Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Something Better Than Forever

Night like awkwardly scrawled

Handwriting withers in the wisps
Snake whips of storm clouds crackling
With lightning’s hiss
Like Zen koan
That show how
One hand would clap
The slow sad music
Of a life dried up
With the juicelessness
Of that which I once savored
Hard and fast and gulped down
Because I knew it
Would not last.

 

  

From Then On She Enjoyed Her Contact With The Aliens

 

My life like a melting wax statue’s

Dripping pigeon feathers to Icarus’ fall
Pounding of the surf in my mind like
The echo in a child’s ear from a seashell
Sea breezes eat through the pores
Of my clothes raising huge goose bumps
Which feel invigorating
To my long dead senses
So long ago I started to die
A slow death lost in dimensions
Of unfeeling alienation
And had a nauseating hunch
That something was missing
Voices fuzz out from the top of the cliffs
And I realize I am not alone on the beach either
A broken sea scarred doll
Floats in the tidal pool at my feet
Her hair tangled with seaweed
It is a kind of witchcraft
To be here now dead to wonder
Hanging on the end of
The North American continent
Quivering on the verge of
The final westward trail which
I am in no hurry to travel down.

  

 

A Scarcrow From Odds

I opened up the door this morning

Expecting everything to be in Technicolor
But evidently last night’s
Storm did not spirit
Our house away
Because I’m still in Anaheim
And the fog is but
The messenger of the gray
Choking sky
Of the noon day yet to come
Later on in the early evening
Riding up over the crest of
Signal Hill past the graves of
Thousands of dearly departeds
Our truck rolls forward
And father’s foot is hard on the brake
And I notice that Long Beach is dying
Its aged buildings smothering
Beneath spigots of invisible Zyklon B laced showers
The chimneys of the electric company
Puff out globules of smoke
Into the night time
Like a lunger smoking against doctor’s orders
Ejaculating a sour stench
Into the womb eternal
That is our atmosphere
And probably only rehabilated asthmatics like myself
Can truly savor the fine syrupy taste
Of a techno haiku like this
Coming as it does at this late date
In what we laughingly refer to as the age of progress

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.