B-List (by Mark Sebastian Jordan)

B-List 

Another young actor has died,
tired litany of our times.
I grew up watching his
crooked-sweet smile
in gawkward comedies
hammered out
onerightafteranother.

In time I grew to distrust
youth and eternal summer,
the cheap charm, sugar-buzz
blare of B-list flicks, but he stayed there.
Is still there, as if the cameras
stole his soul, discarding the body
to fall off the Hollywood sign
and roll down the Sunset Strip
to join the rivers of trash
rolling out to the sea.

I almost said Movie Star,
but those days flew in a flurry of snow,
for fame gorges on the gorgeous,
like Goya’s tabloid Saturn.
We drive by, craning
our rubber necks at
E News Daily, waiting
for the next commercial
to sate us with distraction.

Once, you were loved.
You were a generation’s erotic toy
sucked dry by the same beasts
who now beat their breasts
and talk about innocence lost
and protecting our children.

As far as I can tell,
little has changed since the Mayans.
We don’t need a pyramid temple
and a knife-wielding priest today.
We lay him out on the big screen
and take the boy’s living heart
into our hands and squeeze.

The crowd roars.
Life tastes so fine.

Roll
the
credits. 



* * * * *

Mark Sebastian Jordan has been an active presence on the Ohio arts scene for thirty years as an actor, director, playwright, and improv comedian. His Mansfield Trilogy of historical dramas was featured in sell-out performances for a decade at Malabar Farm State Park. As a living history performer, Jordan has portrayed Orson Welles, George Frideric Handel, Dan De Quille, and Clement Vallandigham. He has also been featured in television programs such as Ghost Hunters, My Ghost Story, and House of the Unknown, and appeared as an extra in the classic film The Shawshank Redemption.

Jordan is also a poet with numerous publication credits. He was awarded 2nd place in the 2013 Jesse Stuart Memorial Award by the National Association of State Poetry Societies, and has also received awards from the Ohio Poetry Association, the Ohio Arts Council, The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, The Associated Press, The Rupp Foundation, The Ohio Theater Alliance, the Ohio Community Theatre Association, the Ohio Eta Chapter of the Theta Alpha Phi drama honor fraternity, and the Mansfield/Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Jordan has worked as a freelance journalist for publications all over Ohio as well as ones based in New York City and London, England. He currently reviews concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra for Seen & Heard International.

He lives at Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, where he runs the Hostelling International hostel, which provides affordable accomodations to travelers of all ages.

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Night Comes to the Versailles of the Mind (by Mark Sebastian Jordan)

Night Comes to the Versailles of the Mind

Dreamrise beckons
come away away
surrender the shine
of a sun-sharped mind,
slip into eyeless sleep
where a brooding
garden breathes.

A thousand falling fountains
are wells of infinite curve.
Sleep seeps to bleed
the listless flags
of a far-off world.
Chiselled lines are abandoned—
no dreaming brow is straight—
each furrow is a mob of liberty
overthrowing absolutes.

But what says the voice of the dead?
Will not dreamtide’s rosy gore
pearl across the dawn lawn
when all princes and palaces are gone?

The sun king sweats
in the hall of mirrors,
watching his selves
slip away away
across the wide misery
between seem and dream.

They call you to come,
come away—
frost flowers kiss
the deep leaves of the mind,
silent eyes start,
as if to speak—
but no prince
shall mark
this time. 



* * * * *

Mark Sebastian Jordan has been an active presence on the Ohio arts scene for thirty years as an actor, director, playwright, and improv comedian. His Mansfield Trilogy of historical dramas was featured in sell-out performances for a decade at Malabar Farm State Park. As a living history performer, Jordan has portrayed Orson Welles, George Frideric Handel, Dan De Quille, and Clement Vallandigham. He has also been featured in television programs such as Ghost Hunters, My Ghost Story, and House of the Unknown, and appeared as an extra in the classic film The Shawshank Redemption.

Jordan is also a poet with numerous publication credits. He was awarded 2nd place in the 2013 Jesse Stuart Memorial Award by the National Association of State Poetry Societies, and has also received awards from the Ohio Poetry Association, the Ohio Arts Council, The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, The Associated Press, The Rupp Foundation, The Ohio Theater Alliance, the Ohio Community Theatre Association, the Ohio Eta Chapter of the Theta Alpha Phi drama honor fraternity, and the Mansfield/Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Jordan has worked as a freelance journalist for publications all over Ohio as well as ones based in New York City and London, England. He currently reviews concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra for Seen & Heard International.

He lives at Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, where he runs the Hostelling International hostel, which provides affordable accomodations to travelers of all ages.

Snow Patrol (by Mark Sebastian Jordan)

Snow Patrol 

You sneer
You make your friends laugh
You scored the touchdown Friday night that won the game
You are sexy as sin, and know it
You could have every girl in this school and half the boys (if you kept it secret)
Your dad’s in management
Your mom’s the mayor
You rule.

Hurled by genes, class, hormones, and luck
to an adolescent Everest,
You think this peak goes up.

You miss the flurry of wary eyes,
the ones who look away so you won’t see
that they once meant to be rock stars
and Superbowl MVPs
You don’t know your dad
is about to be downsized
You don’t know that city council
laughs behind your mother’s back
You don’t know that those genes
carry a fault that will quake you later
You don’t know that the stick of dynamite
between your legs will one day go off
in the wrong place
at the wrong time.

Listen up, kid.
This avalanche warning
ain’t for the mountain next door.

And who am I
to tell it so?

Just call me The Snow Man. 



* * * * *

Mark Sebastian Jordan has been an active presence on the Ohio arts scene for thirty years as an actor, director, playwright, and improv comedian. His Mansfield Trilogy of historical dramas was featured in sell-out performances for a decade at Malabar Farm State Park. As a living history performer, Jordan has portrayed Orson Welles, George Frideric Handel, Dan De Quille, and Clement Vallandigham. He has also been featured in television programs such as Ghost Hunters, My Ghost Story, and House of the Unknown, and appeared as an extra in the classic film The Shawshank Redemption.

Jordan is also a poet with numerous publication credits. He was awarded 2nd place in the 2013 Jesse Stuart Memorial Award by the National Association of State Poetry Societies, and has also received awards from the Ohio Poetry Association, the Ohio Arts Council, The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, The Associated Press, The Rupp Foundation, The Ohio Theater Alliance, the Ohio Community Theatre Association, the Ohio Eta Chapter of the Theta Alpha Phi drama honor fraternity, and the Mansfield/Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Jordan has worked as a freelance journalist for publications all over Ohio as well as ones based in New York City and London, England. He currently reviews concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra for Seen & Heard International.

He lives at Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, where he runs the Hostelling International hostel, which provides affordable accomodations to travelers of all ages.

Lean Wind Over Wolf Lake (by Mark Sebastian Jordan)

Lean Wind Over Wolf Lake

Icy face laced with abandoned
causeways and busy turnpikes,
Wolf Lake lurks outside Chicago,
watching the world herd in.

Factories stack like tombstones
on the lake’s low banks. Cold war
silos wait in Eggers Woods
for a new chill.

Stories bubble up
from still waters,
trapped beneath
the ice—
Leopold and Loeb
flicker faint on
the northwest
shore, by a
culvert:

More stories of love
polluted by words. 



* * * * *

Mark Sebastian Jordan has been an active presence on the Ohio arts scene for thirty years as an actor, director, playwright, and improv comedian. His Mansfield Trilogy of historical dramas was featured in sell-out performances for a decade at Malabar Farm State Park. As a living history performer, Jordan has portrayed Orson Welles, George Frideric Handel, Dan De Quille, and Clement Vallandigham. He has also been featured in television programs such as Ghost Hunters, My Ghost Story, and House of the Unknown, and appeared as an extra in the classic film The Shawshank Redemption.

Jordan is also a poet with numerous publication credits. He was awarded 2nd place in the 2013 Jesse Stuart Memorial Award by the National Association of State Poetry Societies, and has also received awards from the Ohio Poetry Association, the Ohio Arts Council, The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, The Associated Press, The Rupp Foundation, The Ohio Theater Alliance, the Ohio Community Theatre Association, the Ohio Eta Chapter of the Theta Alpha Phi drama honor fraternity, and the Mansfield/Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Jordan has worked as a freelance journalist for publications all over Ohio as well as ones based in New York City and London, England. He currently reviews concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra for Seen & Heard International.

He lives at Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, where he runs the Hostelling International hostel, which provides affordable accomodations to travelers of all ages.

The Burial of the Lizard (by Mark Sebastian Jordan)

The Burial of the Lizard

          “Is everyone in? The ceremony is about to begin.”
                    — Jim Morrison, The Celebration of the Lizard


Five a.m.
We wake dimly hushed.
Blue-black echoes stumble
through the wasted dawn. I feel
the resonance points in my words
as my fingers touch the keys, as if
they chorded your fretting temples,
moist with sweat and pulsing with blood.

Seven horses seem to be upon me.

Waves of black leather feather my mind,
erotic cling of whiskied heroin glides the glades.
Soft thunder summons from across the years,
the young lion struts the Sunset Strip,
the angels of night swarm his mane.

You crowned yourself The Lizard King.
Cruel master of ceremonies, son of Artaud,
bitch of Blake and beau of Rimbaud,
glinting new colors of vowels
as you coiled in the bowels
of the sick rose sun bleaching
the blear of the American dawn.

Your dark star flowered as myth,
the superstar hawked on t-shirts
and then smoked by Oliver Stoner.
Your shaman conjure of upheave
Cain-marked you visionary,
master of persona and theatre,
student of sociopathic sociology,
sphinx who died with smile intact.

Of course, it was never only you.
It was the chemical swirl of your dark orchestra,
the heavy smoke chords of Krieger’s songs,
the red-light neon of Manzarek’s electric keys,
the nervous skitter of Densmore’s drums.

But yet it was you,
born to the endless night,
whose Pleiades eyes spelled our mirror.
Your southron languor draped in whiskey rage,
your tonguing of an azure phrase,
your dusk-doomed croon,
your black dahlia bloom,
your high pirate raids
on the horse lattitudes of learning –
How could we not drink your snarl
like the wickedest kiss
of a decadent
burgundy?

Who shall be the next loaned actor
ready to write your wounded sanctuary
across the drooling lips of a failed empire,
a spree of criminal lightning
to slash the rust-red deserts
of the slave mills of the Midwest,
the flaked wastrels of the idiot coasts,
the sagging braggarts of Sunbelt condominiums,
the Indians scattered bleeding on dawn’s highway?
You see, we are quite willing to blow them all away,
if it would clear the slate for so much as one new dream.
Yet for reasons mysterious, self-inscrutable,
the world has turned away and sought shelter
from your spinning black hurricane.

We buried the lizard in the backyard
and walked the other way down the hall.
And by that, I’m here today to report on you
sailing your bathtub off to oblivion
on the hush of the velvet black sea.

But on still autumn evenings
when the moon hangs low,
the fishermen on the promontory
say a dark fog steals into the harbor,
an apparition of horror and hard-on,
the residue of our dirty past,
nocturnal emotions that unleash
an arc of melismas, that peak
in the scorched throat
of midnight storms.

Seven horses paw the fall,
snort in phrases, almost words,
as we dig another door in the dirt.

We will bury you again, wild child,
wondering how long until your sinuous,
singing wraith claws its way out again,
which it will, until the day we look
more closely at that shroud
and recognize
our own
faces.



* * * * *

Mark Sebastian Jordan has been an active presence on the Ohio arts scene for thirty years as an actor, director, playwright, and improv comedian. His Mansfield Trilogy of historical dramas was featured in sell-out performances for a decade at Malabar Farm State Park. As a living history performer, Jordan has portrayed Orson Welles, George Frideric Handel, Dan De Quille, and Clement Vallandigham. He has also been featured in television programs such as Ghost Hunters, My Ghost Story, and House of the Unknown, and appeared as an extra in the classic film The Shawshank Redemption.

Jordan is also a poet with numerous publication credits. He was awarded 2nd place in the 2013 Jesse Stuart Memorial Award by the National Association of State Poetry Societies, and has also received awards from the Ohio Poetry Association, the Ohio Arts Council, The Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, The Associated Press, The Rupp Foundation, The Ohio Theater Alliance, the Ohio Community Theatre Association, the Ohio Eta Chapter of the Theta Alpha Phi drama honor fraternity, and the Mansfield/Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Jordan has worked as a freelance journalist for publications all over Ohio as well as ones based in New York City and London, England. He currently reviews concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra for Seen & Heard International.

He lives at Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, where he runs the Hostelling International hostel, which provides affordable accomodations to travelers of all ages.