Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Incursions And Cracks

Hardscrabble winter is now just a feather weight remembrance

That I still hunt and peck through like it was honey
But still through it all midnight has such a build or drop tenderness
Where I am the Zen master of her tapestry of sighs
As together we weave folktales that breathe green fire
In a hotel room that is now only one long strange dream
But that like Val Lewton’s horror films will haunt me forever
In thoughts most bottomless and vision inducing.

Appears To Be Rimbaud Speaking  

My shadowy wraith like goldfish pond is only bones and gristle

An ominous childhood collage of fairy lands
That causes my living room to speak in a gravelly whisper
And here where you first have to descend into Kurt Schwitter’s Prelude
Of nasty red welts to where the railroad tracks beat their wings
Near a city that has become a touchable phantom
As its asphalt comes awake and the lost jazz
Of Ezra Pound is played upon a punctured saxophone most red
Till it becomes a key turned in the lock of that egg spoon hour
When poetry pulls my strings till my hands do ache
Before it releases me from its power once more
Until later it once again lights my powder keg.

 

Tomorrows I Have Walked Along

Autumn evening is full of poetry and brush strokes

Lost in the roots and trunks where tamed doves wander
Like mysterious shadows towards precipices so delicate
And forsaken that are dusty and patched as potato steam as
They begin their fading scrawled in black chalk like a piano chord
Breeze swept and beyond the reach of all rationality
As the stars and moons and planets spread out like a peacock’s tail
Till all in foaming lace doth sleepth
And my dreams become pale melancholy peasant hovels
Where I pour out these sentences that have recently foaled
And yet are still so pregnant with the winter’s sorrow
That only the aged can truly know.

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.  He is also publishing recently in the many fine anthology poetry books that Kind of a Hurricane Press is putting out.