A Poem by Ken L. Jones

The Neon Koan

(A Suicide Note For The Sixties)

I

Behold a green skinned monster

With a brain the size of a walnut
A hot fleshed green skinned dinosaur
So large that he needs another brain in his tail
Just to act as a guiding apparatus
A green fleshed behemoth whose emerald oaths rip the primeval air
Causing the lesser monstrosities to scurry in terror
Behold this thing driven by a passion
Which engulfs him like a vortex
This unholy fool is the last of his kind
No more will he taste warm red flesh and armored platings
No more will he be a fourth horseman in a time when horses are the size of rats
No more will he topple trees and rock the food chain
For the strange bony faced primates who cling to the branches will soon stand upright
Someday these insignificant creatures will only remember
This terrible green skinned one as a legend
An aphrodisiac, a side show curiosity, thirty feet of white bone abstraction
Suspended on piano wire like George Reeve’s Superman was in my daguerreotype youth
The green skin now spews from Texas oil rigs
The hot blood is now the minerals of Africa
The savage razor teeth now line the coal shafts of Wales
Now the emerald king is nothing but an illustration in a children’s book
Nothing but a Japanese movie monster
Now nothing more than a symbol for things that can’t adapt
And refuse to function in the all too real present state of affairs

II

This is my tribal chant

My ghost dance to scare up feelings in an effort to catch hold
Of any submerged fragments that rise to the surface
My fingers now drum in the dust of ruined civilizations
How my fingers long to make dust of my present bloated situation
Oh why must I be dust again
Oh dust to be reborn
To be dust to be reborn again
Reborn again and again
Spinning in a cyclic sickness
Until the final sewing shut
Of infinity’s eyelids

III

These words like a team of horses strain beneath my whip

While a musette playing free form mocks my word imprisoned lips
Oh stumbling straining existence you woman never tamed by man
Still my pen, amputate my arms, atomize my soul beyond remembering
I am weary of life and cringe at the dawning of each new day
Street worn things beyond my grasp
Not within my range of caring

IV

This is the end of my pink flesh age

This is the beginning of gray hair
Flaccid thoughts, coughed up words
And all of the empty dreams that come near the end

V 

“What sign are you?”

 They ask as they stitch up your life like   
An ancient whale bone corset
 “What sign are you?”
They ask and when you tell them
They know who you are
They’ve seen you coming a mile off
You’re as recognizable as the punch line
To a traveling salesman joke
What sign are you they ask and I answer
“I am a sign of decay and folly a mass of hacking fat
A Pandora’s Box of complexes
I am the Mayan Codex decoded in Camarillo
An immaculate deception
I am a vaudeville nativity
A tangible infinity
I am the instant anything machine
That puts you on Easy Street
And never asks “Where would you be without me?”
I am a Frosty the Snowman
Who never melts in the summer
I am a mystic and a libertine
I am the rhyme that does not vamperize inspiration
The poetic voice that matches any saxophone
The Sphinx that asks no riddles
In short I am paradox and enlightenment
Nonsense and common sense
Mysticism and reason
An irreconcilable set of opposites
Whose tension keeps the world spinning
In the middle of the teeter-totter
With no time off for bad behavior

VI

Such bitter wine I taste

Bitter to my dilated taste buds
Bitter to my phlegmed lungs
Bitter to my corrosive spirit
Which lays crumbling
Like a sheet of steel
Which has resided in a vacant lot for months
And now sparkles in autumn hues
In the pale cold sunlight of afternoon
Oh what a cold ashen fireplace
It is the morning after youth
So like stale jazz heard through a worn needle
So sadly stagnant like a river damned
And happy in its green death
And in its inability to quench thirst
I have lost the only love that I have ever desired
Since desire first did bloom
And I prayed to God to free me from this flesh
And pleaded unto him for release from this world
Of singular beds and barren wombs
And I was denied
Yes I was denied
Is death such sweet succor that God would deny me its pleasure?

VII

Spin me a blue web

Play me some blues
Slide your fingers
And play me some blues
Play me the blues of the first born slayed in Egypt
Play me the blues of cheered slaughter in the Roman Coliseum
Play me the blues of The Children’s Crusades
Play me the blues of The Inquisition’s chambers
Play me the blues of Dachau, Nagasaki, and My Lai
Play me the blues of red skull fragments scattered on a street in Dallas
Play me the blues of a dead man on a mountain top
Play me the blues of a rosary of blood dripped on a kitchen floor in LA
Play me the blues of a pregnant butchered actress
Play me the blues of jungle death in steaming Indochina
Play me the starved to death lack of love drunk and drugged out aching souled blues

VIII

Two sweating tundra’s of sun pink flesh

Slam together in a secret death at night
Mastodonian grunts of pleasure issued through foaming teeth
A separate life force emerges unbidden
In squirms and screams and mindless motion and in the bargain
A teaspoon full of ectoplasm to carry on the madness!

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.