Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

In the Throes of Missteps
(for Kurt Cobain)

He's been put upon the darkest of pedestals
Because he used his guitar sprawl as a paintbrush
Both lethal and revered
And the aftermath of his lyrics
Which were a storage locker full of recorded phone calls
Still speaks to us murkily after all these years
And after his flannel heroin is there anything left to be said
Except that he explained himself as both the lost and the found
Until a shotgun went off while a flicker machine spun
As all of that was lost to a seagull
Then he departed us led by black angels
Who reminded him of butterflies
To something more exquisite than the Emerald City
Where dreams of becoming is only the beginning.



Retractable Elegance

The ghosts who whistle within my copper teakettle
Are like vintage video games long ago played by my young sons
That I still remember like icy crow footprints
Now preserved until spring on this April day of winter rain
And now are only rose petals which when strewn
Take on the shape of the stars and moon.



The First of Many

This rain and gloom is like T.S. Eliot wrote it
The titillation of winter is now gone
Fished out of a sea of somewhat untraceable
Recollections that lets my curiosity become a
Waterfront whose dance metamorphs
Into all that is low lying on an island of museums
I once visited that was a purge of my image banks
Back when I was a young god of such innocence
Till I found a lost passport of tacos for lunch
And then in the spoken word sculptures that became my forte
I hitched a ride on mixed media collages
And quit forever the bands whose symphony halls
Where only their family's garages.




For the past thirty-five years Ken L. Jones has been a professionally published author who has done everything from writing Donald Duck Comic books to creating things for Freddy Krueger to say in some of his movies.  In the last six years he has concentrated on his lifelong ambition of becoming a published poet and he has published widely in all genres of that discipline in books, online, in chapbooks and in several solo collections of poetry.