A lazy lover is a thing painful to be

It is hard to come back to her; I cheat on her, I use her, but I run to her in the middle of the night because I love her and I never lie to her.

No matter the distance created it feels like it is I who left her, but how could I ever be such a fast runner? She must have run too or maybe she walked but she must accept we neglected each other. She left me too! Yet somehow it’s never her fault, how could she have left me when I was already gone? It is I who feels too much and decides to keep to myself. It is I who begins to doubt that she would understand and take me as I am; all of me.

So when I shut the doors of my imagination and feelings and reach for clearer pictures and sounds in movies and music.

She watches me from a distance with tears in lines left unwritten. I don’t know how she finds me again every time and learns to trust me every time. I don’t know why she lets me hold her anytime I have nothing else to hold. I don’t know where she learned to touch me so deep. I fucking don’t know why she holds me when I rub my heart and try to hit the hurt to stay in if it won’t disappear.

If I could trust me like she does. If I could hear myself out and show me the other things that exit like she does. I won’t be sitting here feeling alone and empty. Why do I cut her out so often? Why do I forget how we met, how she saved me and collected my tears until the sheet was wet and I felt listened to and freed.

When I cheat on her, writing lousy reports and proposals, she sits assured that I will run back to her but when it takes too long to get back, how does she feel?

Dear poetry,

Would you forgive me yet another time, would you come back this night? I carry my old sores with me, they are beginning to stink, would you heal them? Would you point to the intact skin surrounding the sore you nurse with love? I brought new sheets. Please walk with me again till we get to the last line. I need you, just you.

Yours,
Yaa

Lines crossed

Lines crossed

we have wrinkles on our foreheads
we are young
we have wrinkles on our foreheads
it shows when we smile
it pushes up
when we remember
when we forget
our childhood troubles
our wrinkles are waves of the ocean
our forehead laughs like the sea


I know I've been away for long. too long. I will write to explain soon. I hope you like the poem. I miss you. Can't wait to get back home- Beyond Tales.

Answers are questions

Today is one of the days when I wish I run on batteries, and then someone can just hit my ass open, take the batteries out, and let me lie quiet with nothing to worry about. Everything feels like bubbles, bubbles that won’t break. I am just very confused! well, here is a poem I was writing some time ago, I think both the poem and I need help, right now...:(

Answers are questions

I hang by my navel
scream
why?
find grounds
to replace
what?
will change
pictures tables
where?
I grow taller
than beds
made for me―
who?
believes in
painting breath― in out
such tokens
which?
seal our matrix
when?
it matters much
how?
faith
keeps cuts revives
smell of rain
in harmattan

Why do we dance the way we do?

Pounding harder than is good for a heart; I had to put down my pen to cool off. I was clearly not in darling mood some eight months ago to tackle this issue of ignorance; some Ghanaians called for the abolishment of chieftaincy. If you follow Ghanaian news, you would probably recall, the backward and forward discussions that was engendered. I can say now that, there won’t come a day when I would consider chiefs as super humans and so take an exception to they being chastised for their wrong doings, of course not! Irresponsible chiefs like irresponsible leaders at every level of our social structure ought to be dethroned. But I was shocked and a little angry not for what I heard but much for what we do not know. Do we really think that chieftaincy is a thing we can just abolish?

Does it not matter that our ancestors found the need for royalty? Royalty as meant to be the highest quality of life, thoughts and spirits at service to the masses. Royalty is intended to be an inspiration for development and unity. Royals are ordinary women and men who learn to act in a distinct progressive way. The essence of royalty is not in the display of wealth and elegance. It is a tool intended for the continuity of wealth and wholeness. People who feel worthy of their person; of leadership, give themselves power to think higher of their existence and to affect change. It is from an inner source that royals are made. It may be troublesome that blood gets in the way of things but people who learn to align themselves with higher discovery and adventure are royals in their own rights.

The reverence and respect royals earn should match theirs resourcefulness and regards for progressive continuity of the human race in peace. We cannot detach ourselves from our culture and expect to matter. It won’t happen. So, where are we going now; to abolish chieftaincy? If we dare try, there is going to be such a huge vacuum and tell me, which one of us is prepared to take over from our chiefs?

Let us by no means belittle the power of our chiefs: Chiefs as political leaders, Chiefs as cultural leaders, Chiefs as spirit stewards, Chiefs as humans, Chiefs as steward of history, and Royalty, as an inversion of chaos and total extinction of our heritage.

When was the last time you heard the poetry of linguists, when was the last time you danced to our ingenuous music, when was the last time you attended a traditional festival in your area, when was the last time you joined in giving thanks to your ancestors and the gods for not giving up on us yet?

Standards from the west, standards from the west often leave us with nothing to stand on, we slip, we fall hard, we may never get up.

One last jot to freedom

6.15pm on my wall cock. 3.19pm on my computer. 3.23pm on my phone. I guess it’s really up to me to decide what time it is. Obviously my wall clock could use some new batteries but I also feel something new in my today would be useful. A new assurance, maybe the old assurance in a new utterance, I don’t know.

It’s morning, at 3. whatever pm, I decide it’s morning. The old sun will bring a new day. The old tree will rehearse a new song. The Makola women will sell fresh vegetable in their old pans. It is morning; I have decided it is morning.

I want to breath deep, my time says breathe deep o’nana!, I have been “breathing shallow/ stuck in my past where death is awake” right after the time I learnt it was only a dream and I wasn’t actually learning the snake dance, with P. Diddy and Oprah Winfrey. Weird dream, funny too.

I will share another poem today before I head for Ghana Voice Series, our monthly book reading at the Goethe Institute, 7.pm every last Friday of the month.
“In between your fingers”, not a particularly strong poem or quite related to what I am feeling today but it is a poem (if I can call it a poem) birth out of an sms to a friend who at a point felt there was no point in trying harder. Today, my own words feed me and I feel I should share it because I quoted these lines from it “breathing shallow/ stuck in (my) past where death is awake” .

In between your fingers

as you speak
of quitting
your job
by nostrils
you make smoke walk
in traffic

you jump
on the shoulder
of a bad road
and get caught
for moving

we laugh get drunk
and dance our ashes
to glimmering floors
of night clubs

you say drought―

drought is when to learn
dance for rains

but before I could
pause
to hear your heartbeat

you fill your urn
and put down
your smile
laying here
breathing shallow
stuck in your past
where death is awake

Come to Goethe if you can, I am collecting as many hugs as I can today… :-) see you soon, yes?

A point where there is no point

I am sad, not oh my gum fell out of my mouth sad, but sad. it’s a kind of, no one can hear that I am saying my gum fell out of my mouth even when I’m screaming and pointing at it sad. Contagiously, not even my gum knows it is out of my mouth sad. Now I want to change the channel, I need to change this damn channel but the remote lies by my feet and not my hand. I try to drag it with my feet to my waist where I can get hold of it but it falls, under the bed, it falls and breaks open. I stretch out to pick it up, hit my head on the coffee table in the process but I get hold of the remote anyway.

I touch the burn on my forehead and sit my thumb on channel 1. The remote battery dies on me. I want to change the channel, so I crawl out of bed, reach for the knob on the t.v and puff.

Power cut!

All I can do now is to watch the rivers I make on my face fall on my breast. All I can do now is to imagine who I wish was here but is not. All I hear is what I did not say.

The thing I find with sorrow is that it doesn’t go away until you defuse it. sometimes you let pieces of it walk away through your tears, sometimes the people who love you make chain saws of their love and try to cut through your sorrow with simple words like “I love you”, “it’s ok” “come here” “cry all you can” and gestures like a hug, a kiss on your forehead, a gentle touch on your hand till sorrow begins to tire, slowly into diffusion.

Today it feels like I wrote this poem for me; “Come sit by me in today”. I wish I would have someone read it to me and mean it like I meant it when I wrote it for her. I miss her, we spoken poetry when we were lost, we spoken poetry. We spoken poetry when we were sorry, we spoke poetry. We spoke poetry when we were alone, we spoke poetry, because we believe in poetry and poetry takes care of us in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep, poetry holds us and rocks us and believes us and judges us not when we tell her what we feel. Poetry is never cold. Poetry listens every day, she listens. She is not a god. She just is.

Come sit by me in today
passing on the unbroken calabash
that floats atop waters
take my chest
If yours is up to fill with hurt

let us make streams on our faces
as we split our sorrow
and salt our souls

we can swim
to the other side
of this sensation
because shores here
are too cold

The day for beating the chief

The ewes!, my next favorite people apart from the Ga’s have a proverb… oh wait a minute, this is no ethnic bull shit thing, I will be the last person to serve a bowl of ethnocentrism on any day, besides I am neither Ewe nor Ga but then again I am Ghanaian which by my definition makes me Ewe, Ga, Fante, Asante, Dagomba, Guan, Nzema, etc etc…. I mean who knows who my ancestors, loved, kissed... actually did the thing with heh? And so I am everything and these days, I have been speaking Ga papa, I won’t tell you why, my dear kokonsa friends…;-)

So, I was saying, the ewes say, the day for beating the chief never comes so when a tsetse fly lands on him, you hit him hard!

Ok, here is a confession; I have no idea why I am quoting this proverb. Obviously, I like it but shouldn’t there be a point to my quoting it? Give me a second I will make up something…

Ha! no luck.not at all...uhm let’s try this, I wanted to teach you a proverb. Do you buy that? Oh keep your “No”, if you don’t buy it, see if I care! I am not even selling, anyway!…:-(

(hitting my lips with my fingers, looking up at the sky, thinking oh why didn’t god make me a hiplife artist? people actually like their nonsense! god, the woman with the big boobs, had to make me a writer, a fumbling poet…. now I am just humming, of course not a hiplife song! how do you hum that?... *snap snap*)

E-PI-PHA-NY!! E-PI-PHA-NY!!!! I am a poet! I have poetry, yep, yepiiiiii!


Moonlight or no light

Sixteen hands on one calabash
we sip pito on Wukuada
savor palm wine on Jufo,
Afelika will taste asaana today

gathered lore whispered clues
to broods by-the-fireside

In our light
each one of us to a glass
coca cola and pepsi and sprite
we splinter vows of ancestral pots
talk long winded talks
to induce what we are not

we bypass blood without a word
erase childhood games
elude first light songs
exclude twilight proverbs
misspell royal names

In our light
we do not know fibers of our kente
rhythm of our music
lessons in our dance steps
nutrients from our earth pots
life from breath, death from corpse
Hogbetsotso, Akwesidea, Hommowo and Damba

In our light
we thirst for water
along the Boti falls
dash to the next settlement
to find nothing

In our light
we call on bats to lead the way
upside down they watch our pot


“And so therefore”, crop rotation is a system of farming “whereby” omg!, do they still make students write shit like, lol! very entertaining. (seriously I can’t believe I passed through that system, yesu!)

And so therefore, the day for beating the chief never comes so when the tsetsefly lands on her, you hit her hard!, whereby you read a poem, now there is the connection!, catch me if you can!…;-)