https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
Prose Poems by Ken Jones.
LIT FIRE I
Hawks squawk, leftover after dinner mints sprint onto the keyboard. Carpal tunnel syndrome for the whole horde. Hoarding holes of incipient doors to forgotten freedoms. Like Larkin’s “Toads”, my morning bills ill me, spill me into a poetry frenzy. Friend inside my id, you’ve hid from process longer than Wordsworth’s late life drought. Head south— Pimpin’ some sounds. Words. Fury Signifying Nothing-but defying. Trying to scry a loose hootin’ future-exotic boots like your passionless exoskeleton turn Will into gelatinous mass-crassly you remind Superego that you donated some clothes to Charity last month-Where’s the receipt, bitch? All we care about here in scary quite contrary land is that you prove Mary took it immaculately. Quite spectacularly, the spectacle revolves around the radius of a rectangle; equal on two sides (square-like); unequal on two (or is that a trapezoid?) This void threatens every Mary Morning to scrape that plaque from artery wall to clock stopping blockage. Two minutes to play and all the players look to you to quarterback. Instead, you hack away at Mary with a machete, vowing that plowing into down black fields of pink sinkage beats signifying any day, no matter what Derrida says. Matches?
LIT FIRE III
Seriously, a series? Weary as I am in all ways, I pray that this Deliverance ain’t Ned Beatty squealing like a stuck pig. Like a victim on Survivor, you were only sliced for the good of the tribe. Why, I cry, am I left on the shores of a slum, on the border of a disordered life, at the cliff edge of a debt death?
God helps those who help themselves. So I help myself to a heaping helping of pain of the insane. Am I competent to enter contracts? To be an agent? Or am I compus non mentis.—unable to do for myself what a wealth of betters and for worse have done—live on Earth as it is in Heaven. Graven images of the Buddha sit next to my computer. Scooters are the hot transportation item. Black clad cell phone trendies mend their frazzled, unraveled ways. My hair, obscenely long, hangs in graying waves across my face—Cousin It and I interchangeable in a police lineup. My cup runneth over(says Mommy) or is it with warm yellow pee splashed gently on my tummy. Yummy Yummy Yummy for the dummy rummy!
LIT FIRE IV
Roman numerals are homing in on the Homeboys message. Ho’s— you know he be the bomb—Ho Ho Ho and a bottle of rum—Santa Claus is causing a disturbance in the mall. Turbulence from his bellying is rocking the frequent flyers into diced liars. I aspire no higher than buyer. Why are Consumer purchases down this quarter? Artificial needs must rise. Toward crowded polluted skies rise millions of flying hominids (a word to revisit.) A world to visit. This vast pall of mammals defying Newtonian laws would awe any Great Historical Bum. Sum of crisscrossing routes in metallic pterodactyls fueled by compressed dinosaur entrails. Jet fume trails hasten the demise of the mammals. Soon the Snows of Kilimanjaro will be no more that taro fields or the hills like white elephants will be as gone as the long line of fetuses I fertilized.
Ken Jones has been a published poet in academic and underground journals, magazine, websites, anthologies and other forums. He earned an MA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Texas at Austin and is a full-time faculty member at the Art Institute of Houston, teaching Creative Writing among other subjects. His book Unutterable Blunders and Palace Disasters will be published this Spring from Plain View Press.