In the wildest place,
my mouth stopped with stars,
I came to the end of words;
the parched mint, bitter
paper plank

where I lost my balance,
on one foot teetering
along that roadway where gold-
flashing fireflies stand effortlessly
on air

to send their fragile signal
out,
every night a nocturne
of one less
til I and the last firefly

danced alone
in the wildest place
sending our last ignition
out
to find our kind

or else fall quiet
and one
with the wild that
will neither be spelled
nor known.




©joyannjones June 2023

Asylum



In the madhouse
on beds of daggers
we slept like crickets
chirping to ourselves
while they tried their best
to make us cannibals.

The nuns were worse than
lawyers, praying like accordions,
tracking their sins into our soft
wax skulls, wheezing like roosters
when one of us cried, laying the greasy ribs
of Jesus on our plates.

They kept you behind
door number six. I'd go to you
with a stolen key, when the noon
smelled bright as carnations,
when the nights were
more purple than the jacarandas.

You spoke of your father
dead of snakebite,
a clockwork marvel with
his million-dollar suit of skin,
of your mother
with the viper between her lips.

I remember your kiss
astringent with reason
as bitter lemons, and the way
your hair blew back from
your dog-brown eyes like poisonous
smoke from the oleanders.

I thought these things
as beautiful as angels
whispering in the dahlias
when I was lost in the asylum,
when the doctors did all they could
to see that we ate each other
down to the bone.


April 2022

After
the explosion
I found
pieces of you
in all my poems,

embedded shrapnel,
unclean words,
full of fever's fester.

I scrubbed the wounds,
massaged the scars,
repeating,

autumn is a doctor,
winter is a nurse,
night's blue sky body
arches over
the surgery of the gods,

poppy-soft, ocean-deep, capable
of illuminating
even
your lies.




~October 2013,
revised May 2014

Here in the dry constellations,
Orion winters in the blue west, the
Drinking Gourd spills silver on the void, and
the Seven Sisters crowd together,
quilting the covers of night.
I miss the beach.

I miss the salt, I miss the sweet
curled wave that rolled the wind
into a gesturing wand
of air and water,
joining two lurching souls
ungainly in their solitary progress,
into one smooth moving thing
hip to hip, stride for stride
handfast, untarnished

because you chose to throw
your arm around my neck
and let us spin

in the eddy, as the tide
ran out, till we were dizzy

and all the slipping stars
cleared the boards and moved
their heavy banquet
to our eyes.

©joyannjones December 2016

In the Amazon there's a moth
who lives by drinking the night-tears
of sleeping birds.

By day she's folded asleep
deep in green minarets where purple frogs
sweat pearls of poison.

If she dreams, it's only by accident.
At dawn the birds fly up, eyes
opened by song, tears given

without intent or knowledge
as I give mine, silver life
to the mouths of memories.



March, 2024

Today is an old day,
leaking
the passed night's rain,

almost with its dawn already
yesterday,
faded replicant of yet another supplicant.

I'd throw it away, used-up as
a broken comb, a flared match fired once to
light something gone,

except
the birds
greet it with such celebration,

singing their
soft explosions
above the autumn seeds.

September 2025

At night the little scorpions come down
to watch us playing at our poison kisses
to study from the dustbath where we drown

the sting that sinks the deepest when it misses.
I found flowers once where you had touched me;
black poppies sown in moon-distempered hisses.

Now the sun is crawling through the ivy,
its dawn a flickered fire burning wishes.
You're a green ghost spitting from a tree;

promises float away like silver fishes
and Love's a child who suddenly confesses.






  ©joyannjones April 2022

Lonely As A Dream

If
you come through the door
you see at once it's an old woman's house
smelling of apples, eucalyptus
and yellow books rhyming by size.
Nothing is new.

Incense
burns in the bedroom
for the sake of a man's memory
smoking and braiding in soft light
that slips through heavy drapes
like a child's song, clear in the silence.

Peace
is there, and emptiness.
The ghost has learned to
keep to its corner, and seldom speaks to
the woman who gambles with words
in the hunger before dawn.

She's
the laugh no one hears
at  the midnight carnival,
the road no one takes
winding back on itself, the sprout
light's pulled too thin, too tall
in its mirror, shadow.

Besides
the dream, she knows only
a sky flat with heat
that eats birds and rain,
a plague without cure
that stretches its dead skin
to infinity.

But
everything passes. To all things come
this tension of maximums
just before the breaking
and the letting go.


©joyannjones  September 2022

I've unpacked the moon
from her nightboard box
so many times
I've worn out the ribbons.
I've hung her up
where she couldn't be missed
unless you were
watching
TV.

After a time, however
things loosen. The moon falls.
That paper crackle under the boot
is the crumpled bonesnap of
last night's hopeful crescent,
broken like a shotgun
that has two black eyes for
what it scars
and always fires blind.

So I gave up being
a moon-hanger years ago.
Now I'm retired--fallen
by the way
some say-- too tired
to lift that heavy glow
or to reach a sky that high,
but I have gotten by
by being very good at
dodging bullets.




©joyannjones~October 2015

You said you'd give me the moon
on a piece of toast
or at least the sweet-hot peel
of her cinnamon skin.

You said you'd raise from the grave
my heart, the ghost
to fill with black-burnt warmth
that could begin

a beat to bring horned dancers from the trees,
life to lift me lurching from my knees;
a revenant in red
that's what you said

that night in the glimmering swell
before the Fall
but it was Carnivale.



~September 2014

Time came unbound
like your feather wild hair,
the feeling shadows of thorn,
endtimes laid on the plate
of a destitute breast.

It was hell dark
in the filthy theatre.
The old ticket-girl sat ****
and tattoed, like Madame Defarge
knitting the playlist for the guillotine ball.

And so clicked the tale
from her needles to mine;
how He spoke to the girl
in the bathtub forsaken,
razor-naked and numb:

'You die before living--' said
the Dark Prince, 'a sad backwards thing;
spread for me--learn.'

He brought her on velvet
the delight-box of tortures,
the ambrosia of Tantalus
to put between her legs.
He artfully taught her

to rub out the human
for the animal clench,
to **** all the sweetness,
climb hard for the falling,
then took it away

from the mad thing a-mumble
in her wilderness skull,
wearing the blind face
of an ancient race
we can no longer know.

He left laughing
laughing
on His way through the endtimes,
for the Fall was forgotten
and Death held no ease.



©joyannjones February 2013

Lady Of Dead Leaves



Beneath a dead leaf my love lies hidden
with a rose pearl and a starling's feather
where the dark forest unties Her ribbons

where night rides as black as robber's leather
with a bagful of moon's most starving hours
in a forest where leaves are falling forever,

where balefires blaze meteoric showers,
where pale sprites teach old lovers to dance
and sew up their wounds with threads of flowers.

For grape never saw the wine She decants,
a vintage that ripens with dissolution
aged in a song, sealed with ash and chance.

Under the starlight's silver infusion
asleep as a bee in the fading thunder,
which is volition and which illusion

when all that's left of life is to wonder
or lift the leaf that love lies under.




October 2022