The world saw
This apparently everyday scene
A child being held
Asleep perhaps? Unwell?
But, dead – really dead.
Looking at the scene of which I was a part.
Tomorrow: now, never comes.
And somehow the age will change
Against our canvas
Of our making
Cut in the devils playground
Somehow playgrounds
Devoid of this scene
That is our life
And his that fell short
Here the scene:
Whether landscape, portrait, or abstract
He’ll never this out
Nor kick a ball, kiss, or read a book.
Early Sunday Morning 1930 by Edward Hopper
You don’t see us
Along life’s rails
The sleepers and paths
That veers away from
The split infinite.
Of the fire and
Passed by; under the window’s
Eyes, closed on the world.
The rats and foxes
On night maneuverers.
You cannot see them in doorways
Sanctuaries of the bum.
v. absenteeists.
Words that smooth and caress
All lovers are blind except for Echo –
A cast in these vast stone artefacts.
These places to store…
Created for building & making.
And ‘no’ not us, we’re the bums – lost, strayed.
Just the bums invisible, yet there.
There is reason. There must be. Reason!
Kant’s mind occupied him a lifetime
Sorting those colossal pieces of,
Bishop & knight …
We feel – the fork
No address: no, no, no,
Begging breeds, no ingenuity
The cream always finds
The way up – the wise will
Wield a new way.
We sit, sharing stories
So old now, they become rusted.
Stuck in time. Their cells, their D.N.A.
Become and the story: that grows differently
The scene remains the same.
Life remains until the day grows.
The light cuts the polished shop window.
They have passed away.
The eyes of the morale and the moneyed
Will not see them today.
The dull dives
of the east, west, and southside:
A loud unharmonious
Noise was heard to beat, beat, beat
What monsters the TV
Breeds and in this
Self-perpetuating
Swamp that needs cleaning?
Somewhere – somewhere
In streets and sidewalks
He spoke to me and will
Look after me – me – me
When breeding the though
And airing to the masses who
Want to hear – hear – hear
that they are not us. Not us.
They can fight our misguided
Wars without being part
Of out central cause. The words
short as they fall down the drain.
There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting. Buddha
The world is the distance trod by the passionate pilgrim
This eternal geographer
After Henri Cartier – Bresson
□ From the loneliness of the Frontier Post, □ to those
Spanish gypsies: a sharp glint in their eyes
To their endgame. □ Seeing the women of Epirus
in Greece beating their sodden washing to the rhyme
of some ancient rite, or from the very eye of Lorca’s
women. □ As do the women of Suzdal in Russian wash
in Icewater. □ A man caught between shadows (somewhere
between Debussy and Grieg’s Morning Song) striding
on into anonymity. □ St Georges Day Georgia 72 –
The Alaverdi Monastery the boy swinging in the car door
Paul Newman perhaps? The monastery unable to look away.
□ unassuming, in the Palais-Royal Paris 1959, people passing,
Philosophising, perhaps? □ the Serbian cycling cellist. □
□ Finding ends everywhere from a decomposing boat
in Co Kerry; to a Horse, a man, and dog pause before
going on to where they need to get to. □
The thread of humanity woven in culture of place and time.
The eternal geographer marks the world of émigrés
In the eye – in the moment – in the memory
…of consumption creeps in, drips from the side of the moon that doesn’t sleep. A faucet with fangs cannot be turned off. From Alligator: by A. J. Huffman.
Syria today – tomorrow
That human nebulous experience among the rubble
As everyday as the football gossip or the markets rise and fall
Empires in their being rise and fall. Not even walls hold firm
The world is fighting its own bill of rights. In every tiny corner
Once, here was a great and glorious pulsating heathing metropolis.
The city will rise again from the blood permeated in the earth
..
Jonathan Beale has numerous poems published over 50 journals around the world. His work can be found in such books as ‘Drowning’ and ‘The Poet as Sociopath’ (Scar publications). His first collection of poetry ‘The Destinations of Raxiera’ is published by Hammer & Anvil. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Destinations-Raxiera-Jonathan-Beale-ebook/dp/B018F6GWQ6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1452199641&sr=1-1&keywords=jonathan+beale
His second volume is looking for a publisher and he is currently working on his third volume. And is included in Macabristas d’Honneur.
His work has recently been published in Anti Heroin Chic, Dissident Voices, Red Fez, Sheepshead Review, Aphelion, Linnets Wing, aaduna, Horror Sleaze Trash, et al. He studied Philosophy and lives in Surrey.
(of Grabovo)
That still air holding no side –
just an innocent bystander:
as one with so many sightless eyes –
senseless to the deed,
railing across the sky’s simplicity
as the bloody butchers window.
The world is made-up of half-truths
and half-truths that dissolve –
Jacob’s ladder, there, just left
unattended seeming intertwined
in a moment – the toss of a coin:
the flick of a finger.
Between life and the alternative.
In a single frozen moment
sucked out from the heavens
and casted down to hell.
Not even the simple dream to stride
the heavens as pantheon.
As the sunflowers’ face of innocence
look bewildered seeing this scene.
Holding a quintillion quintillion of seed
each a single mass-of-hope
Each a universal day.
Drowned out by the bloody sky’s.
Marbled voice and shouldest destroy
them which destroy the earth.
In this corner of the world, this world,
this microcosm of the world
From some bland earthy paradise.
To an amazing stunning
Strangely appealingly hellish image.
The stench – drowning –
If Hieronymus Bosch’s eye could
have caught: that vision!
‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’
to ‘The Seven Deadly Sins
and the Four Last Things.’
This inconceivable allegory
of what is to come or what we are
to become. And how close is perdition?
A Triptych
For C. H.
Panel I
Beneath the waves the currents strength
The mane; vast, swirling, spiralling, uncompromised
As the thought of St Sebastian and as thought as absolute
As Aquinas’ – the masses who occupy the distance
Who fall and fade into the background.
The masses make up and swim in their mediocrity
A happy sea to swim in. waters of renaissance
Panel II
That song: you know the one.
That song – that stopped you DEAD!
Dead! The nudum pactum*** of the raw –
Four – on – four that drives them on and on.
The vein of your past grows on in the garden
Of your might and magnanimity.
The cortex maps the past too much.
In the scented garden there is no need
No, no need for vision
The right path is always found always
Can become lost in the morning mist.
Panel III
leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur****
With that sense certainty: the French have a word for it.
As the air reverberates with swirling conversations
“…the polymath, one who is interested in everything
and nothing else.” °
°°
Expansion of self – in the ravine between the hemispheres
The waters carry fresh and brine at the same time.
Clothed in silk and in goat hair
The external world of the unexplained
The changeable world from Babel
To Père Lachaise Cemetery where Chopin’s
Nocturnes echo on into the night
As the river ripples flow on
Endlessly into the night.
* From the beginning
** A condition without which it could not be
*** Naked promise
**** The laws of man are born, live, and die
° From a conversation between Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco
°° Expansion of the sum
“Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve.” . “Pfizer strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.”
Morality! Blindly strident –
Coloured by years of the moss corrupting –
Blinding all vision – until vision becomes
Meaningless.
And is led by the cries of the crowd
Kill! Kill! Kill!
That unholy innocent trinity of Sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride to stop the heart.
Incidental overtones from a chemistry class
Perhaps – who knows?
The bewildering abstract
Of a so-structured-death.
Between too much day-time TV
And The Good Book.
From the hands of lives that have
lead to preserve life
And save.
And save.
There is no past here,
only a constant ‘ever’
and only and an eternal present.
They are cemented in blood and blood
The masculine sword wielding
Struck in the blurring of bloods.
She was born and lives outside
of history’s thin vein.
In her own private universe of a sticky
past caught among the olive oiled redeeming light.
The artist understands
the city paths, in their red bloodied rich lives.
Only the pauper or poet can see through.
Here, some two vast covenants
are married under one roof
of the Copernican sky.
They are now drowned in youth’s desire
for beauty, and in beauties desire.
This consumes all.
The primary element, is as life starts;
is seeking the first fruit before the sunset.
..
That image; the downtrodden, punishment is innocent.
Eyes blinded by the whiteness, Caustic salt of bitter worlds, words.
Hounded by life mused to be painted by purity of they whose soul.
..
Echoing something past over into history.
As an unwanted child reminding
The parents of their brief moment of indiscretion
Theirs cannot be the punishment
Theirs cannot be the cross bourn
Theirs cannot be the life declined
Theirs will never be the sacrifice made.
Revisited upon them – by their act
..
There he stands when standing won’t do
His hair hanging like willow leaves
Even the refreshing breeze ignores this infant
And his eyes plead for –
What? He cannot resolve
He cannot know – instinct speaks
Against the crowd as he
In silence remains
His blood for the sins of other
His blood for the sacrificial alter
His blood with cover a multitude
His blood will, his blood will, his blood will.
..
So let us beat a path to the new Garden of Eden
Let us warmly blanket our enemy’s enemy,
And where’s the friend? Where are they to be found?
..
So your grandmother will sacrifice her care
Or be charged even more by those she’d worked to feed;
Who, now play another poor opening gambit.
..
Those who are blessed with schizophrenia, or any
Of those unrestrained un-necessities of Pandora’s
Blackest box. Stuck down while more destruction is made.
..
How long can we wait before we strike blindly out?
Debate has sparked some of the unholiest of fires
Into the forest’s fires to burn and turn the day black
..
The worlds selective venom just breeds venom – remember
Baga Nigeria? Do you? Heraclitus would seal and heal
The wounds and wash away from the memory.
..
So now, the media speculate and the Politian’s
weave and spin and wheel and deal and grin
and spin and only historia will teach us the truth
..
if indeed there is any. The newly cut cloth in Eton
and Brasenose dogtooth to tear and tear –
as searching questions get blown away and lost
..
in the wind. And so, even in the Garden of Eden there
was a serpent, and still to be found today as the newly
broken country. So let us beat a path to the new Garden of Eden
Blue
..
An accidental falling of spring sun light
As the afternoon fell in to darkness
In this mid-November storm.
Seas of leaves – storm and vortex – divisive
The pigeons in their chores relive.
..
Swirled around and around until
The afternoon fell into darkness
Life off course, and of course.
Their number, too vast
For their time – just too vast.
..
Their future rips at their deed
As the darkness fell into death
To exist, in a Parisian mood.
Not out of any hellish scene
From Bruegel or Bosch.
..
The ages crumble, as change must,
As darkness fell into death
trying to erode, the foundation
of the mountain. The Gallic
strength not to bow; not to break.
..
White
..
Life and death is something
We are united by
A sole life a man a woman
..
A soul left covered in white canvas
A picture left incomplete
Under cover of white canvas in the street
..
Life and death is something
We are united by
A sole life a man a woman
..
Their Friday ready to unwind
The guard dropped
Ready to relax
..
Life and death is something
We are united by
A sole life a man a woman
..
Then a random demon
As hellish as the wildest fire
Melting human flesh and souls
..
Life and death is something
We are united by
A sole life a man a woman
..
Seeing a city ripped & torn
Apart and seeing exposed limbs
And tendons – A modern Golgotha
..
Life and death is something
We are united by
A sole life a man a woman
..
A soul left covered in white canvas in the street.
A picture left incomplete under cover
time moves along leaving one behind
..
Life and death is something
We are united by
A sole life a man a woman
..
Red
..
..
The rivers of fraternity
Have run red today
This plot of whys, whys, & whys
Le monde
Is covered in
Bleu – Blanc – Rouge
Pax. Paris
..
‘What a drag it is
The shape I’m in
Well I go out somewhere
Then I come home again
I light a cigarette
‘Cause I can’t get no sleep
There’s nothing on the TV nothing on the radio
That means that much to me’” America Razorlight
Those life events: the stories reeling around the hours.
From acts in the ‘House’ to Afghanistan.
They who dance across the sullen spume of life’s tides elsewhere.
And pirouette across the currents hand-to-turn- to A.M.E.R.I.C.A.
The leviathan in the oceanic conscience of the world.
The night – there – here all over licking the grass and eyelids
DRAPED in this gothic mockery
Of childlike man lost in a shroud of mankind
This darkened cloaked sandyman
Full of his darking trickery
Expresso’d voices twirling up and across the night
A single plateau – of voices where no one is alone – in a night café
For the lost and lonely those with time burning a hole in their night
The night as vast and new as America
The cross keys heard to gently rattle in the invisible air
The night deconstructed from the songs and lyrics of crows song
And from the nests of souls and as if Shelley and harp are outside
The men from all the cities north Finland to Russia Norway and every between
They from their spin on an axis seeing east to west from west to east
Avenues from where the deep voices are washed over by the night
Strange lyricism of fantastical place names
The Oily night slides across blood pulsing in blind lust
And conscienceless state – The night was made for loving
Guards dropped alluring alluring exploring exploring –
Weightlessness of the eye lids –
Dry as the latest crime thriller grows
Sheets cover the eye – minds breeze
Flicks them out to dull slow zone
Time to linger dully in shadows
Curled like a canine in the corner
The voices slip into Desert island discs
Flicking a light of charm
Someone’s river tide with silt and jewel
The nightmarish dogs outside bark and drool
In their silence – fighting against
Their light the place
A garden of a million unknown scents
Places on shipping
The immeasurable beasts saunter along
Canals and seas veins in some
Other mightily animal and vastly microscopic
The minds that steer them
From south east Iceland, fair Isle and Shannon
Places on the moon of earth
Until they reach Cromatry – Viking – Fitzroy
My English class as we read ‘Kes’
Kes blurts out Fisher German Bight –sir
A world of water engrained in land
Punctuated until 05.00 when having woken
Conscience au-fait with news
The words mental mongery
Thoughts given thoughts
Some comic discussing
Swedish liberalism along with English comedy
And some rerun of
Revised hourly. Hourly. The same.
‘Your lawful acts drink an unhealthy repose from the upturned lip of this vessel, secretly, But if it is always time for change.’ John Ashbury
Spain. Red raw as the sun blistered skins it harboured, carrying too, too much.
A nation pumiced by, those blinding winds cutting reason down with fear.
“Today, strangely quiet”; the coffee existed in scent, that fine line broken.
Their sallow faces; emerging, raw and hard as chorizoed sculptures’
“I heard the children.” Their voices as arrows in the wind cutting their innocent teeth in a-too- brief- unfair-youth.
Trying to find some new avenue in the same-old history play; that they never will play in. Their delicate voices blind to the clouds secret. “We smiled at each other”
Just like the children I saw waiting for the train. Journeys’ are invariably fickle.
“It was the high walls here; the people are so small, scuttling in fear, as mice.
My senses awoke: the blend of cooking meat, frying onions, fear struck flesh.
The stale smell of Rioja from last night’s brief escape. The nightmare real as stone.
There was a noise heard overhead; wielding some death cry, an inevitability.
“I paused. I saw some coffee being sold. I took a quick slug like a bullet
Then, feeling my sweaty finger, taught, then realising it may be me having to pull the trigger…
Distantly tangible.
Eyes touch the view.
While inside another world.
in the heavily oily sludge he writhes
and the rat run’s under our alien sun.
In & under this alien sun.
The undefinable state of what was and is to come
Somehow indescribable.
One slight, one night, once among the neon
and the bar room noise. Leaves him punch drunk.
The chaos of this life –
Seemed to be alien & vaguely relative, somehow familiar.
The action somehow invisible – something unreal.
Although important for need of mankind
The need for, when all else has drained away.
Down! Down! Away! Away! Away!
All their eyes were distracted by…
The neon, billboards, and garbage blowing about
Now forgotten as are they,
Yesterday’s wants now gone – bellies empty.
The others cut the cataract of the scene:
Strangely it shuffled by –
A stranger did something soothing
The sculpture of another life rarely felt
from another world to someone else’s life for another tomorrow.
I am not a silent poet 