Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

Dragonfly Words that I Once Swallowed

How does one fathom a dream
When all of my females were merely Cliff's Notes
In the Cafe De Seahorse where I recalled my youth
Which was like a Disney sonnet
Whose rose petals nodded at me
As oh so bone white they sighed
Heaving and sad and like a spinning wheel
While the fog held a seance to communicate with my dreams
That dissolved like some Cocteau film
As it pulsed from the Painted Desert
To Alpha Centauri and beyond
And then morning tore my ticket into a stub
While a rusting symphony of the frogs in the trees
Turned all this into a bewitched womb
That tilted and quivered like a playground swing
Near and freshly plowed fields that like pendulum clocks
Led me to the midway of the black b irds
Where gold fish swam in its carnival light
And where with the benediction of the clouds
Summer boarded up for winter in front of me with a sound most loud.



A Tarnished Whirlpool

Driving along in my father's speeding pickup
A thousand times I dreamt of flinging open the door
On my side and repelling out of it
My legs tucked under me cannonball style
Sure that I would magnificently fly before I died
When gravity finally did an Icarus on me
Many times I tested the door handle on my side
Wanting so badly to do it my mouth and throat gone dry
My blood pressure throbbing inside of me like a trip hammer a'pounding
Only to abandon such thoughts at the very last sweaty palmed moment
Then back to the pile of funny books I always carried
In the canvas overnight bag with me to day camp and everywhere
It always smelled pungently of peanut butter and jelly and suntan lotion
And bubble gum and of the four-colored comics it had made to bleed
I haven't thought of any of that in years without number
Then this morning it swam up from the depths to me
While I listened to Tchaikovsky's Russian sadness
Which was still engulfing me like some forgotten summer.



As Comes Snow

Goodbye is not gone as long as it floats you
To those few hours when she was an imposing beacon to me
And made me first believe in the portents
That turned her ginger cat into an old lion or so I believed
And as long as I was cloistered in those irrepressible footsteps now long gone
I trod on a ship's deck of different rhythms and envied
Those who dug in the soil that could play a violin if it so chose
My thoughts as surrounding and comforting as childhood jammies
While I made a wish as I sat down on the rooftops of those red lipsticked mansions
As the pink light rubbed a magic lantern that quivered through
The windswept catwalks of the somewhat eternal seaside's rocks.



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.