‘Bog Cotton’ – the new book by Ken Jones

Who ?

I turn up the flame

from the snaking wick

coiled in my flammable heart

Although he is my lifelong friend I’m in two minds about him.  Sometimes I don’t recognise him at all, with his ugly old face.  Or I don’t like the way he can behave.

Perched on the wing mirror

robin preens himself

and shits

Then I play at being top dog and growl at him.  But when he’s being helpful and kind, now there’s a man after my own heart. And isn’t it strange how other people seem to like him more than I do ?  The best of times is when he lets  his shoulders  drop  and we’re drawn in together and lost, in a landscape, another person, a poem or whatever.  Beyond all that neediness and choosiness, like this  oak which shelters us from the autumn rains.

Branching without a thought

this way and that

for two hundred years

The trouble is that every morning there’s the two of us, grimacing in the shaving mirror.  Tomorrow I’ll offer a smile.

Guttering

my smoky flame

muttering to itself

Ken Jones

For more haiku stories, send a £10 cheque, for Ken’s latest
collection “Bog Cotton”, to Troedrhiwsebon, Cwmrheidol, Aberystwyth, SY23