Paco Jones is a poet, musician, photographer and filmmaker living with his wife
and son in Seattle. He has been previously published by Alpha Beat
Press, Coke Fish, and Currant St. Press.
Write Like Me
sometimes i wonder (i’m in my
white t-shirt phase)
why i can’t write like i did
before
it’s because i wanted to
kill him and i was
successful
it’s the pharmaceuticals, baby!
the first dose
changes yr brain
and i took so many doses
the words stopped altogether
& when slowly they came back
they were wrong
& slow & broken
and entirely in the wrong order
i left the Russian Poems
- thick wondrous slabs of words -
behind, Celan made
perfect sense - i wrote Polemic
Slide (tight knots of bits broken glass) (“i can’t publish this because i can’t understand
this”)
and then nothing
nothing at all
floating in the darkness
of silence
i could only pretend
and now eons
decades years hence
i still am
not
put together again
all the king’s men
all the king’s men
cannot bring
the man
to the boy again
we built a wall in there
you can look over
but you can never touch, never
cross
and never quite remember
who was you
when you lived
there
hope in yr hand like
flowers for a girl named
Heather
holding hands
through a wall
married to another
a woman
on a mountain
behind the wall
& that’s why
you can never
write like
me again
you wanted this
you asked for - built - brick by pill by pill
between you and you
and you would do it again
to stop the pain
i would yes
i would
that’s why people leap off
bridges with rocks in their
pockets - speaking of Celan &
perhaps Virginia Woolf
the mad ones
all the mad ones
all the good ones are mad
the mad and the intolerable
the broken - wait till
they’re dead
then their genius is
tolerable
until then
kill it, kill them
kill the pain, the wrong
the unfitting, the
broken
in me in them
they kill us
we kill us
i killed me
and that’s why
all the mad ones
all the mad ones
and that’s why -
i killed me
like i was
all the mad
ones
supposed to
~Paco Jones
Write Like Me
sometimes i wonder (i’m in my
white t-shirt phase)
why i can’t write like i did
before
it’s because i wanted to
kill him and i was
successful
it’s the pharmaceuticals, baby!
the first dose
changes yr brain
and i took so many doses
the words stopped altogether
& when slowly they came back
they were wrong
& slow & broken
and entirely in the wrong order
i left the Russian Poems
- thick wondrous slabs of words -
behind, Celan made
perfect sense - i wrote Polemic
Slide (tight knots of bits broken glass) (“i can’t publish this because i can’t understand
this”)
and then nothing
nothing at all
floating in the darkness
of silence
i could only pretend
and now eons
decades years hence
i still am
not
put together again
all the king’s men
all the king’s men
cannot bring
the man
to the boy again
we built a wall in there
you can look over
but you can never touch, never
cross
and never quite remember
who was you
when you lived
there
hope in yr hand like
flowers for a girl named
Heather
holding hands
through a wall
married to another
a woman
on a mountain
behind the wall
& that’s why
you can never
write like
me again
you wanted this
you asked for - built - brick by pill by pill
between you and you
and you would do it again
to stop the pain
i would yes
i would
that’s why people leap off
bridges with rocks in their
pockets - speaking of Celan &
perhaps Virginia Woolf
the mad ones
all the mad ones
all the good ones are mad
the mad and the intolerable
the broken - wait till
they’re dead
then their genius is
tolerable
until then
kill it, kill them
kill the pain, the wrong
the unfitting, the
broken
in me in them
they kill us
we kill us
i killed me
and that’s why
all the mad ones
all the mad ones
and that’s why -
i killed me
like i was
all the mad
ones
supposed to
~Paco Jones
