CRAZY BONE
Author: Billy
Jones
Includes 18 Drawings by Billy Jones
Genre: Poetry, Trade Paper, 6X9
Publisher: Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301)
www.lummoxpress.com
ISBN: 978-1-929878-37-6
Pages:168
Publishing Date: August 2012
ARTWORK by Billy Jones // title: "Indian Corn"
For Billy's bio and samples from the book, scroll down past the "add to cart
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BIO:
Billy Jones was an artist, poet and emotional expatriate born in Camden, New Jersey in 1935 where Walt Whitman died. He quit high school, joined the Marines, then went back to school on the GI Bill majoring in American Literature at LA State. He migrated to Australia from Stockholm in 1967. In addition to his previously published poetry collections and numerous exhibitions, he has kept a journal of drawings, paintings, poetry and every day events since June 28, 1975. Started as a hermit on the riverbank in a she-oak grove at Mary Smokes Creek five weeks after his then girlfriend, Diane Kelly, was killed in a car accident, he was working on volume 167 (ME & MY GANG OF ALTER EGOS) when he died ---100,000 pages, 4500 illustrations. Overall title: THE ILLUMINATION OF BILLY BONES.
Billy Jones died on July 3, 2012 at the age of 77 after a brief battle with cancer. It was his second...he was a tough old bird with a beautiful soul.
COMMENTS:
Billy Jones is well known to poetry lovers in his adopted country, and by some of the art world there, but he is also known in his country of birth. He is a no-borders man. His love of life startles me into joy. Even a serious illness brings him poems and wisdom and art. Even his fears take wing and fly over beauty. I am a long time admirer and fan of Billy, and a friend. I introduce him with affection and respect and love.
Ann Menebroker, poet
A unique American expatriate poet in Australian outback w/a soul as fine as a dingo dog & as big as the universe & as beautiful & wild as a Van Gogh sunflower
Fred Voss, poet
Optimism underlines his sympathy for fellow creatures and respect for things in the natural world. He speaks of auras, halos and spirit: This is Billy’s spin, perhaps, on ‘all that lives is holy’. This poetry is no throwback to Beatdom though he writes of booze, hitchhiking, sex and the rapture of being alive.
Michael Sharkey
I first "met" him back in the mid-90s. He's always been annoyingly optimistic, making a realist (what others would call a pessimist) like myself feel small and cheap. Now I stand in awe of his feat. He, like a towering Redwood, feet firmly attached to the ground, head in the clouds, buzzed on the energy of a natural, living world; the flora and fauna, his inspiration… Billy touches the sky and laughs in the face of death. Death is too small for the likes of him.
RD Armstrong, poet
SOME SAMPLES
EVERY SECOND COUNTS
writing bar top poems
pine knots resembling galaxies
magnetic fields
my change 4 coins randomly
placed by my half empty glass
2 cents
10 cents
50 cents
$2
sacred stones smash my illusions
I’ll never be born again
never exist anywhere else
every second counts
this is it
I’m in the picture
but my face
is off the
page
20 CENTS
in China
the families
of executed counter
revolutionaries
charged
20 cents
for the
bullet
ABORIGINAL MADONNA
I’ve seen her many times
poor
drunk
bedraggled
as she looked at me
just another white face
in a once pure Aboriginal world
that goes back maybe 100000 years
I’ve seen her in pubs
parks
at bus stops
I’ve seen her hitchhiking
saw her walking through
a burning forest when
I lived up north in
a leaky caravan
too dilapidated
to move
I’ve watched her wade the wide
shallow pebble pretty rippling Flaggy river
I even saw her once at a poetry reading
her face
reflects rape
genocide
dislocation
she almost appears fierce
but I know she isn’t
because a softness
radiates from
her sacred
ground
eyes
she looks immortal
in my painting
against the blue
sky holding her
baby in a little
yellow dress
when I stepped
off the plane
a migrant
in Oz
all it took
was the laugh
of a kookaburra
to make me
feel at home
WAITING FOR MY DAD TO COME OUT OF BARS
“I’ll just go in for a quickie”
he would say & 2 or 3 hours
later he would come out
mostly I just sat
in the car until
I got hungry &
then I went in
I enjoyed
being inside
sawdust on the floors
long lovely mahogany bars
shuffle boards
pool tables
laughter
good stories
horse race results on the radio
but most of the time
I waited for him in the car
or wandered around the neighbourhoods
which wasn’t so bad
taught me how to look at things minutely
there was nothing else to do
but ponder the dashboard
the dust on the windows
the upholstery
the parking lot
I learned to look with meticulous wonder
at just about everything
gravel became huge gem-like stones
translucent leaves inlets
into another dimension
back streets
main streets
alleys
dogs
birds
trees
vines
bushes
flowers
squirrels
& when he did
finally come out
I’d look at him
in the same
searching way
whiskey on his breath
cigar butt in his mouth
apologizing for taking so long
telling me what a good boy
I was not to be mad at him
grand were
the glints
in those
drunken
blue
eyes