Patricia Spears Jones

Dinner with the ghost of Lorenzo Thomas

 
He was wearing a dapper suit and midnight blue brocaded tie–no stripes on him.
There was a sparkle in his brown eyes/his ghost was most corporeal
 
You’re still curious about the world, I asked.
 
“Oh yes”, said he spying an Obama 2012 poster.
 
“Brotherman needs to keep smoking!”, he opined
The hole in his throat the size of a ballpoint pen.
 
“Reefer” I guessed. “Oh yes”, he laughed.
 
The digits of his spectral hands shook gestures
What do you miss, I asked.
 
“Skin, he says. I remember flesh
soft to touch or rough from scabs on shins
falling off bicycles and such. Tough
 
Life was/is tough. But you”, and then his voice
Muffled something meant for me, but
 
Oh Lorenzo, what did you say to me?
 
He chuckled, then rhymed
 
“The world is always spinning round like a broken toy you can’t shut down”
 
Light crosses the hole in his throat.
As if its speed has found just the right portal.
 
“Reefer”, he repeats. And we are laughing
 
I pick up the bill. It costs what it costs.
 
I pay what I can pay.
 
What was it he said, and why couldn’t I hear it?
 
 
 

Plume

 
Bet your beeswax who said
 
Bet your beeswax what is
 
Beeswax –how did it arrive?
 
 
What moist hands dropped it where and oh how
 
Clever to drink from a cup made of bets
 
On beeswax, crop dusters, gramophones
 
Huge things with gears and bolts a century of
 
Forget-me-nots plucked and placed in books
 
Biblical in manner the colors flat –one day
 
 
Fade away like a plume of smoke pretty sight
 
The mustachioed man the pretty desperate woman
 
A song between them, ancient, hostile heard long
 
After the first singing. The payoff made in amber.