Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah is author the of new hybrid works, The Sun of a Solid Torus, Conductor 5, Genus for L Loci and Handlebody. His poetry has been accepted and appeared in many various literary journals and anthologies, including North Dakota Quarterly, Cathexis Northwest Press, Strata Magazine, and The Sandy River Review. He is an algebraist and artist and lives in the southern part of Ghana, Spain and Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.
Diogenes, the Artist’s Friend
Pay good money to be in Diogenes’ bed
where hundreds of drawings and paintings
are exhibited and auctioned by Sotheby’s;
pay good money to be in a barrel on a rubbish tip,
where a room for one of the hundreds of homeless families,
is cut out from a hard cardboard left behind;
the door is not ajar, or a window does it just lurks,
from the first rainfall you have flown about the cover
like bats in a belfry, their colours are convictions.
Now here is the light of fresh evidence to improve you
in no doubtful submissions when every numberplate
I wear for a face for a post office road is signed,
something is overshadowed above us like a cloud.
Time is not enough to come to anything.
Somebody must look for what sustains.
I have found him sitting down near me,
whispering to himself, an imaginary part,
I am trying to welcome myself back
among the commons with a nightcap,
I am ragged. I am listening to all with his attention.