. You have returned from your long journey without knowing you are back. You stand at my back. You embrace me. ―Narcissus, see how we’re in a vertical view when we’re stones waking up from stones that kneel on stones, I remain in the margin waiting, I face a pale face that looks over a solicitor’s shoulder after all these years. You’re tall, a figure behind in me says with a gravelly voice, grinning at me behind a kneeling figure. I suddenly hook myself and begin to play with my trimmed stubble and beard. Slowly, I gravitate towards my divisions with similar interests, living together with the law. It is swooning outside and this world is silent in its shell growing. Sometimes I draw the curtain to look at the house and this time I goes near it. I hears the rustle of the leaves and children squealing with excitement. I smells rotten apples trapped in the ants. I stands yet, at the close of the water running in the vale, my arms rest on the gate when I have already withdrawn my eyes from the penciled brow. I lift up my head and throw back a long veil. The distance behind me begins to be covered with large ornaments of rich and plenteous tresses. The door of the house is opened. Someone comes out to me. It is me. I look at myself, I look back. My mouth certainly looks a great deal compressed, showing its youthful and graceful form, full of fine contour. I likes what I am seeing. I drag myself in.

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah, 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.

Communication Strategist

Giving one shot to the point for a reason very different from soft wax in your stamp on the ground, I apply your eyes with both my hands at once to hold up the room a minute when you may suppose I am not able to walk as fast as you drive the sandstorm and pursue your short breath to overcome everything I guess with your brain. I begin to go backward and forward not to conceal from myself what I have done at short intervals, I mention your name. You are hot and cold, and black and white, all at once when you are a young libertine in everything I have experienced, I wait for your next questions which are surprised and inconsiderate for elders who are still learning to rewrite their names.

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is the author of the new hybrid work, Z. His individual poems are widely published and recently appearing in Rigorous, Beautiful Cadaver Project Pittsburgh, The Meadow, Juked, North Dakota Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, The Sandy River Review, Strata Magazine, Atlas Poetica, Modern Haiku, etc. He is algebraist and artist and lives in the southern part of Ghana, Spain, and Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.