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I am resigning.
From living and tasting like rejection.
I am leaving myself as a most memorable aftertaste on life’s unkind tongue.
I am hanging my petty quotes in the overcrowded wardrobe of poetic tantrums.
They will brew my story the morning after as stale jokes. The zombies will slurp on my hot black without notice.
Those who think loving me as chocolate will let me melt as sweetness are right. For this day only.
Tomorrow I will be vapor. Nothing but dried up sweat. Obliterated but fighting back from the grave with spiteful stench. Not for long though.
They will pour fragrance over my dead body and make that my legacy.
They will retell my flaws by covering them. They will tell the world that I was great. Perhaps too bright to be understood but they will only say I was different. As if calling me different is some honor they do me.
Who is not different?
That promise of commoner becoming king quickly fades upon realiZing kings are common. So I am going home.
I am resigning from this conflicted breath. I am going home to a real palace.

 

 

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Post image by Sten Dueland via Flickr

About the Author:

11129633_424696977693540_8268235314976106796_n2Nana Akyempo is a poet and writer who occasionally dabbles in Spoken Word. His poems and essays have been published, or are forthcoming, on Three Sixty Ghana and African Writer. Some of his poems and essays can also be found on akyempo.wordpress.com and greymural.wordpress.com, respectively. He is the 2016 winner of the Three Sixty Writers’ Challenge and recently graduated from the University of Ghana, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theatre Arts and Political Science.