JACOB SAYS
Fearing the cobalt, and to stop his wayward roaming,
Magnolia bourbon widow flips a coin in down town Serotonin:
Heads serves the serpent, in her strangled silent scream
Tails is for the final fool whose weapons are all failing.
Lift the lemons off the trees with leaves forever trailing
Cool strips the heads off its betters and its deniers
Night brings forgetting of all the zephyrs and the liars
Pious kills the rain and the remainder search the lobby
Imagine if you can the pain of a tortured baby’s body
Kiss the corpse to sanctify the loss of this old parent
Drones are made of metal, babies made of flesh,
Guess what’s next? Cradle creed is burning in
This valley of the ashes. Everything we love is good
On the train that ol’God smashes:
Love, eggs, sperm, blood.
Everything to do with love.
John Marks
Thu 12th Mar 2020 19:09
In many ways Jacob's poetic style and my poetic style are opposite to each other. That was why I couldn't refuse a Jacob's kind offer to collaborate. Jacob's poems are often a form of rap using holorhyme, half-rhymes, internal rhyme and other forms of phonemic patterning to produce the overall effect on the ear and brain of the listener. They are written, often, to be read aloud, even shouted out, statement by statement, encouraging the listener to engage with the creation of meaning. My style is to appeal more to the inner ear, the inner voice, to get inside the head of the reader. I have learnt a lot from this collaboration, specifically concerning the phonetics of poetry and the necessity not to under-estimate the audience's ability to leap across chasms of meaning. Anyroadup, I'm glad that some of the poets on here liked the resultant poem.