To the Pain

en faveur de la guerre a l’outrance
Viet Minh in crazy hats, Hanoi is
bombed again, the Empire will
be lost. The giant across the
ocean stirs in Pachydermian slum­ber
and the dol­lars begin to flow like
million-​​dollar drops down a stalactite.

2.
de Tassigny is dead.
Les Parachutistes, ils sont tous morts, lui.
The Viet Minh are still there.
My brother is all gone.

3.
Tobacco stains on trou­bled
fin­gers, rice pad­dies heaped to
king­dom com­ing with the brutes
of dead and the curs of delin­quency,
the urns mobiles and the gun­pow­der
slap of fight­pow­ered Wehrmacht
vet­er­ans who died at Dien Bien Phu
eleven years after sur­viv­ing
Stalingrad. But the Imperial machine
is still not dead.



Infield Aquinas

blend­ing
teas in the
dented ket­tle
read­ing Aquinas
with my blonde
angel
time was
no thing to
you — screen door
pops and cracks
heat light­ning
sum­mer bug
clouds hover over
the pool, eas­ier to
watch from the porch
than try to swim
as the dust swirls slowly
over the soft­ball diamond.



Sea of Mirrored Sorrow

light­ning arc of joys
that bab­ble, become
fluid speech. You taste
the salt, brine crusts your
skin, you start to dry, you
start to heave, lie singing
gen­tle in the shal­low water,
foam-​​memory tugs you,
mir­row of sor­row, angle
of dream;
cry melts to moan,
steam.



–Tony Jones

 

 

Tony Jones is a 36 year old poet who has been writ­ing seri­ously for 21 years, and has been pub­lished in jour­nals like Virginia Writing and Kronos. He lives in the beau­ti­ful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and took a suc­ces­sion of dead-​​end jobs that were nonethe­less very pro­duc­tive of cre­ative inspi­ra­tion, though gen­er­ally in a neg­a­tive way, before decid­ing to fin­ish his Masters in Religion, which occu­pies him presently. He lives with a cat, Sibyl, and far too many books on his­tory, phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­ogy, sci­ence fic­tion and, well, you get the pic­ture…

Copyright © Tony Jones and Spinozablue, 2008. All Rights Reserved.


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