Friday, December 2, 2011

Preludes-- By James Land Jones

Preludes for a Prodigal Son

James Land Jones

To Jake on his coming of age 3 September 1976

For Jack, Christmas, 1976 (My hand written copy)

Song, as you explain it, is not passion, not striving for some end at last attained; Song is Being.   --Rilke


I) For a long time we think we are in love with them, the Others.
Then comes that one who is so much beyond
That everything in us gathers to a word.
The dictionary of our being furthers
That one name, cognate of a fond
Tone that henceforth in our speech is always heard.

II) How does it come, this love, this being
In us that is other? By what unraveling
Do we lay before us threads that catch the heart?
How does it come, this sudden freeing
Of the possible, the traveling
over dangerous arcs, the daring starts?

III) It had to do with laughter and your hands.
They reach in wonder, play in space, astonished
When they find. Their touch so reprimands
All bluntness that things are thus admonished
To be kind. Before you came, my room was bare.
Then all that space was filled: your hands were there.

IV) Your image is everywhere. That body lies
As forest to all else; things move but
As you move, breathe as you breathe, over the field
Of all you are. The vision shifts. I
Find you everywhere foregrounded, cut
With such radiance that reason, blinded, yields.

V) That delicate green, so pale, electric, nude,
The summer trees diaphanous with light,
Cool water in a fountain splashed with wet:
These images are the world your body proves.
Naked, so fully there, you overwhelm like night.
My hands would praise that miracle of sight.

VI) You move with bright articulation down
The sandstone terraces of my heart, each shelf
Descending with such grace I know the gods themselves
Thus petrified my heart that it might ground
Your going. Go quickly now. These shelves are
Mined by love; soon they will give, will fail you.

VII) Oh yes, your body's tight articulations
Catch my breath; they quicken it, such levity
Has any body's beauty. There is no gravity
In this. Like sudden comets these attractions
Dazzle and expire. To deeper motions I am borne,
That well of you, for which your body's rhythms are mere form.

VIII) Your motions image that in which I'm grounded,
That other into which I long to go.
Before you were, things seemed but masks, unfounded.
Through you these things grow lucid and they flow.
Your beauty proves. Through it all orbits run.
I start my slow descent into the sun.

IX) Your body is a distant shore I yearn to reach,
An island plenitude, uncharted, free.
I'm carried toward you, ever out of touch,
A swimmer baffled, wearied by the sea.
I would surrender to that horizontal stair
Were you, too, not a swimmer lunging hungrily for air.

X) So much astonished by that first flooding vision
Of the meadowed sea, you feel your being's amplitude,
Henceforth your only home. You seek precision,
Mastered words, a chart to plenitude.
Take mine that move harmonious with that which you would be.
Together we will pasture the horses of the sea.

XI) Suddenly now the unnameable moves through you,
Confusing with its strangeness, magnitude.
You grasp at nouns to place it, give it due,
Caught between act and actor in a feud.
Water will take all shapes and yet still flow.
Names are a net through which becoming goes.

XII) I lie exhausted from this all night vigil in the sea.
I hear you clearly in the dark, but when I row
In that direction, your voice is only back of me,
Confused. Your words displace you, everywhere, I dive
And dive. You move toward me and we touch, I strive
To hold. Then some dark sea force takes you and will not let go.

XIII) Take from the trees of summer all their leaves
And wed them to you, those leaves that rise
Unbidden, full, and giving. Fear not some grief
From being too much you. Be wholly wise.
Give up your fear of dark, of the unknown.
The summer birds find greatest joy just before the dawn.

XIV) Why all this prodigality of bloom,
This splendid, multicolored, dazzling spume?
Eros arrives and drives all to this giving,
Granting each thing a superfluity of being.
Eros is profligate not merely for new seed:
All that we are is grounded in that need.

XV) Think of the gods. Their gaudy, vagrant passions,
So monumental, slow, live on approved
In legend insofar as we can fashion
Claims that they are distant, too removed
From what we are. All tragedy denies. We are the driven,
Beaten down dark stairs before the body's simple given.

XVI) She he pursued so ardently had already
Turned to laurel when that new different being
Of the boy took all his heart's breath, fired
His mind like Troy. Their touch was love, heady
With spring, with wild surrender, distant seeing,
Out, the Other, astonished music sired.

XVII) Each was the prism through which the other flowed.
That brilliant, empty, tedious light of godhead
Fanned to color: abiding green, the red
Of a peremptory rose. And his white light showed
To the boy that unity to which all colors run.
Like stones that turn to stars, each was the earth, the sun.

XVIII) Naked and self-delighting, your body nearly reaches
Being as your thighs surrender, spend and fount
Before a mirror. Narcissus at the pool. To mount
Into the Other, though, we first must breach
A union. Mirror into mirror must be flung.
Let me become the pool through which you plunge.

XIX) My dreaming fingers, gentle runners, drift
To dark earth, a trunk to climb. The plain that they
Descend is damp and rigid, waiting. They find and sift
Through sphagnum, intertwine. They take the trunk in play.
Your body tenses, shudders, falls asunder, smothered cries.
My thirsty hand is quenched within your spindrift thighs.

XX) I would taste all of you, not merely your
Shy tongue. With all my breath I would caress
The tree now flowering in your thighs. Oh let
It go to seed. That shaft, that axis on whose power
Becoming spins, I would take to my mouth and press
Until my timbers sunder, tunnels flooded by that jet.

XXI) Weigh heavily on me like mortality.
Be in me like my death. Come into me
And seed. So by this act we come to be
Becoming clarified: not merely one, but Other, free
Of the finite numberings in the salty blood.
I am now earth, beneath the Nile in flood.

XXII) In dreams I take you to me. I know the gaudy
Passions of the gods. Then I awake,
My body spent, and all the dark surrounding
Me is ever, always, you. No study
Can explain this residue: a lake
Of heart that will not empty and this dark, abounding.

XXIII) Thus carried by the dark I sail to dawn.
Daylight begins to turn you into shadows,
Grounding things. You're multiplied upon the lawn.
So much astonished, I breathe as if on ladders
Descending and ascending the miracle of days.
Love reaches to its deepest purpose: praise.

XXIV) Soon now the evening tide will quicken.
One final wave of dark will carry everything
Away. All I shall have is given. I thicken
And will die. But this so nearly being
It becomes it. What's left is praise. Shored
By your love, I'm beached upon this edge of always more.

James land Jones. 7 August 1976.


Dr. James Land Jones, At home, Moon River, Savannah


Monday, November 28, 2011

No Zen



No Zen

There is a madness in me
That will not be content
Though I know the depth of
Feeling others have for me
Giving their love to me
Body and soul
Holding me with fingers of compassion 

Landscapes give me peace
Ocean waves breaking or mountains in mist
Autumn trees rising above a waterfall
There I am momentarily at peace
Yet with those I love
I am restless all night
Beating nightmare fists into pillows

 My yearning is my wisdom though it annihilate me
The smile of the Zen master my distant landscape

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116


Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

    William Shakespeare 
 
 
 

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Stars of the Firmament



As if from heaven come
The compassionate ones
Buddha Jesus Gandhi King
Spreading wisdom like so much
Seed flowing out upon us
No solipsists they
Pure selfless love of humanity
Dying from food from the beggar bowl
Or from torture or from gun shot
Did they die for us
Washing with their blood
Our singular selfish souls

Whatever their vision their wisdom
They too had individual passion
Buddha was Siddhartha husband and father
It is what he gave up that holds him
In our imagination
So too Jesus whose private loves 
We can only surmise
John Mary Lazarus
Gandhi with his nieces
King with his lovers
What compassion was not
Begot by love in the flesh 

Jack 11/11/11

Friday, October 28, 2011

Naked

 Naked

My first act of graduate education
Was getting naked with Allen Ginsberg
In a bathhouse on Toulouse Street
Deep in the French Quarter jazz
Down in New Orleans

There was no end to the skin I shed
After the clothes after the masks
Down with the wine high with the herb
Altered states  one sure way to deconstruct
Nixon's Dixie damnation

We sat centered on a circular waterbed
All around us whirling like an ascension
William Blake inspired copulating bodies
Naked like us red lit and happy
Maybe mindless but fucking bliss

How many dark empty predawn streets
Did I amble intoxicated with Zen
Nothingness when Allen left when
The poets departed and I slept again
With Aristotle faithful and rational

Allen's rhythm enlightened me
Chanted me through Lisa Jan Roger Al
Who loved my showered hands
Past Humpty Dumpty's fatal fall
Until a sublime finger reached up into my hip
Heart

Jack 10/28/11




Saturday, October 22, 2011

October

October

This month is gold and black
Houses porches lawns revel
In death's ghouls and broken skeletons
A joke for most just as death is
Witches on broomsticks
For me it is genuine
October's death is mine
With those who made it
What it is
A Leonard Cohen plaint of
surrender

October murdered one love gave another
To another on the Day of the Dead
Halloween expired with
A funeral dirge and a wedding march
Followed by a solitude that is
My dogged companion
How can I look love
In the eye and not see death
How not think of the erotic joy of
Bodies embracing without a skeleton
Bone

Yet neither grave nor vow has taken
My naivete my song my romance
This ever chilling October
So I commit to love again
Bury myself deep yield
To intimacy to touch
Accepting the gold of leaves
Falling with the autumn
October is my tomb my dark
Look back though grounded well in
You 


Thursday, September 22, 2011

September 22



The rain is a caress
Its cool air comes like breath
Keeping me alive
Like your caress your breath
With a rhythm as sure
As your heart
Calming beneath me
My head resting there
As we fade to sleep
It is a rhythm quiet
Despite the hurry around us
As subatomic particles spin today
Quicker than light
As a busload of debris falls
Burning from our sky

Jack 9/22/11

Friday, August 26, 2011

In Sex

 In Sex

such passion fireflies display
as summer ends and storm clouds blow
above shadow upon shadow darkening
they flash the night beckoning for sex
knowing that from the trees may fly
at any second birds to eat them up
glowing insects on which to sup
for such reward of minuscule sex
fireflies light up to  fly- by- nights
defying  death
for a fuck


Jack 8-26-'11









Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Peyote






Peyote

Terror comes 
As illusions disappear
The familiar comforting world
Dissolves
At first we think distortion
This is not real
Enjoy the hallucination

Hallucination is a portal
An opening into mindfulness
Letting go 
The cloud becomes a face
Nothing becomes a place
My hand extends as far
As my eye

The round red face of my
Watch on which hands spin
Laughter erupts at the absurdity
Of time 
Who are the beings in this circle
In a tribe stranger has 
No meaning

My head is in the sky
There is no head no body
Consciousness floats along
Molecules of me collide
With those of a rose
Is a rose is a rose
Even the words dissolve

Bright hot sun rises ascends sets
The day is over and my ego
Returns in the form of a pulse
Cricket reality
Were you here beside me
All along
Two mouths one kiss

The revelation of the sacred
recedes into dull
Ordinariness the separation
The terror of solitude
The cloud bursts into rain
Yet for an instant a flash
Godhead


Jack, August 2011




Saturday, August 13, 2011

Ars Poetica

For a philosopher 
It hurts to define poetry
Prescribing metaphor
Simile rhyme sharp archetypes of song
To define poetry is to step on a caterpillar
Pluck away wings
As a torturer will destroy 
Better to remain silent or to utter
A poem is a ploy
A poem is a toy
A poem is
Alive

A philosopher finds no joy
Qualifying a poem good or bad
Better to praise
To say "Wow those are
The exact perfect words"
Does a poem have meaning
Should a poem just be
LOL
A poem transcends should
A poem knocks on wood
A poem is sweet as devil's food

The philosopher who writes of poetry
Ends with a couplet  knowingly
Or a menage a trois in the Bo Tree

Jack 8-13-11
(For Alf Corn who will Gag)




Monday, August 8, 2011

This Time



This time the storm gave all the wetness
It promised 
Soaking the parched earth
Flashing and blasting away as it did
Leaving behind the damp fragrance of
Satisfaction
Tonight exactly ten orchid blossoms open
Purple upon the branch snaking from an old china bowl
As Beethoven's sublime piano melody
Melts what dry soul I have left
Away





Monday, August 1, 2011

Haiku Talapia


(old version)

Demented father
Nibbles crisp Tilapia
In the Pancake House

Jack
8/1/11

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Heart Attack


This morning loading the laundry
Filling the machine
My back a pull a cramp a stab
Near the shoulder blade
Pain that lingers as I type
And goes right round to my chest
It will come to my heart

My heart which has been under
Attack most of my life
Pulled out of me as by a Mayan
Priest given up to the Chac Mool
So many times the knife of love
Not quite unrequited
Has cut right into you my heart

It will come finally the so called real heart
Attack the kindest of all freeing me of pain

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

High

High

High on the joys of life

Appreciating the mountain hike

No less the gushing waterfall

Delighting in the wetness of the sea

Jumping over the cool waves of sunrise

Over the Earth up to the stars

Beneath you the whole gorgeous world


Jack, 7/19/11


Monday, July 18, 2011

Eventide



Even in memory they are the same
Sunrise sunset
Hues of promise hues of completion
Life's brilliance opening up
Rising like an erection
Life's brilliance receding
Like the face of someone loved
Gone

My summer draws to a close
Already
I am not ready
Fall offers a season of color and repose
Yet its beauty is in decay
Let me go on with our summer play
Let me dance in your spring
Your abundance yet

Let us dance warm nights to our song
We lovers where nothing's either right or wrong

Jack
 July 2011

Monday, June 27, 2011

Libation




Σπονδή * 


Naked rubbing away hunger
I Sit back
Let the sun caress my face
Perhaps today I'll die
Death is nothing and nothing is more
Than need

Upon your steed you come
 Alexander
King of Macedonia
Facing  seas of false smiles
You ask all Athens where is Diogenes
The man who speaks truth

Your shadow caresses my face
Your words
I am Alexander
What may I give to you
Give me what I had
The warm sunlight you took away

You move aside ask me to share
Your wine
You command all Athens go
You bring your goatskin flask 
You disarm your shield golden in the sand
You sit here within my earthen tub

Though the sun sets your wine
Warms my belly warms your heart
We light my torch fire in our faces
Eye to eye
Against your eminence I rise up
You bow you give me head 

With morning we must part
I shall conquer Persia
All Asia all the world you say
What then I ask
Enjoy myself sit back make music
Then my friend  you will be Diogenes


 * (Libation)
Jack Miller 1/27/11

Copyright Jack Miller 




Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Monosexual

The Monosexual


It is a state of distress
The failure to caress
The whole of a gender 
To open up flushed flesh
To just one sex
To kiss only woman or man
Alone

We lucky few who've known
Plenitude in the embraces of all
Tasting at the banquet we call
Life the oyster and the clam
Imbibing the green fairy
Absinthe on our tongue having it
Both ways

Pity the monosexual missing the rich reward adorned
Abundance and nourishment from our Plenty of Horn


Jack
Druid Hills
6/19/11

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Death of a Peacock



Flipping slick pages of a news magazine
Full page photo Duchess Kate future queen
Long white veil over her white smile
White bouquet in hand lacy sheen
Next page over the eyes of Arabia
Staring from behind a black veil
A woman with black flowers
In her other hand  a photo from jail
Her bearded husband

Of all the news glossy or not
The story that frightens me  most
From Wuhan China a Panda
Chases and kills a peacock

Jack  5/6/'11


Saturday, April 9, 2011

Musician, Age 25

Musician, Age 25

"He's lonely and you're a whore."
A witch in New Orleans told me.
We both laughed, 'cause we knew
It was true.
Not that we weren't friends; good friends,
Traveling to the city that care forgot
On my 21st birthday, staying in a red
Brick room with a French Quarter balcony,
Where I played guitar.
I got sick on oysters, but that didn't stop
My old man friend, 65,  from hitting
On me every fucking day...

It's been four years now, as I let him put his
Moist hands all over me; and I give his everlasting
Hard-on a hand job 'cause he loves it when
I hold his dick. Loves it more holding mine,
In so many showers we've taken together
I feel wet just remembering.

Thought I'd have to live with him when
My Parents threw me out at 24.
Let me keep my studio, but threw me out.
Out, now there's irony. I'm no gay-boy.
Then came a miracle. I met a girl.
I met two girls- her and her best friend.
They invited me in and I went in again and
Again. They bought me meals; gave me gas;
Bedded me in their dorm. Gave me whatever.
Damn, if I didn't go from whore to gigolo.
And there I play my guitar, and sing every fucking
Day. 'Cause, you know? I'm living the wet-dream.


Jameson 10-5-'15

jolt



Life dumbs down to dark
Gray Southern winter skies
Colorless crumbs for food
Bloodless afternoon belies
Energy half asleep
Like a mammal in hibernation
Until you come 
Offering me compassion
Gentle and caring from your
Embrace letting rise in me
Passion like a blazing transformer
Burning in the night 


Jack
1/10/12


Send Off


Your old guitar with its broken string
sits still in my living room
two weeks after Nashville
two weeks after we were high 
on Starr's porch and you hugged me
saying how freaked out you were
frightened like a child shaking
as I calmed you told you normal
would return as I knew it would
the day we had our send off 
the day pre-cum glistened on you
a pearl on the family jewel
offered erection for me to grasp
that pearl a slippery symbol 
of our sexuality fluid but never
getting there five years after
we first shared that pink source
of your pleasure your compass

Broken string on your old guitar
broken words that failed us
our love recedes into those 
memories of walks and food shared 
warm showers in a host of states
where we slept together naked
forgotten now as you answer my
question which of our travels did
you like best "they all had good 
and bad moments" no recollection
of standing on an overlook above
Asheville in a moment of pure 
camaraderie
discerning the waxing Moon

As you continue to gaze into the
Looking Glass be careful as you fall
deep within your mirror lie strange
experiences to shatter complacency
shatter your fragile self-esteem bending
the straight road you imagine lies
before you because your path of life
is like the road to Starr's filled 
with curves and twists that will
discomfort you ransack you just as 
we probed ourselves for seven years
from excitement to disappointment
no point in my being on your mind
swallow now that the song is over
it was a fine affair an enterprise 
of great pith and moment
of great pitch and foment
or whatever it is you recall or pluck
on the old guitar strings of your ego








Jack Jameson
 The End of 2015








song


Now there is no longer choice
No longer free will no turning back
No longer can I not be
Your lover because
More precious to me than your
Semen your sperm ejaculated hot
On my flesh still warm to my taste
Wet from your orgasm of surrender 
To me
More precious than that nectar
Are your tears
Spilled down your face from
Eyes open to me 
Naked and hurt
Pleading
For a love we already have
And that neither of us can deny
Any more than we can deny
That we breathe 

Jack 1/12

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Bent (The Curvature of Space and Time)


Bent (the curvature of space and time)

Ninety-five years ago young Albert
Proved  straight lines do not exist
Space is curved as celestial bodies
Fall into one another

Since I was eighteen nine bodies
In my orbit  prove the nonexistence of
Straight men celestial or otherwise
Young Alfred's scale appeared when I was one

Of my nine men seven wed women
With seven I had sex for years
Six are fathers three I fucked
A fourth asked for it but I had no condom


Jack 4/6/'11

note: Albert= Einstein
Alfred= Kinsey

djccwbjjs

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Language


Language

Humans created words and language
To extend the joy and wonder of life
Just as the denizens of caves
Painted images of aurochs bison deer
And the hands of shamans

Jack 4/5/'11

----

Monday, April 4, 2011

My Type (a work in progress)


My Type    (A Work in Progress)


Where shall I begin

Flamenco dancer
Wet dream at  thirteen
Dancing up against me
Under the live oak tree
Shaking her red ruffled dress
Stomping her feet in the grass
Until I ejaculate

The boy at  Episcopal camp
Bedding me a night of mutual
Masturbation
Pretty pearls of metaphor
And discarded innocence
Hairless chest abs of 15
Eyes of wonder skin with sheen

Scarlet blond hair delicate neck
Presenting herself to me on our bus
Across the hills of Virginia
Lucious lips invent a story of her life
A month later sweet as honey
She finishes  her virginity and mine
Melting like ice cream on the cone

Playing Chopin all passion Botticelli's
Pianist with El Greco's  fingers
Hard as his keys and as white in the moonlight
Grace as he emerges from the salt sea
As we open up ourselves on the beach
Jacksonville
Six hot weeks of nocturnes

And so they go the images of my
Memory my dreams my existential
Embodiments Afro-American to Zapotec
Not the ontology of desire
Not want not need
Now my type dives  in over our heads
Flowing with  music  penetrating with words

Jack 4/5/'11

------