Featured Poet #6 - Jon Stone

Lara

Lara, it is your deaths that make me marvel.
Not the pistols that stud your chafed-up hips,
alexandrite earrings of your bottom

but the way you swallow-dive, boots locked,
onto a stint of sandstone and crumple and
not your plait’s strop, dosed in jeweller’s rouge

but the boulder massaging your hapless spine
that straightens the metals of my eye and
not the oil slick of you in your wetsuit

but how you buck hard enough to break
as you drown in a deep sea grotto and
not your strut or your small, hard ‘t’s

but how, set alight, you still do ‘demure’,
gasp and expire in a sponge of moss and
not the sheer vastness of your swimming pool

but live wires caressing you in the kitchen
of a slowly capsizing icebreaker and
not the calibre of your voice actresses

but the wolves who worry your jetstream
legs to uneven kebab-shanks and
not to be your butler or obstacle course

but the Arctic waters tenderly biting
through your Parka’s scruff sealmeat and
not be the boat you climb into in Venice

but the spear sprung by a pressure pad that
tastes your knee, that you fall around and
Lara, don’t bend to pull up your sports socks

but fluff the jump again for me, would you.


Near Extremes 4


Where I come from it’s the other way round:
Seroquel’s slipped by the fistful into
ministers’ snifters, curing them (fingers x’d)
of such spells where they intuit war things
are squirreled beneath every unturned stone,

and when shell-shocked or down-on-their-luck
ex-squaddies mistake the knifeplay of light
for a gun barrel’s flinting we all hit the dirt
because after all, the odds are they’re right –
in the streets: hajjis. Hajjis everywhere we look.


Three Celan Poems

I.

THAT ANGER’S BROKEN HER EAR.
Mid-day Monday, undone, counting
foreign brutes.

Drink
out, my almond.


II.

I CURE HER, THE AXE HAS GOT BLUNT.
I cure her, the artists nick timber.

I cure her, desperate that sin and silt
hail down or hang ten.
Desperate assembly throwback.

I cure her, see lemongrass leaping,
the antsy kazoo-flux.


III.

THE GNATS HAVE STOPPERED THE WELL.
Frederick’s aghast
the way sometimes words are alarming.
Hera gets switched on. The mower
and the iron wander, hawk-legged.

--

Jon Stone was born in Derby and currently lives in Whitechapel, where he co-produces both Sidekick Books, a publisher of collaborative poetry books, and arts magazine Fuselit. He was highly commended in the National Poetry Competition 2009 in the same month his debut pamphlet, Scarecrows, was released by Scottish press Happenstance. He has also released a co-authored pamphlet, No, Robot, No!, through Forest Publications with Kirsten Irving and a full collection, School of Forgery, is due from Salt in 2012.


[eds. note: 'Three Celan Poems' look different due to the fact Blogspot wanted to make the capitalised lines way too big, so I had to use my nonexistent HTML skills.]