Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

She Imagines Comic Books

Signal Hill is now all blooming lilacs
Last night's infectious neon arias
Have all fluttered and alighted
Somewhere else as the day slows down
Like Darth Vader's heavy breathing above
The nearby pencil thin sea
In this era carved from reclaimed timber
While I feast well on the Maltese Falcon
On a dumpster dived for TV
Little realizing at that time
All that I once had back in that Sad Sack version
Of Omar Khayyam's Bagdad
By Terminal Island and the bay
Till decades later when I was miles and miles
From that place that I can never
Physically arrive at again
But can only re-cook in my brain pan's gravy
Like some chicken that Donna
In our kitchen now long bakes
And yet still I often go back there
In fading memory looking to see
What can still be retraced.



When the Circus Came to Town

I cannot forget the sound of her voice
Which takes me back once more again
to the shores of decades long ago
That still are mind stretching even yet
To where fiddlers and sad clowns
Provided my lyrics on those roof-less afternoons
When that white hot farmer's daughter
Who stood out even in that sea of super girls
That could shame a rainbow
Infected me with needs that set my very eyes ablaze
Until a fragment of a white dwarf star
Brought me back to earth again
And now when all the gas stations
Have started to blend together
In my licorice blue forever
Where Iowa will always shiver
Even when splintered by the other "Me"
Into a world that no longer exists
Except in the memory of her kiss
As by the last three chapters of my clock
I sculpt with words anything I wish.



A Book that Wrote Itself

There was a glow from afar about how everything
Swam in fold rock during that misjudged summer
That is now decades long ago
And yet its marinated poetry
Still brings upon me a grief as sharp as diamonds
As I reflect on way back when the salt breeze
Was her long and lingering hair
And my heart throbbed madly like wild swans upon the wing
While we ate Gummi Bears that were like a feast
As I played my funhouse of a guitar on those monolithic cliffs
That seemed to like it when I would sing.




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.