Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Mechanical Interviews With My Cerebellum

Probing long finger nails

Of late December
Whisper through old cigar smoke
Some nights I feel a thin connection
To the earth
And I get that Hank Williams
Ghostly feeling
Like I’m slowly dissolving
I live in such a world of nonsense
And that’s what I like best about this place
I deal in visions
I put them down as they come to me
They float in the air
Like the tendril branches
Of my giant pine tree
Where I espy the withering rattle
Of a face that skulls out into
A death most beautiful
Its all there already
All you have to do
Is to be fast enough to catch it
Like the long blobby lines that flow out of
The end of my paint brush
And land on the paper beneath them
Going where they will
And then heavy spurts
Of night eyes take me on a thrilling ride
Above the human condition
Until I wake up on a bus bench
Unzipping my personality
Moaning as I am impaled
On the coming of the dawn
Which looks like it was
Laid out long ago
By Carl Barks in the moon’s lesser gravity
The night has dissolved
In a muscular blur
And has left me alone
In this city of millions.

Foot Up The Chimney Of A Music Box Playing Backwards

 

Cut and paste streets

Lead me to an

Obsidian thrift store

Where I am reminded once again

Of my first love

She was like a wildflower

Cool and dark

She was the living personification

Of view master slides

And comic book spinner racks

She was a husky voiced blond

With Cleopatra eyes

With a body like an apple pie

Cooling on an ledge

That I just had to hobo steal

I couldn’t help myself

As I was drawn deeper into

The darkness for which she stood

Where she nibbled on my words and images

As if they were a shrunken head

On a Popsicle stick

As the gills in our throats

Scattered glue and pictures everywhere

Until they stretched out like Silly Putty

Across the summer sky

Nothing left now of any of this

But the petrified remains

Of this poem fermenting and decomposing 

In the lower intestine

A debriefing room that has all the velocity of

A jack-o-lantern hurtled by Brom Bones.

 

 

 

An Apron Full Of Seeds

 

The interplanetary bones of night

Are aflutter with the concrete and dust

Of barb wired pollution

Delicious mandolins played by unknown fingers

Echoing through the venomous meowing twilit moonbeams

As they become a super voluptuous mystery

Dipped in a cocktail sauce

That blows up into a throb of humid disco balls

The side streets turn into purpled rivers

That slice right through my mouth watering skin

Another day will soon come

When I will scrounge through the trash

That is half the battle of writing poetry

But until then I will be a starship daddy

Who never exactly stopped exploding like

An lonesome bottle rocket high over Max Yasgur’s farm

 

 

 

Ken L. Jones has written everything from Donald Duck comic books to dialogue for the Freddy Krueger movies for the past thirty plus years.  In the last three years he has gained great notice for his vast publication of horror poetry which has appeared in many anthology books, blogs, magazines and websites and especially in his first solo book of poetry Bad Harvest and Other Poems.  His is also publishing recently in the many fine anthology poetry books that Kind of a Hurricane Press is putting out.