About
the hand behind the ink
Tachi is the pen of Jephthah Akene.
Every story earns its teller, so let me account for mine. It begins in Lagos, in a loud and loving house of five boys, where a curious child crept into the storehouse to open the bodies of dead radios and ask them what made them sing. I have been asking that question ever since. I asked it of heat, and it became instruments that measure the smallest whispers of energy. I asked it of other worlds, and it became probes built to taste the breath of moons and regolith. I asked it of machines, and it became Playgrounds, where I build with Rig, Ryzome, and the ARC ecosystem. I ask it still, of quiet anomalies at the edge of known physics, under the roof of Lattivox Labs. The boy with the screwdriver never left. He only found bigger radios.
But an engineer's ledger is half a life. The other half is here, and I should tell you plainly what you will find. These poems are true. They are written in two forms I made for them, the long tellings and the short breaths. They tell of an unpainted house and the woman who filled it, of a father's thunder and a word we finally set down together, of four brothers under one moon, of a year my blood emptied and returned with no explanation anyone could sign, of a laboratory I loved and a night it taught me to count. Some of them cost me something to write. The ones that cost the most are the reason the others exist.
I did not write them because I have answers. Where I come from, a story is not finished until the teller turns and accounts for himself, and I had gone a long time unaccounted. So this is the accounting. If you find your own street in it, your own mother, your own unsaid thing at somebody's table, then it is yours too. That was the hope.
You will not find my face here. Where I come from, the drum outlives the drummer, and a story well told needs no portrait of its teller. Only my works, and the hand behind the ink.
— tachi
