Jonathan Beale

DEMONS

 

Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator

Laying my ghost in metal.

My half ghost in armour hold hard in deaths corridor,

To my man-iron sidle.  Dylan Thomas

 

Struck Upward – forces conjoin; disjunct

There, a kind of peep-hole scene: the girl, as if blind

Dances against a sea in a wilderness of darkness  

 

Her arm Caravaggioing the room

Loving in the air spacial 

An echo

            Tingling

 

They are drawn and repel in a pinnacle of magnetism 

 

Both necessary expanding each other’s truth 

 

Wanton necessity

 

Each other’s being

 

The time in a moment, in an instant.  A seething vast epoch of a ‘now’

 

You cannot have her, you cannot, as she is as the summer breeze 

She’s uncapturable – your pain is in your eye, you create from your greed

She is free and you want her to have not be with allow her hand to

take you, if you could she would break in your ownership of her….

 

Still

 

She dances in seasons

 

The word is motion indicative of what just needs to be  

…he the innocent in this symmetry.  Blindly believes not.  

She, vowing to the god she must worship and adore

 

A notion deep inside, after all it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive

 

2

Blown to one side by the wind

Every sensation except being alone

Drained out of your mind

Stephen Spender on Manuel Altolaguirre

 

The demon is as the air to life

The forlorn Doppelganger’s knife

Washing and proving the acts

Dealing and playing the facts

 

The point in which it’s written  

Twisting on

                             Degas

Contorting until

The beauty unnaturally

           Forged

 

3

How beautiful you are, my beloved

How beautiful you are!

Your eyes are doves,

Behind your veil,…

Song of Songs poem 4  

 

A rhyme flowing as silk in the breeze

She dances against the compass

Against the rules that pre-exist her

And have now predeceased her

Time like scent is.  Unimaginable

Roaring in silent architecture

Attracting the secreted geometries of the past

A silent love sleeps across the horizon

From the souls desire to evolve

Into the need of another

 

4

Emancipated for the moment at least from the torment of fantasy

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

 

They need not that ill wind

Beneath an iller sun  

That leads to nowhere

As in this dimension

They make another

Some future dimension

Unwritten

In its being

 

5

Better a bitter ending than an endless bitterness

persian proverb

 

The sky scarred by the electric blue dragonflies’ wanton wake:

There the innocent Chalk hill Blue darts here-and-there

In its own private chaotic architecture  

She breathes the silken air of soul

Upon a canvas of experience

She lives in night storms torment

And in tomorrow’s 

Tomorrow.

Until they begin again.

 

 

DAY

 

Start then, begin…

Minds crawl up from the gutter 

of last night. Bukowski et al

Viewing from the down up

the lights maginitudinal

begin. Like a defunct god

of the morning after…

Cutting into the self.  Seen as through

A dulled mirror…

‘Who is that man in the mirror’?

The characters along the vascularity

The roads, corridors, any vessels

Steering steering.

 

Then, entering the final third

 

The sullen evening

Into the horizon

An amber glow

 

The new fossil fuel

Jack Daniels or Southern Comfort

And nicotine patches

 

Blood loss-wind cut face –

Destroyed remaining in completeness

Effervescent infancy

The minds maps seek the moons

clouding: finding their way

 

The light finds the scar the weakness

The lime green against the red

The brevity of sobriety is lost 

In moments

 

Life, love, sobriety

Lost in the circularity of life

Lost in the 

Over load –“Another Jack Daniels….”   

 

 

THE PATH ALWAYS FINDS ITS WAY TO THE FRONT DOOR

 

“Teacher why do you not tell the whole truth. Teacher 

My mother screams through a loss of words and her voice breaks

Teacher who passed through another day, another time

 

Your afternoon apathy lay heavy as a maturing wine

Cups-of-tea with the weight of astronomy – and the crossword

On some half marked exercise book

 

Windowed minds cluttered with dust and broken blinds

The idea and free though exorcized in the recognition of apathy

As the Girls in their hop scotch, find learning, teacher, learning

 

She always found the way home even in the fumbling snow

Teacher crossed the night in the pub as she struggled to perfect

The absolute In this world of seeming variables, so how?  So why? 

 

The Glossed door reflects deflects convexes -   the by-line

Why teacher is what say in these four walls – so different outside?

What is the truth teacher?  Does it exist, teacher, does it teacher?”  

 

Jonathan Beale writes from the United Kingdom.

 

 

 

Peter O’Neal

Three After Baudelaire

 

THE IDEAL

 

Not for me those ‘beauties’ from Hello or Cosmo!

Those insect creatures, products of a photoshop age.

Those brodequin limbs, n’ mantis stalking fingers

Could never satisfy a heart like mine.

 

I’ll leave them to the paparazzi, the poets of chlorosis,

To serve up the babbling troupe of surgically refined horrors.

For, I can’t for the life of me distinguish among those pale roses

A specimen who resembles the richer hues of my ideal carnations!

 

What it really craves, my abyssal heart, deep to its very core,

Is you Lady Macbeth, a soul powered too in crime,

A dream of Aeschylus, hatched from the climes of a mistral.

 

Or you, also, great night, daughter of Michelangelo,

Set in the androgynous pose of the ignudi,

Yet whose tits are fashioned for only the mouth of a Titan.

 

 

DUELLUM

 

Two warriors run after one another; their

 Weapons stain the air with sweat and blood.

These games, featuring the clash of steel,

Are the racket of a youth prey to a wailing love.

 

The double sided blades are broken, like our youth

My dear! But teeth, and sharpened nails,

Will soon avenge the rapier, and the treacherous stiletto.

So speak a fury of hearts, matured by ulcerous loves.

 

Inside the ravine, haunted by lynx and panther,

Our heroes embrace savagely, rolling about,

Their skin flowering with all the aridity of the briars.

 

This abyss, this hell, is peopled by our friends!

Remorselessly driven, by an inhuman Amazon,

Set down to eternalise the ardour of our mutual hatred.

 

 

DESTRUCTION

 

Constantly at my side this demon hovers;

He swims about me like the impalpable air;

I breathe in and I can feel him burning my lungs

Filling me with guilt and eternal desires.

 

Sometimes, knowing my deep love of Art,

He takes the form of the most seducing women,

And, with a special pretext,

Bathes my lips with an infamous gloss.

 

He drives me, far from the eyes of God,

Stumbling and broken by fatigue, into the middle

Of vast deserted plains of boredom,

 

And throws in my confused eyes

Stained clothes, opened wounds,

And all of the bloody accruements of  Destruction.

 

 

 

Baudelaire, ou L’architexte

 

Pendant vingt ans j’étais ce Bateau Ivre.

Finalement, rejeté par la mer, je me suis retrouvé

Par terre devant les pieds d’une déese impitoyable,

Et sans remords qui s'est transformée en pute.

 

Et depuis, je travaille pour eux, tous les deux.

Le premier me donne des conseils par des signes

Anciens, qui sont très difficiles à déchiffrer tout seul.

Alors, avec la seconde, habillée fantastiquement,

 

Parfois en gode miche, et armée avec son fouet

Et ses bottes, elle me gronde. Je me laisse diriger par eux,

Avec leurs signes obscurs, et leur ordres sévères.

 

Je me suis battu une véritable cité construite qu’avec

Des paroles. Et parfois, marchant avec eux,

On s’arrète devant le Temple D’Heraclyte l’obscur.

 

 

Proust

Pour Catherine Bennett-Villars

 

J’aime ce vieux monde proustien,

J’aime plonger dans l’océan immense de ses mots,

Et me laisse porter par les noms propres de son époque

Qui évoquent toute l’histoire en sa surface.

 

Celle de la grande guerre, par exemple, et l’affaire

Dreyfus. Mais ce que j’apprécie vraiment de voir c'est

Le comportement de tous ces gens si cruels et si delicats,

Ces gens qui souffrirent tellement, comme Swann.

 

Et ces autres, comme Charlus qui fit souffrir tant de personnes,

Par sadisme pur et simple. Par ce qu’avec eux je suis avec

Mes contemporains, hormis le décor et les costumes.

 

Avec eux je suis avec la race humaine dans toute sa misère

Et dans toute sa splendeur. Ah, que j’aime ce vieux

Monde proustien, que j’aime plonger dans ses histoires.

 

 

Eros – or the Discovery of Nylons

 

The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality
reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.

NietZsche – Beyond Good and Evil

 

G-string,

mind ligament,

balancing precariously up on the high wire

that is human sexuality;

there gathered within your purse

the intrepid movements of the blood surge-

impossible verticality!

 

This further compass

sets its sights on such deliberate movements,

such impeccable negotiations of skin,

your breathe –

each second counting

like a revelation.

 

So, intent is the mutual consideration shown

that it sets your mind alight;

the precariousness of the descent,

the quietly measured strokes

transcending all control

till you are both

flailing in a mutual sea.

 

What is the stiletto

but a further metaphor,

this time on legs,

of vertiginous attraction

and retraction,

a mere platform

upon which the feet balance

along the subliminal heights.

 

O sacred pantyhose,

synthetic materialisation of male heart’s fire.

From out of the wondrous sheen or membranous envelope

potential is being realised...

every square millimetre of the fabric

embracing her anatomy,

nanotechnology,

with mini mini lips embraced-

She then?

 A walking colossus...

 

While through the trees

a whole battery of 88’s can be heard,

their phallic poundings

announcing her coming,

 

while inside Paris,

grunting cunts,

its Liberation Day.

 

Peter O’Neill is the author of Antiope (Hammer & Anvil Books 2013). He writes from Ireland.