better than sliced bread!!!!!

Emma Jones' poems exercise the imagination. By the end of a page or two, your imagination has woken up, brushed it's teeth and is half way around the world in time for tea. I have no doubt a lot of the poems in 'The Striped World' (her only book so far) examine her own life situations or feelings, but Jones relishes a storyteller role, picking at her life through original and vivid scenes. They fluctuate between their often everyday roots and oneiric qualities. A great writer rebuilds situations in a way to eliminate the need for distinguishing between page and 'facts'.  In a way this is far more timeless then poets who constantly update their poems with the language 'of the minute'; it is inescapable that in the end we are all just characters and life is just one big fat "Once Upon A Time".

Sentimental Public Man

I was a penitentiary.

A self-held 

man, and bounded.

But when I stood up,

the world was righted,

and I saw the horizon just fine.

The sun rose there and bled.

It's got a rhythm.

I felt a dull commensurate beat in me,

and I said, what's that bird in a cage?

Who's that man?

My barred heart

saw the striped world turn like a beast

and said 'open yourself up,

son, and spread out for loving.'

So I wore my heart on my chest,

all decorative.

And it flared like the hair of a parrot.

That was my trademark.

They kissed it, the girls.

They died, and subsided.

Just a little bit, mind.

A pill in water 

foams and subsides like the sun in water,

it spreads, and is rested.

Two in one,

a new thing.

What a blue union there is

between this wall and it's shadow,

this open door and it's held world.

Scenery's its thought

It veers and is tilted; it swings from its roots.

My keeper unlocked it, a grave man.

I want to walk alone 

on the city streets.

But is this permissible?

Someone walks with me for my protection.

And if I say 'things happen, and an average man

is made a brilliant thing

by solitary acts

and the gaze of his countrymen'

he says nothing;

it's as if his pocket mirror had spoken;

it's as if we must 

as he says, go out, bright and blank,

and draw the world in,

and make it in our image.

Man, it was hard to turn thirty,

to feel my youth

thin to an alley, a kind

of pale propped girl on a garbage bin.

Such hunger, apprehension.

Such a handled thing.

But the buildings listened.

When they leaned in, it was like the day

leaned in with it's lights on,

every window a wide eye.

The streetlamps listened,

and the businessmen, and the office workers.

I was a piece of work, ticking.

And my songs

were their measure of longing.

I said, well, take it.

Please take it away!

How good it would be, I thought, to be empty.

So I wiped myself out.

For days I lay, a gin-clear man,

a beaten man, of beaten glass.

A trammelled man.

And as though I were a path

lit for their use

the stars dwindled, losing sight,

the brain dwindled, 

that cracked house

and the overhead light

flared backward like a rearing girl,

and passed away.

Their love dismembered me.

As though my head lay 

in the sea, my arms in the desert,

and the cool promontory

of my singing throat in the city streets.

My limbs gathered grass.

When will the end come

and the chorus sing?

Baby, your arms feel sweet.

I remember them,

the subtle wheat of their pastures.

They've rocked me awake.

And I say, if this is life, if death is life,

then let me die

the way I died when I was born,

alone, with you. That straddled light.

And I also say: don't touch me.

....I basically can't be bothered to type any more, but read the book! It's a nice colour too