Poet Ken
The birds are communicating their wisdom to the trees, who are breathing their wisdom to the breeze, which is trying mightily to survive in tact. The artillery shell explodes in fragments as if Bert Bacharach were on the attack, selling falitas at a taco stand on 10th, the whole while importing surplus Xanax from Mexico at a dollar a pop. Stop.
The ceaseless communications from the disembodied entities begins again. If they manifest themselves too much, odd occurrences, like gentle gusts of wind, appear like popped popcorn kernels. The nugget of truth in all this is the transcendental realm of the never dead, who feed this consciousness via electricity or fiber optic high intensity microwave coaxial data transfer, flying through our skies at the speed of light.
KEN JONES
Select Poems
The smell is long gone
But the images remain of driving smoke encrusted freeways
As acrid atmosphere attacked the asphalt
Asphyxiated all of us
Obscured the exits off the 101
Where I had lived for three years.
The first night I challenged the streets
Because an ex-lover hadn’t seen the carnage yet
And I wanted her to feel these orgasms of revolution.
So we drove down silent curfewed streets
Where a National Guardsman with a rifle at the ready
Stepped in front of my car-stopped it in the middle of Melrose
We begged him not to shoot
So they followed us all the way home.
The next day I drove the boulevards with anarchic energy
Watched the hopeless strutting empowered
For a few hapless moments
No authority to constrain their marching celebratory looting
Overrunning grocery stores, appliance shops,
The Western Avenue vendors of necessaries.
And my law school friend said,
“The riots could be your big break”
So I took a photographer with me to shoot the scene and me in it.
For three days I repeatedly visited where others feared to go
Knowing my soul was with the rebellion.
And I could venture unharmed
Back into the riot zone
Again and again and again
The dispossessed had already declared their secrets to me
And so I knew I was safe and I knew the answer:
When you have nothing the only question is beyond reason.
When the dust settled and the former order restored,
Not yet a new world but the old one destroyed forever
Replaced by a sense of apathy long cultivated
An uncaring long sought
A reality that no one or nothing really mattered
Or could change the massive infrastructure of intransigence
Of a city, a country, a planet where laws are jokes
And lawlessness was the operative gown of graduation.
I reach across the miles to you
The last time we speak
Your Mother’s will-your daily pills
I sense you need a break.
You ship an envelope to me
The last handwriting I see
I call and call-no answer there
Until the news fills my ear
All instruments agree-silence
Your brilliance-loss-no sense.
I reach across the years to you
The last time we jam
Our joint songs-our spirits’ strong
You make me better than I am.
I play the ancient tapes we made
What’s left of what we shared.
I cry and cry-no answer there
Your life force fills my ear
All instruments agree-silence
Your brilliance-loss-no sense
I reach across the worlds to you
The next time we meet
Your body gone—truly alone
Death is an evil cheat
Your friends left on this Earth
The place of all our births
Vow to find an answer there
Our love for you fills our ears
But all instruments agree-silence
Is now what’s left us here.
Ken Jones-Thanksgiving Day 2007
Twinkling, twinkling eyes--wise, bearded self
Brother in revolution schemes,
I wish I’d been there to help.
Your loss is some bad dream;
I remember when we spoke.
Feels like yesterday
we shared a beer and a smoke.
And all we had to say
about battling against the power--
spreading the message over radio tower.
Through music, actions louder than words,
so many you touched, so many who heard.
So many saddened you’ve been taken away,
so many miss you so much today.
Thank you, Rick, just for being
our friend and truly seeing
the truth behind society’s lie.
Why is it always the good ones who die?
Ken Jones – 11/12/07
Thoughts move in waves
Like worlds within worlds
Mimicking atomic structure.
But what possible model
Other than nature’s basis
Could tangle these intangibles
Into lattices of letters—
Pale reflection of electric
Impulses become theories
Which the hominids postulate
To explain the canyon between
Ultimate security or satiety
And what really be reality.
As for me, these thoughts are enough
To make me rebel—Place ideals
On the pole and cast
Into water where fishers of men loll
Drunk on the dock
With no thoughts but words
Which aren’t the world
Or even close
They leave it to me
To fend for myself.
The products of my hunts
Are mine if my mind
Wrestles the social elements,
Conquers the “horror”
Of history’s order,
The only possible
Consequences of senseless
Origin and disorder.
Then when life
Got complex
It had to feed—
The selfish cell’s
Subsistence level
Left it in constant
Need to fend for itself.
From fields where food
Hung in hunks over carcasses,
Women without clothing wailed
Beneath totems resembling
The deity of bounteous harvest—
A cylindrical, archetypal
Stamen these women
Carved with sharpened
Femur fragments taken
From the dirt they squirmed and squirted on
Poet and messiah walk as one
In the crucifixion of intoxication
Each inundated in understanding
What dies for comprehension.
To explain the inexplicable
Is palpably a ridicule
Yet to rage an aged miracle
Deifies a molecule.
Devise an artifice.
An artifact that
A million million years hence
Will be a hominid inheritance
To our evolutionary descendents
In dominance over this sphere. And
Here think and there tinker and
Mention the nuclear inoculation
They must have had
To use this artifice.
Endlessly I play
Catch as catch can.
The sky is gray.
I kick the can.
I run away
From the way
I see it and say
“It is there
It is all there
It is all there is.”
Effortlessly I smile
I want all
There is to have.
I see the way
It all makes me always
Want to play.
The hominids hurry—happy
Winter has killed their sustenance
But they have outsmarted it—
Stored raw meat
In an arctic approximation
For personal preservation
Of protein—it works too well,
Their bloated bellies
Stuffed to bursting
With yellow fat cells
Threaten their hearts—
An ironic ending
To their outwitting
The witless nature of nature.
Of course, comfort is the number one
Killer with the highest abuse potential.
So they earn and buy and sell and hell
Is having enough but not enough
To smother in comfort—and I
Can’t shake this sad weight
Of shaking legs and knowledge
Like a pack mule’s worst burden—
And though they recklessly drive
In the only possible ride
I do understand suicides.
If standing can be right
It must be crooked
Since Doan’s pills relieve minor back ache
Pain our spine is under
A lot of pressure—maybe not as much
As the ocean—but a lot
For that spot
I’ve spewed genius
Clue into what this could possible be about
Clue—Mr. Mustard in the study
What was he studying but murder
Of jungle plant toxins
Become French’s, Heinz, or Goulden’s Brown
On slices of salami, sausage-
Meat cleaved from live bone once firm
With marrow, muscular
Not like the French
The cushy crepes of Caucasoid carnivores
Far removed from the tense pulse of nature
They even had art in their caves.
Return the gift ungrateful
Miracles are natural
The Miracle of Life is ageless
Nature’s random sageness
Decreed he purpose: feed
Reap others’ energy with greed
Nothing unreal exists
Herein lies the peace of God.
Shocked cartographers from sixteenth century
See satellite shots of Earth
As magic. The trick being
If they could see it—their century
Lacked radar or T.V. even.
Twelve pox-marked poets pontificate
On dullness or try to ingratiate
Themselves to kings who hold the strings
To their words’ freedom—some
Geniuses these centuries
Produced—refused to buck
God or economic
Dependence vs. the independence
Their colonies achieved.
Learn this national lesson:
Worship history and grieve.
Cougar cub caught
In a wire snare
Priest gesturing
Hectoring about the struggle
For existence and resistance
To the struggle for meaning
Peasants condemned to base
Levels of subsistence; their existence’s
Struggle precludes higher
Meaning—their reward
Says the priest
Lies at the end of time
Coil repair for oxygen
Brain deprivation
Linguistic tricks
Play in a poll of sounds.
I exhort them to cavort,
Live on dead trees
My hand commands
Their very presence
In the ocean of ideas—
Scrambled babble
Or soaring meaning,
I know not what they do.
They flow like H2O
Rivers of rushing vowels
Carving caverns through consonants.
My mind orders the letters
But only half-consciously.
Its true spring hides in mind
Centers centered in the
Floppy disk of experiences
Assimilated surreptitiously
Until called to aural display
On my mental terminal
In language—Not Pascal’s
Precise mathematics—but poetry’s
Passionate rambles—the rumble
Of answers bursting desperate
Beneath the unanswerable.
The air was cold.
Steak chunks splatter rented furniture.
I like a look of Agony.
Why am I writing? I’ve nothing to say.
Cold was the air.
The wood is stained with blow.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
Was the air cold?
A cornucopia of colors crowns the cushions.
Mighty Casey has struck out.
I’m exhausted with literature—this is ridiculous.
It means something to me.
The cold air was—that’s all that matters.
On your deathbed, you lied
The facts you knew
You tried to hide
Your idea of order
Died—it died and try
As you might your wish
Was your life, denied.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me why
Idols and icons and dreams
Can guarantee eternity
When you must see that be
Be finale of seem and be.
To be is all all is.
I know you knew but you
Were you—I am me and
It will never be said
That on my deathbed, I lied.
No wonder these blundering beasts
So full of pompous blunderbuss
Still wallow in squalor.
The faces of Nature
Make great change impossible.
Self-centered drive
Is only logical
Why try to deny
Your instincts for survival
Ignore the contortions
Of hypocritical moralists.
Their acts are acrobatic
Performances of perseverance
In the face of waste
And massive purposelessness.
They still buy the lie
Of man’s pre-eminence
To change the strange
Ways of the world
From deranged
The peaceful unity.
They order the disorder
To cease and desist
But randomness and death
Caused Man to exist
With his silly wishes
For a land of animal equals
In his technological jungle
Where computer chips resemble
Grubs and slugs—and it’s no wonder.
The dominant rooster feeds first
A line of sycophants behind
Eat their own shit
To stave off hunger’s ominous signs.
These dirty birds social schemes
Mean as much or more than Man’s.
The rooster rhythmically taps
His beak back and forth
On an usuper’s feathers
Physical proof that desirable morsels
Are the domain of the dominant.
Empiricists in loud debate
Greet mystics with unbridled hate
But both spout mouthings about Fate
As if matter really mattered
And the Great and the State related
To anything but nothing.
Call me Theophilus.
Scanning the skies
Of electromagnetic excrement
The dung ant can’t ferment.
He finds the fires that fuel
His furious, furtive building
In his home
Humble, but his own.
I sing a song of ego praise
Of cabbages and kings
And heads of lettuce. Let us state
That busts of great men freeze forever
Unreal granite chronicles
Of events beyond recall.
These icons of ignorance
Revel in the cavernous power
Of mountainous appearance
Tall and ever present
“I am Ozymandius—King of Kings!”
Call me Theophilus.
Church towers dot the cityscape
Scraping the sky like a sty
Blocks the eye from escaping
Its insular home.
Men and ants share
The spectacle of physical existence
Each step a desperate dance.
Dance this vicious twist
It’s the only one you know.
We all believe our stigmata are unique.
On the Cyberspace Scriptorium
Monks preserve monkey knowledge.
The reality of prayer
Transmorgified into a terminal
Access to the Nexus
At once trapped in a spot
Yet everywhere and nowhere.
During the Grand Silence
I hear a clicking of keys
Unlocking hidden universes
Diverse as we please.
On their knees, Divinities
Digitize the Divine
A sign of recurring excrescences
Dense as existence.
Your bloody sweat fools no one
Into knowing nothing is something.
Prophetic communications abate
When Dog Orgies dissipate.
For two to three days, wounds in your forehead
Are signs of unused force.
They do not invade. Listen
To what they say before it's too late.
Even in your hour of darkest midnight need
On the other side of the Earth
Two lovers discover each other
Someone earns a fortune
Or finds a Spirit beyond the Material.
Pieces of our species breathe their last.
A town stagnates in it past.
A loner wanders toward the future.
Prophets seek in this realm
A unity at the helm
But impatient saviors' wounds are weeping
Flesh is seeping
Sleeping off the agonies.
Wiped blank as a skanky prankster
I stir these Spirits to a roiling cauldron.
Boiling insincere Here and Now to a prize fur
Around the shoulders of an impudent sun.
Tortured by the scorching naysayers
Affixed to an appendix of This Is It
Kicking Mules, One-Eyed Fools braying
Spirit nearing balance in each shit.
Heightened expectorate invigorates
Satiated caberets whose chorus bellows
Truths of youth and parables so obdurate
Here lies the norm of tomorrow.
Our Spirit walks a labyrinth in life
Sacred spaces our longing yearns to access
When burdened by this world's diurnal strife.
Stalwart within, through winding paths we press
Toward that inner silence where dwells our source.
We cup our hands to catch the Godhead stream
The spirit taste returns us to the course
Where Light defies us to rise toward its beam.
Aloft at that spot, knowledge of the Cosmos
Crosses us as wisely we surrender
To the core of Oneness whose essence grows
When you and it rest at peace together.
Often when you think you are truly lost
Your spirit walks this path and pays its cost.
This ancient native stopped in the street to stare
He pushed his possessions in a shopping cart
He nobly tilted his nose toward the light
He refused to move in response to primate signals
He stood his ground as ancient truth abounded
He glared at us as if we were descendents of conquerors
He knew one of us didn't know his heritage
He blasted the labyrinth of solitude enveloping us
He walked on purposefully, message delivered.
To heal the Earth we first must heal ourselves
Of impurities we surely imbibed
At the shot bar of More Progress and Wealth.
We clean the bottles off the dusty shelves
And make way for the New Age we've described.
To heal the Earth we first must heal ourselves
And then never again dirty our wells:
Those storehouses needed for all the tribes
At the shot bar of More Progress and Wealth.
Unavoidable poisons, with shrewd stealth
Have stolen in with suicidal bribes,
To heal the Earth we first must heal ourselves,
And learn the subtle cycle for her health.
She's not the whore our self-hate did proscribe
At the shot bar of More Progress and Wealth.
No. She is our source, our fountain whose vibe
Gives us the life on which we now inscribe:
To heal the Earth we first must heal ourselves
At the shot bar of More Progress and Wealth.
The stargazer fell into a deep pool.
His housekeeper had to laugh.
"Oh, so you joke at your master's expense,"
He bellowed, "feed on his wheat, forget whose chaff
You separate, on whose staff
Your life depends, the simple ends and means
Of your days; while I ask of the sky: Why?"
"I can't say I''m truly sorry, sir,"
In a weary warble, the maid replied.
"It's just...you're such a strange creature
Your weird words are not in my world.
Among the babble in malls or the voices in offices
No one ever cries, "Why? Why not nothing?!?'
The people in my husband's company......"
"Are mere vendors of necessaries!" the astral asker
Barked back rather harshly, then thought better:
"I don't mean less worthy or somehow inferior.
Yet when I wonder at the dome of the interior
At what's beyond, or even why we know what's here,
The shock rocks me back, my balance disturbed,
So, of course, I often fall backwards."
"But you know the pool will catch you" she objected
And he was struck dumb by her wisdom.
Nature crushes then she teaches
Preaches then absolves:
A purse snatched on an L.A. street
By crack crazed canyon kids
A woman worn by weary years
Fights despite her fears.
A wild-eyed child on Sid
Wields a blade at her face
"You'll be pushin' up daisies
Those drugs are makin' you crazy."
"Hey, shut the fuck up, Lady!"
One of the White Fences dances
To the jambox raps
A silhouette of a marionette
The strings hold his souls's sap,
To the Lady's lip he slips
The steel, then slashes at chaos,
Havoc, the wrecked a
and wasted life where he's trapped
And sees in the lines of her eyes
And feels the steel striking harder
The blood of the Martyrs
Firing his skin
And she didn't listen
To her husband's lesson:
Nature oppresses then sets us free.
These gaps in my wisdom, your warm words seal.
The universe: your orange; which your Light peels.
Bathing in the juice, its life sluice reduces
My doubt to the Light of what you reveal.
Vowing to destroy all addictive insanity
I, tasked with tacking, miss Grace disartrously.
Talking to the gulls whose full throat pulls
Me down to my knees, supplicatingly.
I am a mendicant who can't mend what I am
Please heed to this heaved sliver received
From you all-around empty everythingness
Need has fled me; I am blessed
I made a house of houselessness
A career out of coming
And going as my wishes
Guided my spirit's slumming.
I made a spouse of spouselessness
A bride out of hiding
Fresh, faithless kisses
My pleasure ever abiding.
Then one morn I awoke
Alone in some home
Unknown to myself. I spoke,
But my voice's job was to roam
So an answerlessness
Returned its hollow echo
Scared, feeling now less blessed
I knew what I didn't know.
Today's journey has ended here
Where all aspects meet in your eyes
All manners collapse in the cries
Of the wild wildebeaste shivering
In desolate Kenyan plains. Or in
Channel 57's Nature documentary:
Human Social Interaction. Tonight's
Episode: Men who rape then shoot their load
On the cut tongues of their female victims.
As the dumb monkey fingers his rectum
You manipulate the remote. Sony snow
Swirls in blizzard black and white--you hold
Tight to the control, then stroke your pole
As the Playboy Channel bobs up the latest
Mammal with luscious mammaries who
Appears then disappears momentarily--
Momentously, portentiously, the PTL club
Pops up next, the preacher with gold chains
Around his neck beckons you to contribute.
But he ain't that cute, so you can't shoot
You're condemned instead to a too full head
And a stiff attention you call relaxation.
Transformer wires circle like a spyrochite
Eroded purpose's worst leftovers
Lie cold and old in the Frigidaire.
Random Electron Spins determine
Lifetimes of whys and lost charges
Free radicals search for a covalent bond
Take stock in their lost par value.
The parvenu removes his molar
Sacrifices the silver filling at a solar altar
Mayan blood overflows on the ziggurat's stone
Into cups of human femur bone.
Three naked goddesses embrace their hate
Wipe their bloody wet lips into kisses
Touching the last fresh eyelash, their mates
Know their hidden souls are where bliss is.
Corporate towers surround the sound
Of a lone gunshot in objection.
No foundation of percipient knowledge
Sustained in the underfunded silence
Reversible error? See for yourself.
Among the youngish ruins, a woman's dreams
Learned that determined to lie beyond their control
Are face masks, eye holes, totem bracelets
Other adornments for a reviving tribal sense
Alive to their whys, the bounty heaven-sent.
Spirits come in gentle breezes
Feloniously asporting the philosopher's stone.
Discolored wood shards strewn by my wake-up spot
Match the brown pretzel junk of my junkie crash bed.
Drunk on fine wine, morning birds converse
In sharp chirps, long melodious lines. Then One
Clearly influenced by his surrounding
Sings like a car alarm on an urban assault vehicle
Loosing the uproar of pure sotto voce spirit.
The birds all live in trees like Kobe,Japan apartment dwellers
Talking back and forth, busy in the bustle
Yet eventually dusted by shuffling
Among Earth's Earthquake ruins for a motherly New One.
This ancient native stopped in the street to stare
He pushed his possessions in a shopping cart
He nobly tilted his nose toward the light
He refused to move in response to primate signals
He stood his ground as ancient truth abounded
He glared at us as if we were descendents of conquerors
He knew one of us didn't know his heritage
He blasted the labyrinth of solitude enveloping us
He walked on purposefully, message delivered.
The 3 legged beast from Saturn's fifth moon
Disturbed my concentration one spring day
Ringing my cellular all afternoon
No pleading kept his attention away.
"Hark, Earth Creature, be truthful if you can
Great Squads of my fellows await your words.
Is there hope for that form you call 'human'?
We have chosen you to make their case heard."
"Though grown in the Spirit, still I'm confused
I wish One would shine down, we need it soon.
Though too weak in the flesh, such must be used
By 3 legged beasts from Saturn's fifth moon."
"Why, this One is the Reason!" They thundered.
Then apologized for how they had blundered.
I was to give an entertainment for the benefit of a friend
In order to advertise the show, he asked me to go to lunch
At a luncheon club in a nearby town.
The thing that bothered me most was mathematical chance expectancy.
After the lunch, he gave a sales talk about my abilities
Glowing, as sales talks always are.
After the speech, one man said to me., "If you are anywhere
Nearly as good a magician as said, come with me
To get the jackpot in a quarter machine over in a corner of the lobby.
This machine was an automatic gambling device
In which a quarter was put, a handle pulled, wheels spun around.
When they stopped, the Machine gave out varying numbers of quarters.
Or, on the other hand, one might (and probably would) lose one's own coin.
I tried, without effect, to explain this wasn't my brand of magic.
He insisted. Finally, to quiet him, I decided to lose a quarter and play the Machine
But, astonsihingly, I did just what he had asked me to do--win the jackpot.
All the seats for the show were sold on the theory,
I am quite certain, that I was a true magician.
After that experience, I began to question
The likelihood of any given event being mathematically predictable
Of course, I realize the mortality tables of the insurance companies
Do not say which man is going to die in any given year
They merely say how many men out of so many will die in a given year.
Furthermore, the insurance statisticians, by study, know their presuppositions fit the situation.
Male murderers stifle Mother Earth's oracles
Slaughtering priestesses and pious prophets.
The prophetess' glossalalia flows freely
Men force it into hexameters.
The prophetess chews laurel leaves
As she comes all over me
Then she drinks bulls' blood
Ready for the oracular ritual
Repeatedly, repeatedly.
In the beeswax temple, she slips fern seed
Into her sacral vessel
The supplicants' honey-cakes overflow.
The priestess feed on sacred flesh
A ram prepared in sacrifice.
The songbirds on the golden roof
Dive like divining dice.
A copper coin upon the eyes
A secret well by an old oak tree.
Can you see the future, Sister?
Will you share this Earth with me?
You've got my guts open for inspection
Now upon further reflection
Remember to forget Memory
To pray to the Moon for Good Fortune
And bathe in the path of the deities.
I am the Knight of Cups.
You are a maiden jailed by swords.
We are together everywhere.
Among the disembodied spirits of the sands
Across the barnacle shackles of true coupling
Along the bleeding edge of roiling oceans
Aware of duel consciousness in the embryonic sheath
We toll the days as changes
We embrace to answer.
As we walked about initial offerings
Corporate holdings and the Republicans
A meteor soared into our atmosphere.