The May Editor's Pick Poet is

Jean Jones

Please feel free to email Jean at:

jjones138@ec.rr.com

CODA

The rest is a sleepwalk, a prelude to the final encounter,
the moment before the car crash,
before the bullet enters the victim’s body,
before the airplane hits ground,
before the bomb ignites at zero,
before that frozen moment in perpetual space,
that last speck in amber,
that moment of total consciousness,
the utter lack of faithlessness. . .
Fight it. Fight this sleep that stops you from taking in everything from living and from remembering.
Fight for every ounce and breath of life, even though most of your life
will be one long struggle to rid yourself of this curse of consciousness,
this consciousness Jean Paul Sartre was
so afraid of,
this life we want so badly to be rid of, and yet this life we’re so
afraid to
leave because it is all we know. Enjoy it, live it, revel in it,
because, my darling,
it has no more meaning than my eyes reflected back in yours, but oh how
we desire it. . .

PRECOGNITION

You tell me that my love for you is like amethyst,
and yet, at the same time, to you, I am transparent.
Well to me, your appearance at this time in my life
was a premonition of what the future already held for me.
Your face was a sailboat, ready to take me out into the deep ocean,
and yet, where we were headed together,
a squall raged, just past the shadows.
I find myself not intoxicated by you,
And I need wind to find myself steered towards you,
yet at the same time, there is foreboding in your lips.
I wish to be as candid as possible, but my senses cannot stop
the storm that rages between us,
and even though I wish to throw my anchor out to stop the boat
that leads me to you,
a veridical confirmation tells me that I may as well throw
myself with that anchor to stop
what is surely coming towards me in you.

HOW THE DEAD LIVE ON

How can one overcome a genetic curse?
How can one forgive one’s own father?

My father was a diabetic. Now I’m one, too.
Is it my father’s fault? No, although I have his genes.
In the end, my diabetes is my fault, even though my father
may have predisposed me to the condition.
We are responsible for ourselves, even though we carry on
our family’s legacy.

I forgive my father for all I hated about him:
His age, his health, his stubbornness on business decisions,
his business sense and his bad decisions regarding money.
My own unwillingness to take risks, and my own stubbornness
on my convictions,
I recognize these traits as reactions to his traits or his own traits in me.
Despite all this, I loved him, for he was both my father and my friend.
No matter how many father substitutes I sought in my life,
College professors, older friends,
I wound up as the keeper of my father’s secrets,
his confessor, his confidant.

Will I end up like him, dying of renal failure,
with everything I owned torn down in the end?
Perhaps. Will my daughter, or my son,
end up at my nursing home bed in tears, like myself?
Perhaps, but my father and I will have to be content with this
for our legacy: someone loved us enough to visit when we were dying.

Jean Arthur Jones is an award-winning American poet and an editor. Jean Jones is co-editor with Bruce Whealton for the online magazine Word Salad Poetry Magazine. Jean lives in the Wilmington, Cape Fear North Carolina area. Jean Jones attended St. Andrews Presbyterian College and received his B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He later went on to receive an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Bowling Green State University. Jean currently teaches Basic Skills at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina. He has had two books of poetry published by St. Andrews Press from St. Andrews College, North Carolina; the most recent, Birds of Djakarta, was released in 2008. He has been published in Ditch, The Poetry That Matters, West End Poets News Letter, and Aphelion among others.

Learn more about Jean HERE