From the safety of a comfortable chair, one can travel the world of Professor Leopard Jasmine, a character who can change his spots. In fact, David Stone has given his alter ego the opportunity to traverse anywhere David is willing to take us in his Word World. Leaving the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago AND his wife and children, Jasmine embarks on a journey to ‘find himself”. As time and later works expose, Jasmine will continue to wander in poetic flow through David’s words. Here he is a traveller/composer in this, David’s first book length poem, then he is a magic user who visits Atlantis in his play Magus Jasmine, and later a temporary, but continuous tenant in later works. In Leopard Jasmine, Jasmine incantates sym-phonetic notes whilst traversing the stars, Olympus, the Sahara, Iowa and everything in between. Each of his destinations are compressed in time and space to appear in solar orbit at all times in all places. Doomed as a mortal, doomed as the wandering dead, it is clear that even if he is lord of the sun, Jasmine is beset by his humanity. It plagues his symphonies and emotions, complicates his relationships and douses his spirit in anger and sadness. Even as he orbits the plane of Ra, delineating
the matrix of lords of light in which he dwells
hunting the mountains of Montana, music issues out of rabbits.
In the Caribbean Sea, living on fish and water and fruit,
a desert island, alone with an image of a woman
dressed in white, with dark hair down her back
kissed by a gentle warm wind with blue eyes
which dance upon the surface of the waves of the sun
Jasmine must die.
But, as a pseudo man, Jasmine, made of scented words, bitterness, fragmented memory shards and hopeless dreams, he will continue to walk the corridors of David’s imagination.
