Need

Need

We need the air to breathe

The air does not make us needy

The deeper breath we take

The stronger we are

Jack 5/12

Spittle and Blather

Spittle and Blather

Have you ever encountered a gaggle

Young mothers pushing their offsprings' 

Strollers postulating the joys babies

Bring lifting them to show 

But seeing just their own 

Baby reaching out its tiny finger

As piercing screech of a blue-throated macaw

Erupts startling need crying out its existence

Upon these crawling creatures 

Young mothers project their fantasies

Hopes dreams imaginations of able men

Women one day making them proud proving

Their pride fulfilling what mothers

Married working walking their progeny

Cannot do for themselves

What do you think or feel

Value as you  watch their excited faces

That this is life the meaning we all

Yearn full of passion to gain

Do you see these happy women 

As beauty as joy as comfort

Is their love for these small beings

Ultimate unconditional unassailable

Am I alone in finding my fulfillment

Otherwise in choosing to abort

As I did

Delighting not in what my semen 

Became but in the seed my mind shares

Yet you will point out sweetly to me

That I like them shall one day be

Blather and spittle

Crying out in pain or wonder 

As what life I have departs

Those gathered around 

Will say how sad he has no children

No sons no daughters to bid farewell

If  a few of those who've loved me all these

Years live still

They will bid my drooling mouth

Good bye

You will witness what flights of meaning

I achieved. 

Jack 5/12

Yeux

Yeux

How do you say eyes in French

How do you say eggs

When first I saw you

Cafe in Paris

My desire  hatched

My desire to hold your hand

My desire to fertilize your eggs

Like a cod

Nager dans la mer

Jack 5/20/12
During the eclipse of the Sun

Lake Country Seed

Lake Country Seed 

When I was yet a student lad
First time visiting the Finger Lakes
I hung upside down
From the cabin's playground monkey bars
Naked
You said to me
"You looked like an animal."
You wouldn't have sex with me
That night our host
Offered me more
We unmade his bed
We fucked like animals



Jack -- Revised, 5/3/12

What

What  (Ironic Self-deprecation to Release Tension)

So what the fuck will you say

Old man with a scrap  goatee

You old goat  let us tell you

Death bed nursing home enema bag

Want something to stick in those varicose veins

Come on say something wise

We dare you dare your impudent impotence

Old fag what would you do if we spread our legs

Were you there when Caesar shot across the Rubicon

When they shot Kennedy and Camelot

Fell to Morgan and Modred and Merlin froze

You sat there  a kid in Latin reciting 

They said on the intercom "The President is dead"

What now dry skin can you get it up knowing

They broke your round table

That all your kings and knights are rot

Make us laugh old man jester

Lear's tragic old fool dance

Sing strum a guitar say something deep

So we can like you and your old bone

Like you and your wit whats left of it

Like you because we feel sorry for your 

Feeble attempt to be cool like we are

Young like we are

Hipsters the way we are (Not!)

You can't be our mirror  man

 We are not your masturbation fantasy

Are we are we

Poerm

Poerm: Po-erm Dfn: A poem-like expression using words to convey what is otherwise ineffable, with always an eye on, or other sensory awareness of, Eros. Thanatos may be substituted or play a part as well.

Jack, May Day '12

 

Rain Haiku

Thunder cracks through rain

Gushing as hail pings thin tin

Sun sparks the raindrops

Jack 4/17/12

 

Meeting by the Gulf (with irony)

It is the eve of another jaunt

Down south to New Orleans

Like we been sayin' we'd do

For years

The eve of days together

My mind and yours

Cafe conversations

Late night music

Sparkling Wine

Letting what happens happen

Right

Your body and mine

Or jus' contemplatin'

What might be or not

As the Easy takes hold
Takes hold

Haiku Doggie Style

Joggers intersect

Pups leashed sniff cavort lick

Joggers balk pull split

Jack 3-23-12

Pink

Pink

The white not quite
Full moon drifted up
Among the cloud puffs
Pink like Mimosa blossoms
As she pulled her car to the curb
Let you out
Leaving her angry and hurt
Like suicide
As the darkness came
And more clouds
Advancing with lightning on two
Horizons West and North
Trite
Like the Union Army
Approaching Atlanta
And we sat on the rocking porch
As you came to like
Being queer

Jack

1-7-12

Give Me Shotgun

Give Me Shotgun

Yes there are numberless couples

Happy as horses in hay

Making it every day

Thrilled with their spills

Ignoring the news taking their pills

Lighting up their charcoal grills

Bodies twined fresh and supple

 Regardless spring buds open

Vegetating sex powders us filling

Our noses choking us like fellatio

With daffodils and goldenrod

The throats of birds slaked with worms

Repeat the chirrup of abundance

Eggs encapsulate their existence

Yes I have had my piece my share

If not my fill

Of horses' play of vegetating sex

Of thrilling spills

Choosing rather than coupling solitude

In a world of sap

Preferring to move

You dare me to ride 

Take off on the open road

Your life my life

Merged for a while like fellatio

Be twined fresh and supple

You'll let me drive you say or

Give me shotgun

Jack, 1st day of spring, 2012

Drunk in the Morning (St. Patrick's Day)

Drunk in the Morning (St. Patrick's Day)

Squares fill with eager faces

Children wearing green their hands

Holding clover

Their parents gather 'round them

Friends all waiting 

For the long long long 

Parade redcoats with piccolos

Masons with rubies stuck to their bellies

Now and then a ramshackle float

But mostly military troops

And tanks and

High school bands with high stepping

Majorettes avoiding the feces

Of green dyed goats

We make our way through

Throngs large red plastic cups of brew

Sloshing as we walk entranced

To the Green River

To where crowds congregate as if

Waiting for the Coming of the Saint

Of Patrick himself green gowned

Shepherd's crook in hand

Come to chase our green snakes 

Away to punish us for letting reptiles

Loose as someone yells

To the girl in green beads and halter top

High on her riverfront balcony

Show us your tits.

Jack

3/17/12

Whitman in Amsterdam

High

In myself delighting

Lights shimmering from Canals
I wander into a small house

A short-bus

Gathered are the Dutch

Locals making music sipping

Watching from the corners

Of their eyes

The man on the bed

Four-poster

The man with the long white beard

Delighting in himself

Masturbating

As sippers sip as

Voyeurs get wet

As I delight in the ambiance

Of Amsterdam

Jack 2/29/12

444

Four hundred forty-four doves

Alight upon my backyard

Pecking the green

Pooping black and white pellets

Fertile on the fallow soil

Who would say it is a sign of

Peace in the world all these

Doves congregated cooing with

Vibrations of love in one place

 Not I for had I but pieces of

Bread I'd toss them from my porch

The doves would turn and peck

Bird flesh fighting for morsels

They should never eat as we

Consume such oddities that make us

Ill 

No matter for the doves panic

As if I had fired a gun or some wild

Dog had charged barking among them

Though there was nothing

And all aflutter flapping and mad

The doves soar away into the white

Cloud shaped like a dragon

Jack 2-23-12

Waxing and Waning

Photo by Dar

Kalani

Waning and Waxing

There is lunacy in love

Like the tide blood

Moves toward and then away

From the blood of each other

You increase in my mind

Like the Crescent Moon

A sliver of my life and then

More as your light fills my vision

As the ever increasing sphere

Of the moon increases filling

The sky blocking out the light

Of all those stars we have adored

Until my life is full of you

And the fullness is the sphere

Of our existence sacred 

Blinding

Then like the moon

Our love recedes back into

The night the unconscious for

We know the moon is no less

However much its light yields back

The stars and wandering planets of our

Lives

The moon recedes until there is

A Crescent in the dawn

Rising over the sea just before the Sun

As the moon vanishes

We are sure the cycle will repeat

That we shall share the fullness

Love gives us

Over and
Over 


Jack 2-22-12

Voice

How she tried to dance

The girl in the magenta blouse

Swinging her arms up and down

Tossing her long blond curls 

Smiling with teeth like pearls

Bumping and thrusting her tall

Girl's body against him

The guy in the olive T-shirt

Black glasses from the Fifties

Not even wanting her maybe

Wishing he did as the singer

Full beard lean body sang

High pitched voice full of pain

His body bent by his youth

And his age stirred with alcohol

Eyes focused on his song

Not the girl flailing as if drowning

In her own pink desperation

Nor the lanky boy aware only

Of his unfulfilled self embarrassed

Just enough to walk away not hearing

The plaint of the singer's voice

More beautiful than anything 

He or she would ever know

Jameson  2/13/12

The Moon and the Wanderers

With wonder I saw tonight the near full moon

Rising in the East and overhead Jupiter Zeus King

Of the gods fallen from grace seldom seen now

And to the West dazzling Venus Aphrodite in the afterglow

Of the Sun fading behind trees bare in the Winter that

Did not come veins reaching to a sky no one looks at here

Gods that I have seen all my life on other continents

In the other hemisphere on islands in the Pacific

Moon planets stars that have been my truest companions

Immortal still unmurdered yet by humans as I

Wonder how a planet molten and burning like Venus

Could be so beautiful across the abyss separating us

Have we all lost perspective gazing rather at the voids

Between us and others the incomprehension of our world

Spinning to no purpose as we pollute the sky

The ocean the landscapes everything we once called sublime

For thousands of years because in our ignorance and our

Selfishness our desire to be gods ourselves

We destroy destroy destroy

Each other and our world 

And still there is this wonder of  two dazzling planets above me

And a moon veiled with a wisp of cloud that give me joy

To know they will be here when I am not.

Jack 2/5/12

Pissarro

Streaming waterfall

Bright Pissarro's beard flows

Down his chest his brown smock

Like cliffs behind the white bristle

His mouth turned down dark red

Suggestion of a hole beneath

Hair that defines existence

In old age eyes circled in a depth

Peering above glasses display

Vulnerability surrender fear

Ravage that deprives the self

Of strength of assurance 

Confidence that canvassed

Grand boulevards of Paris

Haystacks as impressions

Women naked yielding to a

Manhood itself now yielding  

As approaching death stops

Momentarily balked by beauty in

An artist's face

Jack, 1/12

Dying Breath Haiku

Where seaside cliffs plunge

 My last gasp proves erotic

As you caress me

Jack 1/12

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