he said that

you do have me he said that
to me and those others for awhile
he said that his redbeard
the external wiring of the dynamo
concealing the workings of the cosmos
he told us a few stories
he tried to avoid patriarch
he couldn't teach he said that
if you don't already know this
you cannot be my friend
but I will try he said and married
and he saw that now maybe
I didn't know he didn't marry me

out of tulsa and its money and its dust
a dumpy kid when he was young
his mother told me one year he didn't talk
the next he did I see it hasn't changed he said
to me when I told him this story

this to his father:
ray jones you fascist freethinker oklahoman
like the rest of my relatives you raise
your own dust alongside of these days
where is your boy Jackie now? somewhere out there
still tethered to Nora still dreaming
of Emil the end now in sight those equations
nothing more than smoke rising from the prairie
theory not a poem memory not a solution

in the distance the boy is running through the dunes
I am what I am that's all that I am
that's all that I need that's all that I remember
red dust crusts on these pages

To Jack Raymond Jones, wherever you are these days. My friend at Saint Louis University1968-70. Husband to Nora, father to Emil, freethinker, partisan.

trying to break free

So, Nora, holding out in Chicago
your eyes burning segments in the concrete
holding onto the necessary frames like
explanation in your surrender
this time there are arrows
& mercury on your surfaces
& this that turns up, me in this envelope
never quite allowing myself out (I am)
listening to the Doors; funny I should
think of you instead of Jackie
but there is is this image of you
seeking ways outside a skull
designed too small to cope with your
mind and and
and in some sense you are a mirror
to these hours


There is no doubt that Nora Metzger Jones had a profound effect on my early life. I met her at St. Louis University in the Honors Program. Ultimately she became the great love of my friend Jack Jones. Jack was the driving force and organizing principal of the first group of friends I had outside of Wichita. We lived together in an apartment near Forest Park in St. Louis. But Nora could not stand sharing Jack with, particularly, Chris Beckman. And so she forced Jack to destroy his little group. I'll never forget that night in early December, 1969. Yet, we remained friends for many years. And ultimately Nora and I had a brief and stupid affair in 1975. The Year we both turned 25. Yes, Nora and I shared a birthday, June 29th and we shared a lot of other odd things and people. She was a beautiful woman, but she was also hyper and nuts. She had way too many ideas and I am not really sure why she didn't change the world completely. If she could've been really dishonest she might've ended up Hillary. But she could barely suppress herself telling people her true opinion of them, often very dark and negative. For this reason there were many people who just didn't like her. But I know she was just born a hundred or two hundred years too damn soon. And I have always loved the girl and feared the woman. I wonder what she'll be like at seventy?

stealing a march

her mother calls me
into question; suzi gets married
there are many pieces of my anger
all part of this cloth
and Kathleen's pure passion
laid on an oriental carpet
her nipples stiff in a philosophic heat
o baby I am watching your hands fly
in patterns white & pure
as if you had sparklers to write it
out so we could finally see
I think I believe you anyway
it makes you holy Lane
your hands your words woven
in a cloak of many colours
none of it making sense
except that if it's you wearing it
whirling your changing features in
an amorous explanation it is all
true

and these vestiges of perception:
they've changed
you took me in a dark night
at 4 a.m. with the remains
of a bond burned by our ambition
I left you and on the way home
wrote this piece
you could say, I stole a march

This poem is one of those from the notebooks. I never showed it to Kathy Lane, the girl in Davenport I had a distinct yen for. She was friends with Suzi Olds, who was Pat's major friend and who dated Michael Zoeller, my Louisville friend, for awhile. Michael somehow irritated Suzi and she ended up marrying this guy named Robert, who was a handsome Omar Sharif looking kind of guy but who wasn't too bright, but very macho. Suzi was a take no prisoners type. Lane was a small intense girl, one of the few non-blondes in my romantic history. Suzi did get married and I went to Davenport for the wedding. I got drunk with Kathy Hogan, who I had known at St. Louis U. Hogan was buds with Nora Jones and at Suzi's wedding party we got drunk together and she strongly advised me to have sex with Nora and "get it over with." Because she felt it was something we both needed to do. Well, it was the seventies and I did a lot of weird things for dumb reasons. I slept with Nora, though I was afrad to because she was an ace feminist and frankly I am not the submissive type in the bedroom. Of course it turned out poorly.

This poem is about Lane and myself both talking about changing the world in some intrinsic fashion and being, of course, known for that. She was a beautiful crazy girl. I always did like that.