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Jean Jones

The December Selected Poet is Jean Jones

Please feel free to visit Jean at: jean.jones1964@yahoo.com

Jean Jones

THE SEA IS A COLLECTOR

Tell me, Scott, when the woman stopped singing,
and night descended, and you and I walked back to town,
beyond the beach as the sun sunk down toward the distant west,
why, as we stood out waiting for approaching night,
did we not say anything to one another?
You finally asked, “What is the sea?”
and I said, “The sea is a collector,”
and as we stood and watched the shrimping boats, out in the distance,
laying out and pulling in their nets with Venus and the night stars coming out,
one by one, with the roar of the sea constant in our ears,
the tide receding out, the shells by our feet, and the woman,
walking away in the distance, I kept wanting to ask you,
“What is the sea, Scott? Why do you want to know?”
But you said nothing.

ON WHAT KILLED MORK FROM ORK

I grew up on Happy Days and Mork from Ork.
I also know about darkness descending.
Like Frost, I know
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,”

and like Stevens,
listening in the snow, I have beheld the
“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
It is why I write.

I know about intense loneliness, intense darkness,
darkness descending and the only way to endure it
is to want to keep living. I have been there, with the gun nearby,
parked the car in the woods, and walked barefoot and tested the .38 Bird Shot
on a phone book, watching the center blow out in front of my eyes.

It all becomes a choice after that, to put the .38 to your temple
or put the belt around your neck, and one person chose not to do it
and one person did, and it didn't matter if the darkness was frightening,
too frightening to sink into, with nothing at the end, nothing,
for some, the abyss was not something to fear at all.
It was the nothing to return to versus the nothing one entered.

WHAT REAL HORROR IS

I’m always amused at people writing things
trying to scare each other with scenarios
people going through nightmarish things
with horrific things inside their minds
and horrific things inside their hearts

When real horror, true horror is right in front of us.
When one stands while one’s father is dying of renal failure
and who will die during the night,
or when one attends the funeral of a woman who went to the doctor
for back pain and was found to have cancer and who became blind
two months later, and died two more months after that,
why does anyone need to make things up?

Horror is all around us, all the time, every time we go to a funeral,
every time we watch people we love suffer needlessly
and we don’t need to make this up
we just have to observe it up close
and remember
where the real horror
is

Jean Jones has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Poetry from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, and teaches English as a second language in the Basic Skills Department at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina.