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On my road to Damascus
After Michael Ace,
“and as he journeyed, he came near Damascus…..”
& this journey, it doesn’t always has to have Paul in it
when your life is like a boy’s prayer that ends with ‘’save me oh Lord / save me’’
the smell of room is always intoxicating when it starves for me; too many sad songs had learnt how to travel in the wind
your voice will become extinct like the voices of women in the next room, and the body out of guilt will pretend to be a lover of me.I have learnt how to live like the broken plate left by my sister in the kicten basin
“And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless”, like the tea cup I have forgotten on the table
my mother measures depression by smiles and the laughter i have planted on my tongue
I have decided to live in peace that’s how I fool myself every time I leave church,
or sometimes I set my phone camera on five minutes timer just to make a stupid smile for the body to carry in a dark room
I have set my tongue on fire to stop it from grieving
I believe the quickest way to die is to stop believing you are alive
but i want to live until there is nothing left on my tongue to be said
Dinah
And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land….he (Schechem) took her, and lay with her, and defiled her. –Genesis 34: 1-2
Showing sad things on the TV is how my sister learnt how to smuggle tears into another country,
& my father’s newspaper on the table will die
from insomnia for carrying news of raped girls in its headlines.
My mother says the way girls die these days contradicts death in the Bible, for instance;
Sarah was old and died peacefully, while a girl with men digging between her legs died from the wounds after they finally found blood
The way other girls grow into sunflowers is different from the way ours will grow…..
And that is why my cousin sees flower from men as love and the flowers on the living room table as stupid things
Every time the spider webs under the living room table survives another day without being touched, my mother will warns my sister that she can’t smile at men anymore
In Liberia, a girl’s smile is interpreted as, i want to have sex
a girl will try on a new body and buttons her scars to fit on her skin, because she got fucked against her way
About the Author
Jeremy T. Karn is a poet from Monrovia, Liberia. He writes from his room filled with darkness and Tash Sultana’s musics. His poems had been published at Praxis Magazine, African Writer, Kalahari Review, Odd Magazine and other places. He can be reached through his email jkarn209@gmail.com
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