Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Fingers Like Birdsong

There are strands of sunflowers on the tempestuous cliffs
And the music of the rain is on every vine
As I look out this chocolate box's window
Towards the heartbeat of the headless ocean
While random pictures hopscotch across
My paper-mache TV screen as I slowly
Become a forgotten library that shimmers even as it tingles
And as my backyard which has a most dry throat
Becomes enveloped in cigarette smoke
That smells like meat and dooms us all with its flickers
That bloom like remembrance
Of the day the earth stood still like a time machine
As it prepared me for Naked Lunch after being shown the way
By Dangerous Dan McGrew and teh beanstalk
And the Hound of the House of Usher
All of them kaleidoscopes that bred like flocks of birds
Above a blur of ocean waves leading me to dream adrift
About things that can't be plundered and were never carried on any ship.



Someone in a Dream

The birdsong in the cloying heat
Reverted into a catatonic state
As stroboscopic as the quickening dusk
Near where the sea splashes in the harbor
As faint as an epileptic fit
I want to remain sane
So turn off these machines
That are the footprints
Of some alien visitation
Where even the most beautiful of ants
Are eventually revealed to be gray hallucinations.



Becalmed Ballad

Glass after glass of vertigo becomes my distant shore
Where awakened remembrances that slither and slide
Most subterranean through the smuggled dreams
Of an old alleyway in the ebon circuitry
Of the midnight hour where all is one step beyond
All airlocks down where the lily pads that
Breed and breed until they become but mutilated
Broadcast signals near the frigid bones of a disfigured sea that drools
On my antennas bringing forth surrealistic tapestries
In the ruins of my hallucinations where my former feast of visions
Becomes the needle flesh of a dirty bed cloaked in toadstools
And blips of shadows wherein the breakneck torrent of my meat grief
I am left adrift in your fingertips in the silk of all that is forgotten
And all that once occurred in the Haunted Mansion ride in Disneyland
Comes into a dream orbit of my ancient thoughts and plants seeds
Most wintry and mysterious while interplanetary seagulls call above
The rainy farmlands so like solar systems seen through the dwindling Martian rain.

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.