|
The Argotist Online |
|
JON STONE Jon Stone is a graduate of the UEA creative writing course, and a great lover of Marvel comics. He has recently published 'I'll Show You Tyrants', an illustrated collection of poems featuring Caligula, Africa, wind-demons and swifts (and in which he claims to be dead).
GAMBIT Gambit vaults over
towering gates An eye trails ruby
ribbon His coat's a flame
going out in a roar of wind Street to street,
the French quarter is threaded by
him. His hand to your mouth He turns it over: "Is this your
card?" and it is. His lips a stanley-knifed
corner of a painting,
right before it's lifted from the frame in
the night. No alarms and a
swiftness
that demands to be paid not by
the hour but by the count
of pockets picked THE
PATRIARCH I went looking for
the New Orleans thieves guild, mythical and
dangerous as the white
alligator. I didn’t find it
in Rampo or St. Cecelia. I didn’t find it
in the Bubble Tea Café, not with iced
coffee and chocolips, Sound of Silence
playing. I didn’t find it
in the cemetery, or on the Jaguar
Plaza. I didn’t find it
in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not or in the temple
of the voodoo priestess, and I even snuck a
look in the mojobag, lifted up the
trickster mask, and clacked and clacked
through cassette tapes - through Cajun swamp-pop,
the best of Zydeco and The South Rampart
Street Parade featuring the Fabulous Last Straws, but not a lick of
thieves guild. I waited on the
steps that led down to the Mississippi while a trumpet
snaked from a moored riverboat. The roach-coloured
floating rustpans of the Ingram barge company sidled downstream
- five of them, in a
train - but no
representative met me there. No evidence either in the eggs of the
gulf coast ribbon snake. In fact, I
couldn’t find the eggs of
the gulf coast ribbon snake. Nothing in the
belly of the broadhead skink, nothing in the
depths of the Lower Pearl River, nothing in the
bottom of the skiffs or bateaus, among the red ripe
strawberries or orange blossom honey. The red and grey
foxes told me nothing before they slunk
behind the log pile. I ransacked
mattresses, tore out the Spanish moss I spooned to the
bottom of seafood gumbo. I found nothing.
So today I rule my own. There’s you, me,
the ghost of Jean Lafitte, a dozen squirrels
with tails like quill pens, and wild goats
that stiffen when threatened and tumble like
jacks.
HOARDING I predict a
hurricane will undo all of
your hoarding, will give your
larder a flooding, and scatter your
heirlooms, according- ly. Don't know
when but it will. It
will. No matter how high
you heap it, how deep you bury,
sink or sweep it, how well you
encrypt it, or steep it in legislation.
You'll lose everything,
friend. Your wealth that
you raked and squirrelled. Your house,
column, grave, Bible, herald. The family you
fought and quarrelled to win, heel and
rend from your enemies.
Yes. And it'll go to
the heathens and queers. To the devil-boys
you fended off with chairs, and everyone
you've proven wrong. Your fears will calcify. Your
furnace will burn out for
good. And all that you
shovelled into it will be rescued,
untouched, intact, and set alongside your
Louvre, and mine too, I'll bet. As it should. As
it should.
BAKUNETSO Nicotine is free
in the smoking carriage and I I want the fire
balanced - there, on its head, the
brittlestar on top of a
ziggurat on top of a
cigarette Let the fire leap
like dace to catch
figure-of-eighting scratches of memory. Let it
fan, rake clean the
scars of battle-lines, a mercenary,
incendiary wind levelling wake Yes, from this
thin white angel, from this roach, let rise
vampyroteuthis infernalis to wash from my
eyes stains of my many deaths, to unbrand all, to
flood shadowplains Were it to follow
the arc of my hand Ah, were it to To play with no
cochonnet, my smokey love, no grave end To not be reduced
to crumbs on someone else's
war map Think of it! To have it do more
than burn gradually down, and chew at us, to shake off
ghosts To walk from the
station with you, untold of, through rain like
ephyrae in the afternoon
flare
copyright © Jon Stone |