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Michael Jones Poem
In lazy rhythm
A supple umber leaf falls
One's life passes by
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
maybe the ones who have left
us early by the malice of their own
hand knew what matters most:
procreation; the evolution of
planetary life amply illuminated, steeled
to survive in our natal fount or
with mastery of the universe poised
at the precipice of infinitude.
the greatest of these is escape
abandonment of the world one
has been born to
and from.
because:
carbon
avarice
religion
atheism
swarm behavior
there is no heaven
for:
practice makes perfect
preppers will kill you
one good turn deserves another
dust to dust
white sky
mystery
tribes
due to:
8 billion humans
5 billion years
smokey the bear
ember orange horizon
super volcano
chicxulub
since:
science
orbital decay
copernicus-gallilei-keppler-newton
rutherford-bohr-einstein
fermi-oppenheimer-hawking
"war is hell"
"mars needs women"
as:
reality trumps fantasy
euphoria is temporary
mortality is enough
i'm writing a poem that no one will read
i'm writing an ur-poem
poetry has never existed
because I'm writing a poem.
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
Ago I watched a woman coax
A fellow back from death.
Sand clung to the drowned
Man's shoulder, briny fluid
Dripped from clustered hair
Breath pushed lung to throat
In that moment inelastic life
Crashed back upon the dead
like a shadow tsunami
A curl of pale and bilious gas
Fumed from chimney nostrils
Solidified in black to wight
A crowd appeared though I alone
Observed that embryonic beast
Queasy, shivering afright,
I marked its flight beyond the foam
And with a sudden acumen
retrained my sights on death undone
Anon the surly imp invades
My repose, persists, cajoles
Courses as the Golden Horde
Across the spear grass steppes
Lodges of despondent darkness
Curtains drawn in masquerade
Where to the sopping man, renewed,
Removed I have no honest clue
Yet, with Lutheran conviction:
Beware the mirrored urchin clone
Loosed against our universe
Deceptive doppelganger who'd
Concuss humanity, earthbound
Sedate the benefactor faction
Throwing shade across the globe
Foment a foul and frothy chaos
Their like exists, implicit legion
Homunculi, contrary of the crowned
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
Corny: I haven't used real butter
In years
Only eat this fake crap now the
Colorful plastic tub
Slather it on the baked potatoes
All you like
Won't hurt you none as a left eye
Twitched some
His gleaming mouth stretched,
greasy rictus
His wife Jo either laughed
Or sneezed
The family mutt stared
Up at me
A faint growl hissing through
Bared incisors
I was really only concerned for
My Alma and
The kids, this being Thanksgiving
And all
Me only caring to deliver
Them to
A dementedly safe family feast
Late in
The afternoon we'd hit some
awful, icy
Weather on the way upstate to
Uncle Skippy's
And spun the Jeep into
A ditch.
Corny was nice enough to invite us
To his place
Wife's got turkey on the table you're
Welcome, join us
It seemed our host was the lone tow
Truck driver
In Paradox Lake, he'd explained,
There wouldn't
Be anybody around to fix
The vehicle
Till near Saturday and I a
Little hesitant
To accept his hospitality until
He argued
Hell,
Where else you gonna go?
© 2017 Michael Jones
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
Hunched over the vat of used motor oil, Scotty and Osman watched intently as a black ant struggled to escape its unforgiving viscosity. The doomed insect slowly sank and the boys, cousins, regarded each other, their mouths describing rubbery toroids. Scotty was a bit awed by his older relative from Yonkers and Osman was grateful, happy in the July heat, to be amid the freshly mowed grass and tree forts of the Jersey suburbs. “Go get another one, wait… make it two, make it three” Osman directed “We’ll sink them all together.” Later Scotty sacrificed some of his plastic army men to the crush of unsuspecting car tires along the main road that fronted his parents home. His mother chastised the boys for this, “…and your father bought you that set for Christmas,” she’d added. The boys chuckled as they inspected the maimed green figures. During a July heat wave when he was 23, a motorcycle crash took Osman’s life. Broken bits lay littered across a tarred and shimmering landscape in Westchester county. He and Scotty were never as close as during that one week when they were young and free and unencumbered; the one they spent together in New Jersey, when it was enough to simply be boys with supreme power over ants and army men.
© 2014 Michael Jones
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
Place the void before me and I will cower
Fill it and I will pulse with awe
Neither pushes me down the path
The winding way, that greenish-yellow place
I once described in my innocence.
I'm mistaken, languishing
Anticipating some outside force,
Propellant, dependent on
Otherness to accomplish bliss
Folly filling my chance.
I wondered, then, if I would live
Laughing at the speed of one
Planetary body, cynical as Iago.
When I found time could hold me
Luck equals opportunity plus more: effort
Place before me a sheet of paper
I will cover it with echoes
Neither real nor imaginary
Ghosts that haunt my happy place
A stain excreted, evincing existence.
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
The specter of these faces in the horde
Snowflakes on an ice black creek
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
What, if not
meaningful thought
purposeful action,
calibrated memory,
diatonic music,
enlightened love,
defines an auspicious life?
Thought without meaning,
random action,
vertiginous memory,
atonal music,
Stygian despair.
Triumphant Life:
only success
merely failure
only light
merely darkness
only everything
merely nothing
© 2014 by Michael Jones
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
Trees like fallen soldiers strewn
Haphazard amid woods, lawns
Sand brine planks:
runes of nature's
colossal force,
brawn.
A vast- avast! the harbored cry
Spiral'd sinews of vapor vaporize
The huddled helpless. Its mocking eye
Rise behemoth,
Unmerciful, rise
Wind:
The battering terror, no defense.
Tidal surge:
Salacious mermaid beached.
One's life regained no recompense.
A safe and further shore unreached.
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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Michael Jones Poem
We strolled the broken sidewalks
Of a little chilly lake town
Caught between mountains
Talking about art and money
Smelling curiously of aged wood
About who cared anymore for culture
And stopped in to lunch at
A corner cafe where two meals
Cost us twenty because we were hungry
I snapped a photo of the storybook
Book store's curlicue gingerbread
For a moment we were sculpture
Frozen, captured, cast in time
No one important was around to see us
Only a robot Santa and a traffic cop
Copyright © Michael Jones | Year Posted 2017
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