The Pizza Man 

                       ( A. B.  Jones -1997 ) 

The pizza man is always happy. 

The guy next door is always gambling

on the gumball machine,

​always talking to somebody who's never listening.

The black gentleman 

seems so old,

in this two o' clock Brooklyn coffee shop,

yellow aching on the walls.

He's telling the waitress as she walks away,

absently balancing,

how he's from Jersey, but eats here all the time,

how his mother cooked just, like, this.

He's asking

why all the good people die young.

Balloons are always floating

in bunches or sometimes just alone.

They are

blue green pale yellow dreams.

Some people just stop listening. 

Me, I'm always hoping for epiphanies,

I'm always looking for something

that says we're still alive .

Balloons ( Detail )

  Summer Alive Song  - 1993

Balloons - 1997

Lately , I have found myself glancing backwards...it is very mysterious, and reassuring, to see threads of thought and expression that remain constant , but also take on ever evolving manifestations ....shimmering light, saturated colors ...... the groping around in the dark for solid forms ....that can become springboards for the deepest and most profound of feelings , and become mirrors of lived, joyful, excruciating experience . 

Summer Alive Song (Detail) 

 A. B. Jones    Paintings