Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Scars Like Catnip

Cloud fragments lift their dress
Of the sea green that I still remember
The branches of my tree are like the sprawl
Of your shy kisses and all that they foretold
The sun comes down like fallen apples
And is called forth to do so by underwater gods
Still alive but forsaken long ago
Night is real cream preserved in wild cherries
And is as purple as my glass is now
That it is empty of all save ice
The water front is glittering
Like a half moon sighing
And can be felt as if by the touch
Like reading in Braille
And is crisp in a blindfold's
Sun ripened hinges and telepathic
In its beauty in all that it rhymes
The city is now less than the dust in its streets
As it attempts to feed the impatient neon beast
Its pimpled face skid row goes through countless costume changes
Then is beaten to an enchanted bloody pulp
Like Lovecraftian tic-tac-toe frozen in 3D in many places
An unconscious rhapsody is dragged through its gutters
Full of strange miracles remembered like
The song of songs that my heart still sings
Reminding me that I am still the firebird
Like Stravinsky's Petruska reborn am I
In its own ashes like all simple things.



Portrait of Mary Shelley in a Coney Island Arcade

Like an eerie dance of drowned bodies
In the other worldly Mad Hatter depths
That are painted in the abandoned cat and mouse
Whose reliable flesh are the large tunnels of my own dreams
I find myself moving into outer space like R. Buckminster Fuller
Where gravity will no longer be a crown of thorns to me
And once past the screen door whose voices are still shouting
I will reconnect the shiny delicate wires
To a Kodachrome rainbow that I once knew
And in the butterfly float of morphing and shifting
I will become infinity's Mr. Toad.



Just Like a Real Baby

A coastal rainstorm like dribbled ice cream
As her kisses stunned my brain hotel
With a sun blast of shivers
That bled into my broodings
Candlelit and heaven bound
Like a dog long dead
Thanks for nothing
Go put under the microscope
For playing a red, green, and gold harmonica
On the outskirts of the dark side of the moon
Where the fingerprints of Jayne Mansfield
Were still everywhere and in every grinning
And jiggling girly mag that lay like shipwrecks
In the ragged edges of the rhythms
Of the dust storms that jerked and twitched
Like white chocolate land mines exploding.




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.