Ripper Jones

Walk a little.
Round the corner and up a bit
There it is
The strange round kerbstone
...

I saw infinity the other day.
I stepped outside this aimless place
of unfulfilled desires.
I was apart from time.
...

The motorway was grey-blue
As it always was
Cars and lorries rushed past
The lorries sucking us into themselves
...

In the reflection of vanitas
You look not at your mortality
Such is the nonchalance of youth.
You deny death a hundred times a day
...

The nonentity spends its time
in the mud at the bottom of a cliff
while the waves break
and the broken shells complain of
...

Reader when you view these lines,
In your homes and cluttered courts,
Part of me reaches your eyes and mind,
And you absorb my thoughts.
...

The strong, unmixed wine of beauty
That our eyes deceive us not,
Also lets in harsh reality,
Like spirits that abuse the throat.
...

Where does memory go
When it's finished with the moment -
Is it tossed away?
Is there an island in the universe
...

What is the point of ambition
Connected to the reason for being
Why write poetry?
Why do anything?
...

Anonymous people
Where'd you get your colours from?
Red green and blue
In differing blends
...

It is not death I fear,
But what comes after here.

It is not death I fear,
...

In mine and yours,
medical records are kept.
Like a fire starting from the inside,
and spreading outwards,
...

And they pray all night, all day.
See a prayer now as its heavenly trail
Leaves no doubt as to its whereabouts
But look - it's gone the other way
...

It had eyes that slid at and in
Glazed over they had a look of
A lake with too much sunshine
With ice that refuses to break
...

As I meandered through the large darkened room
The post-beat party was in full swing
Too late for the vagaries of topsy-tipsy Ginsberg
People were jolly on hope maybe
...

How does it feel to be in a basement when bombs are falling all around?
How does it feel when your life could be taken from you at any moment?

Words cannot describe it.
...

In the planet of slums,
The very tin sheets are alive.
Rusty corrugated tin
Where souls are destroyed.
...

Sentenced to infinite hell
he rolls the rock up
and it slips down again
and the same awaits him
...

Each age of non-existence
Is a perfect mirror of the other.
Look at how eternity
passed before we're born,
...

Secret gods present feet of wax
To melt on the pyre of faithlessness
They know their time has come
Bowing to the the mass
...