Jon Stone is a writer and editor who specialises in hybrid forms, sequences and collaborations. He is one half of Sidekick Books, a small press publisher of innovative multi-author anthologies, most recently the Headbooks Series, which combine interactive customisable pages with visual and experimental poetry. Jon won an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Poetry London prize in 2014 and 2016, and he has been researching the interplay of poetry and digital games at UWE in Bristol since 2015. His research has led him to experiment with a form of digital poetry he calls ‘ludokinetic poetry’, which aims to incorporate (and implicate) the reader cybernetically in its world.
Events
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Vagabonds
We have blown, like so many dried and scuttling leaves, into your house, your little house,
and found the precious potion you keep in your cabinet. It is all used up; we slicked it
on the bruises that adorn us.
Now a golden needle pierces the room. Our gauges have filled, are blood-gorged ticks, from
fighting in the shifty streets, and your bed – oh, irresistible plump loaf – lies
abandoned, our sandbar and save point.
Bleating, we fall into it, though there are lots of us. Lots of boys. Our bodies slide around one
another like sacks of eels. The empire sends its agents, as always, but ah, too late.
Fingers already hooked in honey-shrublands of hair. An outbreak of boys, a billowing
of boys. More of us by the day, ever scrawnier, ever quicker.
Jostling, our pilfered treasures spill: a dark mote here, a knot of rust, a prince’s kiss – storm-
tossed boats amid the rucked sheets. Even that damned gem that everyone is looking
for.
Dreaming, I find I’m full grown. I command an airship – though I still sport these pants that
itch like mad, this waistcoat sewn from ratskin.