What's Going on - and Why You Should Join My Patreon

Hey.

Wishing everyone a warm and loving holiday!

Been a bit deliciously occupied with matters of the heart, and I just wanted to make a pitch to everyone as to why you should spend pennies a day to become a patron on my Patreon account:

1) As of this writing, there's FIVE HUNDRED EIGHTY FIVE pieces of artistic content.  (songs, poems, plays, essays, videos, and more)
2) ONE HUNDRED SIXTY SIX of these odes and nonsense are FREE!  Right now.  I'm serious.
Check out some playwriting, hear a song, enjoy some nonsense.
3) There's NINETY ONE essays (Patreon Diary Entries)  covering a raw, unfiltered look into my mental health, my artistic mind, my obsessions, my rivulets of hope. My small joys and the grateful love I've received this year.

Here are the topics:

3/18/15 – Making Art out of Hobo

3/25/15 – Showing Up

4/1/15 – Taking Time, Getting the Card

4/8/15 – A Diet of Expectation

4/15/15 – The Shakespeare Marathon

4/22/15 – What’s Next?

4/29/15 – Every Day’s a Gram of Failure

5/6/15 – Self-Care

5/13/15 - Art

5/20/15 – Self-Promotion

5/27/15 – The Unanswered Question

6/3/15 – Scratching Out Hobo Edits

6/10/15 – The Reading

6/17/15 – Prison of Self

6/24/15 – Dudes Writing Romantic Comedies

7/1/15 - Need

7/8/15 – The Tub

7/15/15 – Why Games Matter

7/29/15 – The Chest of Drawers

8/5/15 – August

8/12/15 – Hypnosis

8/19/15 –The Heat

8/26/15 - Lessons

9/2/15 – Where’s the Fire?

9/9/15 –Testing, Testing

9/16/15 –Dating

9/23/15 –Gambling

9/30/15 – The Absurd

10/7/15 – I Need Help

10/14/15 – Being Favored

10/21/15 – Hey, Remember the Time We Pretended We Ain’t Got No Arms So We Could Get Free Muffins?

10/28/15 – This Weathered Old Guitar, and a Homely Face to Tell My Tale

11/4/15 – Every Heart Got a Song to Sing

11/11/15 – 20 Answers

11/18/15 – If You Ain’t Scared, You’ve Got No Skin In the Game

11/25/15 – Waiting For the Other Shoe to Drop

12/2/15 –Doubling Down

12/9/15- Wiping Your Feet

12/16/15 – Re-Entry

12/23/15 – Todo Tiene Solucion, Menos la Muerte

12/30/15 – One of Three

1/6/16 - Nicknames

1/13/16 – Go To Hoboken, Go To the Temple

1/20/16 - Butterflies

1/27/16 – Muscle Memory

2/3/16 – Seasonal Affective Disorder

2/10/16 - Mood

2/17/16 –The Ouija Board

2/24/16 –Square One

3/2/16 – The Boomerang

3/9/16 - Immersion

3/16/16 – Well’s Dry

3/23/16 – Criterion Velocity

3/30/16 –Hold Music

4/6/16 – All You Need is the Cage

4/13/16 – Scissor Sisters

4/20/16 - Sometimes

4/27/16 – Changes

5/4/16 – Cattle Call

5/11/16 – A Mirror is Glass + Motion + Time

5/18/16 – Love-Apples

5/25/16 –Picture Puzzles

6/1/16 – Twenty Unasked Questions to Twenty Different People

6/8/16 – Finding a Mentor

6/15/16 – Making Room

6/22/16 – All it Takes is a Phone Call or Email

6/29/16 – Sin Eaters

7/6/16 – Guests in This Hotel

7/13/16 – A Song I Didn’t Write

7/20/16 – The Woman in the Blue Dress

7/27/16 – I Am a Pretty, Pretty Princess

8/3/16 – It’s Just Business

8/10/16 – Looking for Spiders

8/17/16 – Run in the Rain and Get Soaked Faster

8/24/16 – A Suspecting Model

9/7/16 - Body

9/14/16 – The Voice

9/21/16 – Reading For Fun

9/28/16 – Catalog

10/5/16 –Swallowing Fire

10/12/16 – The Chocolate Factory

10/19/16 – Ain’t No Pockets in a Board Overcoat

 10/26/16- The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

11/2/16 – Typing Passwords in the Dark

11/9/16 –What Can Be Done?  Maybe That’s It.

11/16/16 – Pulling Out the Smoke Alarm

11/23/16 - Reclaimed

12/7/16 –Mani-Pedi

12/14/16 – Keep Your Head Up

12/21/16 – Completing the Circuit

12/28/16 - Honk

Give yourself a gift for the upcoming year and become a patron today!

Love,

Jara

New Poem - Wet Cement

Hey.

Here's another poem based on a Patreon donor prompt.  There's hundreds of hours of weird, wonderful content on the site; all yours for pennies a day!  

WET CEMENT

Clinker:

The raw, inert 

guts

poured into a bucket.

Activated 

with common water.

(too little

and the end result

cracks)

Hands steady.

We pour.   Somewhere,

A clock's heart throbs.

One day, two (maybe) -

And it's set.

Tending to the surface.

Smoothing out 

the anxious bubbles.

Imprinting our descendant's skin

which preserves for 

half a century, long after

we mere carpenters

surrender our trowels,

our gauge rakes, our 

artisan paddles.

Night.  A shift concluded.

We sleep.

That tabula rasa 

stares expectantly

at the moon, its godmother.

Lovers, vandals, the 

hulk of anonymous

men,

starving for any 

lasting impression,

they too may leave

a mark; scratch out their 

initials, scar this

constructed child

with a careless 

tire print.

We prepare.

We cordon off.

We erect warnings.

We compound with quality materials.

We broker faith in our neighbors.

We fret.  Too many pock-marked

progenitors

littered with selfish influence.

It's just concrete, you say.

We bow our heads,

casting concern upon 

the  trodden, rough-shod ground

while others amble, cock their chins,

eyes skyward.

IT'S ALIVE - Jara's Brand-Spanking-New Website!

Hey.

I've connected all the acting, music, Patreon, and writing (both here and on other forums) to my official site:  www.jarajones.com  !  Give it a spin; let me know what you think...

Love,

Jara

New Poem - Oneironaut

Hey.

Here's a new poem (but super cool Patreon folk got to see it first - you should totally be one of them)

ONEIRONAUT

You.  You till

That fertile lie:

What you, sensate,

Clarify as your self-sure

Surroundings,

Is binding. True. 

Persistent.

There are ghosts

Suffering

Between the minute

Atoms

Of your unswept floor.

The screen

To which you fixate

In hazy surrender

Is not static;

Rather, its canvas

Tears draft upon draft

In rapid succession

Yet the eye

Betrays witness.

The night is a malleable clay.

The day, likewise.

I have seen

Plastic drinking straws

Pierce the hide

Of a brutish white birch tree.

I have crept, silent and custodial, into my mother's dreams.

I straighten the dream-table.

I discard the dream-waste.

I launder the dream-garments.  Hang them to dry on the dream-patio.

And

In my own

Frequent confrontations

With the wizened

Night-Incubus,

I act as script supervisor.

Surely,

I challenge,

you've realized

This character,

My father,

Has expired. 

My skin

is not wire-shackled;

An airplane

Cannot guest

A serpent,

Three-headed, rapt

With hunger.

I rub my hands together.

Cradle the dream-beasts.

Mash their form into

A microphone

Or a talk show

Or a bookstore

Or a soundstage

Or a theatre.

I do not accept their false face.

Rather,

I craft another,

Shadow following shadow.

New Poem - Beowulf

Hey.

Here's a new (well, new for non-Patreon folk)  poem.

BEOWULF

The chaos
of the writhing present
is this:

No shadow exists.

Any meter of action,
Whether mired in global friction
Or scrawled inside some antiseptic suburb
Or grunted out
In a airless tradition-territorial,

Will be inhaled.
A limbic frenzy of response will follow.

The object, the analysis of the object,
The rebuttal of the analysis of the object.

It is a beautiful chaos.

Frightened as we are,
We are humbled by the exalted
Equivocation
Each message, each suspicion-speech
Brings.

The past yields no prism of conjecture.
Rather, the most aggressive narrative
Sticks like pitch,
Like ancestral scars .

Grendel was a monster.

Beowulf, his slayer-savior.

So says the tale.

We nod sagely,
For the writers, the orators
Are honorable men.

Yet silhouetted, faintly,
In that puckered scrawl,
(a hagiography made binding
by a millennium of preservation)

Are unwritten details
Which, if said events unfurled
This present time,
Would not rest in un-eddied
Night.

Who creeps
Into a house
of a  grieving mother?

Who kills
A mother
Whose son you've grave-gifted
With her own blade?

Who defiles
The other,
And rather than own
Their brute sentence,
Seeks pity, seeks
Clemency, seeks
Weasel words?

The mask of art,
Kennings,
Cannot eke out sanctuary.

Your tousled hair
And gawky smile
Is not your true face.

Brock Turner.
Beowulf.

Be it
"twenty minutes
of action"
or
Grendel slandered as
"a man outlawed
for wickedness, he must await
the mighty judgement of God in his majesty"

It's pure Anglo-Saxon propaganda.

New Poem - Tarahumara

Hey.

Here's a new (to non- Patreon patrons) donor poem.  To get access to hundreds of content I've made, become a Patreon patron today!  Just pennies a day...

TARAHUMARA

That is not
our name,

You clap,
Witnessing.

We are merely
Rarámuri -

"runners on foot".

There is no
Need

For praise.
Do you cheer

The sunrise for its
Steadfast work?

Or the simple turkey
For the food they make?

Once,
We were farmers, race -hunters.

Before Narcos.
Before their money.

Before the rain
Became

A writhing ghost.
Made fertile ground dust.

Our children
Were taken.

Not with weapons,
But with a false remedy

For a sick soul.
Soñaderos and their

Dream medicine
Replaced with money.

The young ones
Lift heavy packs

Of marijuana
And never return.

Swallowed
By the Estrados Unidos.

Our history,
Our huaraches,

Now covered
In drugs and mud

And blood-marked
Beasts.

New Poem - Praying Mantis

Hey.

Here's Amy's (the newest Patron who's taken part in the Patreon Pledge Drive ) poem.

To become a Patron for pennies a day (and to receive all kinds of creative wonders, just click below
today!

www.patreon.com/jara

PRAYING MANTIS

There's just
One mating cycle

A single episode
Where life must tear itself

Away
From the ticking clock

And
If she's starved

If her rutting
Male's too small,

Too trusting,
If he overstays a coital welcome,

She'll size him up
Before, during, or after

Sperm's delivered.
She'll cradle his head,

Facing him,
And with her teeth,

Wrest neck from body.
He'll spasm, limp.

If he's inside her,
His abdomen will pump

Faster - just for a moment,
Sending signals - life, further

Into her flush, extricated
Body.

Having come and shuttered,
He lies, inert, as she savors

Her fresh,
Restorative meal.

She simply
Must feed.