she casts her pencil like a wand as magic soaks into the page her flannel cascades around her work, shielding it from curious eyes she tilts her head to listen to the lecture, but her heart is elsewhere running through castles and stumbling through candle lit streets colors tangle to mirror the expanse of her dreams she shares her soul with every meticulous stroke each face blessed by her style but never the same when she designs she never aims for perfection for she knows perfect is just a fancy way of saying flawed she erases and redraws as if her art could never satisfy her desires it can always be better but it is never good enough if only she knew I meant it when I told her I loved her drawing her art speaks to me like Mona Lisa never could

BLACKBERRIES

When the woods were green
And the air was clear
And the sky was mottled
With fluffy clouds,

When the river was high
And the water was clean
And fish hid in the shadow
Of submerged rocks,

When the cars were small
And the traffic slow
And wild blackberries
Grew by the roadside,

You were my love
And I was yours
And everything
Was shining bright

The scenes have changed
And so have we, but
love has never faltered
And every day still shines as bright
As when we picked blackberries.
         ljm

In the shadows of stone mountains
Down a fragile ancient road,
Past streams and dreams of glory
Lay a leader bathed in gold.
Haunted by the battlefields of his youth
The forgotten weight of halos old.
A poltergeist of progress
Found downed outside the zone.

Cast off by players unknown
Pretenders covet the Apex throne,
Where Aculites fight like demons
Exorcising respawn beacons
Necromancers in the Thunderdome.
While Tom seems indisposed,
Locked up and throwing rocks
Mocked by the gulag and the snow.
Though we really should have known
The esteemed leader was on his own,
His chute just would not open
Slowmotion to the sound of Chopin,
Commander falls just like a Stone.

A world slowly woke from slumber
Stumbled through a sense of Deja Vu.
Free from sheets of sleep and dreams,
Borrowed stitches pay the seams
Of patchwork quilted promises,
Forgotten threads of make believe.

-


i never actually thought i would
live long enough to experience the
surfacing of all my wisdom teeth–

when my fourth one began to throb
and push aside the tooth next to it,
i felt the pain like a spark plug
in my jawbone

but i drank no alcohol
for it that time

i wanted to bath in its presence
as it chewed its way out
because it was my
              very last
                         one–

a knowledge earned from
this Last Rite of Passage

a rebirth of myself through
the gum line of aging tissue—

this crowning new thing you
will never have enough
of anymore...


s jones
2021


.