Jorrel Patterson is a poet and painter working under the name The Elephent King — the intentional misspelling is the point. He lives in Los Angeles, walks long distances on purpose, and describes himself, without irony, as “CEO, thru-hiker, and King of the Hobos.”

The work is confessional and unguarded. He writes love as something violent and tender in the same breath — sacred and profane, cosmic and bodily — and paints figures that surface out of the dark the way a memory does: half-formed, insistent, more felt than seen. A bone crown. Teeth. The moon and the sun. Fire, whiskey, a flooded garden.

Across it all runs one idea — a refusal of permanence in favor of the real. The king is always also the idiot, the scavenger, the man losing his crown on purpose, because that is the only way to be sure any of it was ever real. Real is what you can lose.

His flagship collection, Golden Boy and the Good Daughter, gathers thirty-three poems, many paired with original paintings. A children’s book, The Bird Who Preferred to Walk, is out now; a third project, A Guide for Dying, is being written in the open. This site is the home for all of it.