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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