values of higher
verbiage; printers
lie always like the Cretan standing
on the corner thumb
upturned soul on fire.
2.
She grabs me the way
she breathes and laughs.
The pages burn like the
fingers that turn them.
3.
An airship crashes
into the side of my
reality without bursting
into flames because helium
is not flammable.
Things we don’t want to know
to feel, to understand
the censor, not from some
government agency, but in
our own heads, blocks us
from feeling, from sensing.
The empty spaces moving around us
or sitting still, are they people we are
blocking from notice?
Is there a whole universe all around us
we won’t allow ourselves to see because
it doesn’t fit the paradigm? Doesn’t make it
through the louver of hopes and incantation
that decants the knowable down to a
trickle we can grasp, but steals from us
the cosmos, leaving chaos swirling
in the pits of our stomachs,
our veins?
Copyright 2009 by Tony Jones
I am the one you forgot to write about
between the parched lines, who inspired you
and you went on, and the world kept
turning.
Music since I was born the last new
hierophant mage, fancy pants.
I am on fire, the last burning bush,
yet this: the saints loved me. And we
danced a circlet around a candle.
A napalm charade.