Three Poems by Ken L. Jones

She Looked Like a Peony

By a lake that was like my childhood nursery
Where I contemplated the impossibility of my first love
Beneath a moon that seemed to me to be suffering
Slouching by dark trees like divided continents
Touched by patches of bandaged chilliness
Whose insufficient evidence and unverifiable agendas
Snatched me down into a descent into printed words
And a fame I came to love found on streets full of poets
As pretty as an opera house dancing to the pipes of a new year dawning
Sleeping on the mattress that imprisons us both
Dead birds now who are victims of a brutal winter
Gone for a long time because we loved someone too well
Crying in the bathtub and on a blue street corner
Whose youthful gait was like a nice catholic girl afraid of all she felt
Death haunted in my immortality
Melancholy in the sweet scraps of my own memorabilia
And clear eyed in my loneliness
Bereft and cooked over an open fire
Angelic for reasons beyond what is needed
To interact with a too rough muse
And in my own entire universe of exalted moments
As I walked across the land of
The one perfect woman that I never quite met
Amazing bebop in the flux of my chronic distortions
An error in the text of some Mesozoic forest
Intricately connected in a Sahara Desert of mask making blown into neutrons
A jagged riff in the oblivion thunder of the void
Swallowed up by vortexes vanishing
But always still always a believer in true love.



Yet to Be Titled

Back when a wine cask was a time machine
While hanging out on a beach of surrealistic bubbles
French kissing I didn't say a word about her gratuitous nudity
Because I was no stranger to jigsaw puzzles
We were like bees drinking orchid nectar
As we awakened journey deep in our fizzy drinks
Transformative like Doctor John Lilly inside his isolation tank
Shaded by the shadow of the Beatles
Cooled by the civil disobedience of a world slowly turning to ice
We became tremors that could never be replaced
A bell tower that collapsed
Locked in a love like Cleopatra and Marc Antony
That eventually gave way to a fallen upon sword by one's own hand
And a much too teased and ornery asp



Arranged Like a Pinwheel

The noonday sun was a sizzling cast-iron skillet
Its light through the trees sugar dusted sleeping dogs
Looking for comfort in the shadows and shade
While I spent the afternoon in the LA County Art Museum
Seduced by heavenly abstract paintings
Like elaborate mirrors made of the ice around champagne
That shimmered like your long blonde pigtailed hair
And your granny gown that twisted around your svelte young frame
Like a lavender turntable playing Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze
In that series of interconnected rooms
Where though you ignored me you were well aware
Of exactly what I wanted as I stared
At what I thought at the time was the truest love I would ever feel
But how little did I know that the only one I would love forever
Was someone I didn't yet even know.




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.