3 Poems | K. Asare-Bediako

Therapy for Dark Torsos

i grew up to be sieged by the nothingness of mind.
like a spiegeleisen,
it takes multitudes of dust to submerge a homo sapiens to the farthest micron.

the least time passes the eyebrow & i watch Morpheus
dupe my grounds like a scammer.

in order not to plumage my body with doom
i will grease my skin with a BBQ oil
& transcribe the faces of the wind pasture
into a simmering metaphor capable of turning bodies to light.

it takes a permit from Mars to intertwine a malic with brimstone,
the stars schooling the knights on Herod lessons, a pedagogue
of shrapnel exploding the inner self—a burning forceps in my liver.

i swerve a panda of an incarcerate living &
ditch my head in a concussion of molality, an ocean spilled
with chrysanthemums
for the pipeline streaming & conquering grief in the body.

it traps the reptile & I hook out from its system
like a line fishing a child from penury.

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In Stress, I Welcome A Volcano In My Father’s Hut

1
The old man talks about how to prepare grief in a vast body
& smoke it to death

He says grief is a noun in transit.

death is another man sharing the same room with my father—

How possible is it to live with someone who is feared

by everyone including you? Which is to say in that room
there is only one man but two shadows crossing
path—

death.

Most of the time, I find my father lying sick on his chair bed.

2
I conjure the words of this poem with the smoke from my father’s hut

It is how you trace your route back to the shoreline of loss;

How I watched him bubble in the smoke
steaming to heaven…

I reckon something gothic hiding in my father’s voice,
his mind,
his head.

I feel cold shrieking my fingernails, the air breathing its heaviness on me.

3
My voice shrouds the room
with a sand of fear as I bird hymns.

A boy has to lose his sun to darkness—this is more than offering a rib to God

my half is gone to the cloud & I sit by the sea waiting for rain.

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Portrait of a Breathless Boy

Let me begin with a bruised body
that knows not how to supplicate

after he is tossed by the storm into
the bellied stream of

graffiti. Say
this skin is an appendage of limbos. Or a myth buried in God’s eye. This skin

is a bald forest that walks the bullied shores. I spread
this poem like butter / unto a tumbling body

that echoes from a moth /
& I munch it into a bitter slop—moth tired of watching

time translates into worms. Every night, I swallow a galaxy
of wounded

stars—stars that only emit the beauty
of grief.
I tweep these words like an acne

that crisp my face senseless. Face like a buron. Tell a boy to reminisce
pain as
a new hymn for morning birds.

I am not green. I do not rain—I mean
I am a faggot / &
I become an ocean in mother’s eye
whenever

it rains. Today,

I exhume this body from the blank. An
outburst. A screech
in gloom. Grief knows
no sadness. When I mention sadness, I mean

grief has no counterparts.
Say,
this poem is an orifice to velvets changing into endless tunnels / relics
tucking in its abdomen—

how do I manoeuvre from this microscopic scape
that only gifts migraine
as presents. I’ll memorize a boy like a lesson,

perhaps
doing that will wind me through nostalgic chrysanthemums
to do away with me.

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