JON CONE edited the international literary review World Letter for nine years. His poems have appeared in Kenning, Ant Ant Ant Ant Ant, Lost and Found Times and The Slice. LIBERATION Mourners, the professional kind, gathered on the muddy hillside. Gray sky. Thatch. Thorns. Nettles. Crowns. Languid melodies wafting like pale flags in weak winds. From the deserted plaza we saw them slowly approaching. Armbands. Dogs humping. The dust on the virgin's delicate neck. What was it you were drinking? They thought you were a recovering alcoholic in love with the condemned worm. You stayed long enough for the penicillin to do its magic. You celebrated by endless sweating in a dark room shuttered down on the Day of the Dead. Storms cleaved the land. The revolutionary newspaper in the capital utterly useless. How difficult it was to have money wired. Anyway, there were crescendos of folk guitar, delicate and dizzying hands. Violent heels upon the saw dust on the floor. In the bar. The brass band outside playing martial music. You wept. Sort of. Che dead in a Bolivian jungle. How far away. Later the music of Charlie Haden and the Liberation Orchestra - (catalogue designation IMPD: 188) - reopened these old ideological wounds. And you could do nothing about them. As you wept then, thinking of Che in the jungle, unable to breathe, Che suffering his asthma without medicine, weakened as his black eyes glittered like compressed coal pitted in the slouching mortal coil. THE LAMBS Nomadic heart be wary. Let lions leap in my hand. And let statues shiver under rain's repeating pins. I saw them leave, saw them return, drunk and evil. The lights on the street flickered, ghosts hovered above open sewers. The herbalist warned us, for the yellow surround held much air that was bad for the lungs. I took your tongue with me when I marched to the police station to divert the sea from our village of dry woods. The night was empty, flammable. The moon sweating in black emptiness. You held tyranny above our heads. Your hand shook like an unsteady drill on the ground of thunder's slow approach. A THEORY Pummel pound the downpour sink, leveling     fermented mash. A kindred soul. Who longed for an answer or can of tomato soup. Whipped into a froth     of insolent nutrition for the pillar of salt. Warned of the segmented thickening, consuming salt like wounds. It was neon: occluded neon landscape, full of citizens     intending fury and exchange, based on what. Yellow slickers for schoolchildren, remember. And incense offered upon their heads, sitting obediently near     the loading docks. They'd got the job but lacked the humor. Or the job was too evasive for weakened knees.     Tree trunks couldn't lift a million eggs, so why should you be any better than God's creation? Pummel pound the downpour sink, the downspout spilling furious white. Grass where birds lay asleep. Where the dead hold pennied eyes up and look at slow rotating skies.         This jazz delivers foghorn, doghorn, the horns of sadness, madness. And of joy. Mostly it is letters written by the color blue. Upon the page of hurt. Like pummeled earth, giving birth to breathing earth, the clay of humankind in pain. This jazz. Blister love used up on sheets in murky lights. A jazzed up light along the distant flue from trains winding their way. The long train        with its song of blue, this is jazz too.     Animate the long wires, so ears set to would hear the approaching riffs tied to one another inevitably bearing weight, grinding metal to metal, heating and crushing pennies along its path, bringing it back home, for this too is jazz, the pummeling of downpour upon poruous earth, a birth,     a birth or two,         in four four or in fractions indivisible, no boundaries ultimate enough to stop the run.                 For this too is jazz.