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Best Poems Written by Spenser Jones

Below are the all-time best Spenser Jones poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

A Part of Something

God created hands for building things. Sometimes before you build something, you must first destroy something else.

Wildfires are never supposed to be put out. Their sole purpose is to burn the entire forest to the ground, transform living things to fertilizer, making room and preparing the soil for new growth.
It is almost paradoxical,
that there must be death before birth

My hands have stared the grim reaper’s reflection inside the pool of my best friends blood. An old student I used to tutor told me that I am the best brother she could have asked for
She said she will always love me
This was after I burned every bridge that traversed the gaps between us
Stared at her from across her desk
Told her that she will never be my sister. That our bloodlines will never match.
Our gene pools are just strangers that made the same wrong turn.
I spent so much time trying to find my way back that I never realized I was home in being lost I found something comfortable, without expectations. I only corrected myself after she spoke,
because I heard something familiar in her voice.
She sounded like family.

I have the scarred and wrinkled hands of a senior citizen
I’m only 22 years old
I once got my palm read
This gypsy woman told me that my lifeline should have been cut short when I hit 17.
That was a year ago.
What do gypsies know anyway
I have defied the odds my entire life.
Been broke down and built back up too many times to count
My fingernails chewed raw to the cuticle out of anxiety
I enjoy the taste of my own pain
Sometimes I use my own hands to destroy myself just to see who my real friends are who will build me back up when I can’t do it alone

My hands have a desire to learn how to cook, but I’m not that great.
So when I am alone,
I tend to be hungry, not just for food though.
I starve for someone to talk to
It never satiates, because it’s not you.
I know what it tastes like to completely give myself to someone.
My biggest fear is being abandoned.
When I look into your eyes, I am not afraid.
I need to cook you up a feast of myself, then feed it to you every day for the rest of our lives
Please tell me what I really taste like,
Be honest.

Years after my grandfather passed away, my grandmother moved into my aunt’s house.
Since I was 5, every time I speak to her she asks me:
“Spenser, did you thank God for waking you up today?”
I think to myself, I never did tell my eyes to open themselves. It just happened.
So I don’t know how to respond to her correctly.
I tell her that I love her, that I am writing a lot.
She tells me that she puts her hands together for me every night
Prays that I will get the job I want
I guess some prayers do get answered.
Sometimes two hands in the right position, matched with a conversation with God,
Can change things.
I even accidentally call that place home sometimes.

My dream is that my hands evolve into wolves, become part of a pack and work together with other hands to make a difference
Some days they will be the alpha male.
Full of confidence, at the head of the pack
Other days I need someone to show me the right way to go
Because if I’ve learned anything
It’s that I am not always right
I can not always be in control of everything
The only thing I have ever really wanted is to know
That my hands were truly
A part of something.

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

Still

I have developed a temporary dislike of the things that I’ve convinced myself have been keeping you away from me. Mere substitutes that admitted to the murder of your mind.

This phone, and this 11 o’clock moon have slayed my reason’s for not just blaming your wandering eye.

Most of these nights I’ve tried Ctrl.Alt.Del.(ing) any ridiculous thoughts, by selecting all of the frequently frustrating things that know just how to push my buttons. I don’t know why I’m speaking in computer terms, but lately I haven’t been able to function quite right unless I’m near one. It’s the only way to get near you.

Most of these nights, this phone has been the entire left side of my brain, but now my mattress has memorized the rhythm to a ringtone it should’ve never been introduced to, and now the stupid cushion keeps me awake until it has made sure that I’ve felt it vibrating up my spine. My intuitive, creative right brain seems to remember being together with it’s brother each and every time I remember laying together beside you.

I wait for a wanting of your wanting. Muscle memories of warm bodies wrapped up in positions that make your mind say ‘what the ****?’ I am missing you. The you who remembers that the other members of her body are always here to help; no need to amputate a listening ear, or an gouge out an attentive eye. I still see you.

Sometimes, I forget that the phone’s main function is to send a signal of information to someone you can’t see. Whether it be via text, twitter app or vocally, you want to reach someone you can’t see. I still see you.

Sometimes, I swear I can see each of the moon’s phases during the day; completely filled with life during the time when it’s nearly invisible. It’s sad though, because New Moon, you show yourself to everyone else except me on the nights I always expect to see your face. Is this a trick man? or have my eyes been gouged out already, and I simply missed the painful message via text, twitter app or vocally? But still, whether with two eyes, four eyes or no eyes, I still see you.

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

Love Poem Medley Part 2

Sometimes everything seems fake to me, and I am so tired of people acting like they remember what love is.
Everyone says it.
“I love you, I love you, I love you.”
No words are more meaningful to me when sailing from the lips of a true friend or a kindred spirit, but the rest of you have to be careful where you point those syllables
because that’s like taking the closest thing to

the Lord’s name that I ever understood
in vain.
I was walking back from the gas station a few weeks ago and some girl I didn’t even know looked at me and said it.
Her lip gloss opening and closing like some kind of sea creature fishing for plankton, and I just happened to be the nearest thing drifting past.
“Love you!”, like it was hello.
Now I have just one question
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN”
You have no idea what I am.
My smile’s like this because my parents had the money.
My eyes are not the windows to my soul.
They don’t mean jack except for genetics that I had no control over, and what my mother ate when I was in utero.
That’s like acting like my poetry is who I am.
Like how myelinated the neurons in my linguistics center
I can feel the right to decide that I am more or less, valuable.
It happened again earlier too.
I was sitting on the greyhound back home, having a conversation with a girl with guys all around her like fire ants with their mating tubes out. All of them with ink, piercings, and sizing me up
because my six-foot-four stature could not speak for itself.
I’d like to think we talked about something more important than my assets and destination, but as she turned to disappear out of the bus with her escorts, she cast the three words back on me
like throwing a fishing line on the off chance something might bite,
“I love ya.”
….what in the world.
After this, I think of the only one whose words held their weight.
I don’t mean no harshness,
but if I could go back in time and have half the balls my poetry does, I’d take you aside, and tell you something you wouldn’t understand. Something like, “BAM! I am a tulip field on fire at sunset.”
Something like, “My shirt, is from the Goodwill.”
Something like, “You’re telling me Christ could have saved the world with His cheekbones?”
“You’re telling me I’m viable and worth a few minutes of your attention?”
“You’re telling me tall, black, and attractive is what’s in this century?”
But let me tell you.
You don’t have any idea of the size of the planets you’re saying you want to try and swallow when you say those words to me.
I’ve been waiting to be able to hear, feel, taste, smell, and know those words for too long. You have to mean them to say them.
But you see, I was a philosopher before I was a poet, so I have to take that back and reflect it on myself.
The truth is, I’m so confused that sometimes, I don’t know which end my head is at.

Poetry flies in my eyeballs that should never make it past my lips, but I’m getting tired of trying to impress people.
In this past month, I’ve been day dreaming about the girl smiling at me and it meaning more than
“You look like you got good genetics”
Or
“Could I please date your self esteem?”
I’ve been day dreaming of the girl who reminded me of what those three words are supposed to mean.
Like when my acne came back, and you told me not to scratch at a handsome face.
“I love you.”
Like when my poetry departs, and all I can do is ramble things too big for my head.
“I love you.”
Like when I didn’t feel like just a romantic stereo type anymore.
“I love you.”
What those words meant to me, before I made the world make them less.

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

Distance

Sometimes I still use a cordless house phone.
When I call her I imagine her wrapping an invisible cord around her finger
as if she were only walking slowly the opposite direction as the cord stretched further.
When she talks she says she likes to feel her voice as it runs away from me. She says that she wants me to believe distance is just a myth our minds created. When she held me I was a last box on a moving van. I was stretched out like piano wire waiting for a hammer to knock the breath back into me. Her hands forced me upward like keys pounding harmony.

She is the hottest day of summer telling me to wake up and find water and her bed is an oasis.
Our clothes scattered a mosaic across the paint spotted carpet.
We read to each other from the bookshelf on the corner.
The one that sagged in the middle until all its shelves were smiling, ready to laugh loose their stories.
The morning she left the half-closed shades left cords of sunlight stretching across her chest
and I traced them but there were highways, and she the smallest country.
When she calls me she traces her breath as it spirals like a hurricane to the wall and bounces between cities. Her voice is strangled with 350 miles of telephone lines.
The clothes we dressed our floors with for months have been stripped away.
The room is naked now and the bookshelf, half empty. When I think of that house
she is the only thing I can remember. Everything else fades, the room disappears entirely and I remember only having lived inside her. Home is where the heart is.

The first astronomers who looked up there had to have discovered sparkling new words about how far two things can be. We build telescopes to force everything closer.
I have built myself a telescope with bed posts and bathroom mirrors.
On warm nights I climb to the top of my room and look west where the world curves her away from me. I know now why the myth of a flat earth existed for so long.
It is not a story of people afraid of falling but of people terrified of growing apart,
reading that if you stare hard enough at the horizon, you’ll be able to find anyone who is left you. But “listen” she says. The blind man on my block had his cataracts removed.
He told me when he looked out his window for the first time he couldn’t understand why his hand was larger than the houses across the road.
He couldn’t grasp how things look smaller at a distance so close your eyes.
Stop looking for me in satellites fading below the skyline. Let us make this world flat again.
I am always right here.
This continent is just our kitchen table.
These highways piano strings.
The same note ringing resonating between us.
God keeps our sight stronger with eyes that we will never see by looking in a mirror.

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

Hospital Bed

If you were to find an old 
calendar, strap it to a hospital 
bed,
tie it down by its weak ends, 
and then sea section the belly 
of it's pages, you'd find the 
winding roads of my intestinal 
past.
I used to be a ballot box filled 
of everyone else's opinion 
except for my own. My swagger 
was like watching a Walkman 
trying to swallow a DVD. 
When I was a little younger,
I walked as if I were concerned 
about how the ground would 
feel about my footsteps. And if 
I could just find a way to write 
a letter to myself, when I was a 
sweater with itchy sleeves that 
I would someday grow out of,
I would say, 
"There will be days you will feel 
like a peacock with no feathers.
You will feel flightless, and 
undeserving of attention." 
But listen, listen to me. LISTEN. 
You have to stop getting out of 
bed like you are an oil spill. 
You're not a flat tire at 2 am, 
so stop acting like an accident.
Spenser, you are an apple on a 
pine tree in a room full of 
lemons, and you come from a 
line of authentic Swiss army 
pocket knives; Men who are  
rare, sharp and dangerous 
when not handled carefully. 
Somedays I wish my arms were 
a few years longer so that I 
could reach back, grab you by 
the shoulders, punch you in the 
chest, and say, 
"Listen. You are the main 
character in a movie that I 
watch every time I see the 
inside of my eyelids."
I told myself a million times 
that I wouldn't spoil the ending, 
but I will tell you this:  Your 
story starts off really slow, but 
it does get better. 
You don't have to believe me. 
Someday you'll see for 
yourself. 
I will see her again soon. 
At the apex of her driveway 
that I can now see in my 
dreams,
I will ignore the washing 
machine in my stomach. 
I'll tell her that she looks 
beautiful. 
I will extend my arms like a 
drawbridge to a castle no one 
has visited in years. 
Pressure washing my fears 
from my hardened heart, I will 
show her how far I've come 
from the hospital bed.

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

My Unconditional Dog

First of all, it’s a big responsibility,
especially in a city like Jacksonville, or Philadelphia, or wherever really.
So think long and hard before deciding on love.
On the other hand, love gives you a sense of security:
when you’re walking down the street late at night
and you have a leash on love
ain’t no one going to mess with you.
Because crooks and muggers think love is
unpredictable.
Who knows what love could do in its own defense?
Broken glass bottles.

On cold winter nights, love is warm.
It lies between you and lives and breathes
and makes funny noises.
Love wakes you up all hours of the night with its needs.
It needs to be fed so it will grow and stay healthy.

Love doesn’t like being left alone for long.
But come home and love is always happy to see you.
It may break a few things accidentally in its passion for life,
but you can never be mad at love for long.

Is love good all the time? No! No!
Love can be bad. Bad, love, bad! Very bad love.

Love makes messes.
Love leaves you little surprises here and there.
Love needs lots of cleaning up after.
Somethimes you just want to get love fixed.
Sometimes you want to roll up a piece of newspaper
and swat love on the nose,
not so much to cause pain,
just to let love know “Don’t you ever do that again!”

Sometimes love just wants to go out for a nice long walk.
Because love loves exercise. It will run you around the block
and leave you panting, breathless. Pull you in different directions
at once, or wind itself around and around you
until you’re all wound up and you cannot move.

But love makes you meet people wherever you go.
People who have nothing in common but love
stop and talk to each other on the street.

Throw things away and love will bring them back,
again, and again, and again.
But most of all, love needs love, lots of it.
And in return, love loves you and never stops.

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

The Cold Side

When you sleep, it’s almost as if you were 
alive, trailing down the pathways of your 
subconscious like a sluggish tourist 
without a camera. Like trying to capture 
every moment between your hands that 
hold past and present like dry sand, 
without a basket to carry the future in 
before the sea washes it away. Dreams 
likes to play hide and seek with what lies 
ahead, and you can never seem to tag the 
back of it’s shirt without waking up first. 
Your own worldwide web of thoughts and 
aspirations all tangled together for you to 
connect what’s right and what’s left. 
What’s up and what’s down. What didn’t 
happen and what should’ve happened. 
You rise up as an archangelic composer 
to a symphony that will perform when you 
start paying attention to your life’s song a 
little more. You construct skyscrapers 
larger than the afterlife with the squinting 
of your eyes, and connect earth and space 
together without a single harmonic note 
played, with the pinching of your thumb 
and finger. You can fly farther than 
sunlight decides to scatter! You can finally 
beat up that bully who gave you that black 
eye. You can jump halfway across the 
world, land on a brick of the Berlin Wall, 
and crush forever the division indifference 
can bring. You can dive without oxygen. 
Drive without a liscence. You can open up 
the doors to a mansion as a gift for your 
mom and see her smile again. But when 
you’re waking up, you can tell. It doesn’t 
matter where you are, you finally see that 
every life has an ending when living on 
this planet. You realize that science, math, 
history and poetry become blood brothers 
when your vision gets hazy, and the 
beauty in front of you starts to melt. Your 
passing is something they all can relate 
to. But why not make your dreams 
transfer into the account where reality 
rests? Even in dreams you have the choice 
to serve others or serve yourself. So when 
you wake up each morning, why not ask 
yourself where you’ll wake up next when 
reality’s dream is spent.

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

Drawn In Harmony

The phrase "Music to my ears" has been injected toward the
wrong part of my body, and most unpleasantly personified.
There is a record player that I let skip and scratch on purpose, hearing
colorful sound of life back when truth kept us both inside the lines.
I thought order was helping me draw closer to you, while you began on the next
page without me. The needle digs it's way into my ape-shaped forearm.
I'm directed by the guitar string shaped veins
that only play notes in the keys of D# E# A# F# and the sharp sounds pierce
my perception to the point I can hardly hear your voice anymore.

At times, listening to the same old sad song on repeat makes me think
that I am just an old soul getting repeatedly tossed around in God's
big barrel of human paradox. "Lord what was I made for? Surely it wasn't
to repeat the mistakes of my forefathers, because I'm certain I am the
only one you molded with forearms so large, that the record got lost
and forgot how to spin in circles. Music is all about art, and art all about
perception. Perception has nothing to do with your eyesight, and
you use your ears to envision the painting on a blank canvas before picking
anything else up but sound waves. I drive myself crazy sometimes when
I think that my inspiration is speeding away from me in the
opposite lane, but I didn't even ask for directions. Mostly because I'm a man,
a stubborn one at that, and I always think I know where I'm going.
But this time, I swear I had gotten the map right. So I transformed my open
hands into tight fists to make music burst out of my arms, and the needle went
faster and faster until it broke off, and the high pitched vibration
disintegrated the steel into my own blood. I blame myself for letting this
be the first time to let myself draw some air into my body. A surgery of
scalpels cutting into my physical, and an orchestral symphony of sutures,
threading my life back together again. My blue blood turns crimson as it kisses the air.
Why do we associate the color red with life and vibrancy, when it clearly shows that we are letting our own blood run down our arms? Why do so many women where red lipstick; the kind that sticks to your collar, screaming to your wife that you clearly sinned?
Why do we see sin so clearly; transparent enough for others to correct us before we really we even grasp the desire to fix ourselves? AND WHY IN THE WORLD IS THIS MUSIC PLAYING SO LOUDLY NOW; when my needle broke off into my body a long time ago, and I can hardly hear you anymore.
Good thing my life's song still isn't completely written yet. Let's add a more positive climax to this. One drawn in harmony.

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

Pez Dispenser

Being used.
Take everything out of me,
& on the days i’m not wanted,
I am left emptied
all of the way out.

A pleasant ‘medicine’ to show others just how good I make you feel, & how good I taste.
I’d be lying to say that hearing those words doesn’t make me spring right back up even in a setting as disintegrating as this.
I’m still here, ready to break off a piece of plastic from my narrow body for you.
It is you after all. I’d do it if I had too.

But, you confuse me.

You keep my head lifted & it keeps you entertained.
I like it, kind of. It’s like we’re getting to know each other’s touch, and see similar smiles to those of when we first met.
This makes it easier not to think too much about how I’m handled.
But
You’ve never treated me this way.
I’ve gotten my big head stuck before by trying to fill myself up with much more than you needed,
but this feeling of loneliness by you is unfamiliar.
I love you, I say. I love you, I show.
You love me, you say. You love me, I believe.

I hate the feeling of feeling cheap. You told me that I was especially manufactured for someone of your taste, & I believe every word of that.

Stop pressing my head down into my stomach, please.
I’m starting to get sick of not seeing everything that kept me full of your every desire to see me smile.
I could never be naive enough to say that I can fulfill who you are,
because I have a purpose that involves much more than
going up and down, emptying my insides with temporary dissolving gestures.
But I know I can share with you
the essence of being the someone who treats you as good as the planets you can’t see.
So align me inside the atmosphere of your care, & I’ll pick you up before you can say, “deSpenser”

Details | Spenser Jones Poem

Birth of a Poet

The animals know better than us. The rain has never poured so loudly in a key so soft.
To the front, the sailing of city buses and mini vans cruising across in this weather makes the water underneath their tires sound like the street is crying out for 5 more minutes of sleep. Up above, the trees are protecting a nest of baby blue jays before they get washed away by the silence of their mother not being there. But with sky blue young spirits, and small empty stomachs, they keep hope alive in the fact that even children know storms and struggles don’t last forever.
Below the trees, nature has found a name to call it’s own. From the hole dug by the little boy next door, a family of three foxes have named human nature sanctuary, and burrowed their problems into the sediment to rest for a while.
To the side of the hole, a flock of ducks are swimming in the water with eyes open wide enough to where you can see their loyalty to love one another rushes wild.
To the right of the pond, caged up in a man made blanket, and lost in his own mind, is the boy. From what he remembers, last night was like a train accident; A head on collision of two people he could’ve sworn he saw holding hands just the other day. He hears the sound of plates shattering in C-minor, and the chorus of words that his parents screamed in F-sharp, so he imprisoned himself in his own bed sheets, accompanied by the courageous corduroy bear who he swears keeps hearing whisper “everything will be okay.”
It’s raining outside, and the crescendos of screams have been silenced by it’s peaceful security.
The boy, sleeps soundly now. The rain has protected his ears, and guarded his heart from being washed away by all of his nightmares.
He doesn’t care whether he wakes up. The baby blue jay, the resourceful fox and the brave little duck are all he wants to keep dreaming about.
Maybe he’ll run away into the rain? Or maybe into the arms if his mother?, whom he prays he can still recognize. To the left of his bed, he picked up the blank page of his coloring book and a crayon, and became a life long poet in that moment that morning. Taking a deep breath in, and giving a soft breath out, his first sentence was
“The animals know better than us.”