Jonathan Beale

Jonathan Beale

Poetry

Through the eyes of Mark Rothko

Too vast and even too bold

A desert to huge to lose

And obviously lost completely.

The colors clear as water

A poignant life. And as necessary

One can view the point

One can feel the point in one’s side;

Some awaiting some action -

The blood flowing with water

This simple eye on the world

Stretched over. Ever outward. Ever outward

The world is upside down.

Never back to front. It looks one-way

And then tomorrow grows in its tiny way

Taken to be given. So life is.

The orange. The red. The vision

As a ‘50’s road movie - retold

…Some young actor; broken

Some writer- whose raw judgments - him,

Or controlled lusts above his head

A time in which a freedom

Roamed around…

For a while, the sanctuary of cigarettes

Beer and greasy food and life – a sort of life.

Passion that now seems unsafe.

We’re as lush as a tropical garden

A life with colorful birds.

The age that grew - lost - finds a simple solace

The emotion taken is shared and life is given

Taken at the time now. Rightly

The dream state number one

The caught artist within the vortex

A drowned state and lost souls.

As the eyes swirl and look up

And look up until they drop

A strange aridity covers the flesh

Gauze unrevealing the idea

Leaving enough hidden.

The final trip - californication?

The restaurants’ in New York

Blatantly bare. Now Iconography

Undersigned scarcely unmade up

The deep eyes plundering a life

Through an eye for art maybe

Taken from the mesh.

Against the back of white

The merging emotion unrounded

Just existing as…

The face values in mitigation

Every icon that you are and were

And could become

Life was too huge

And in some ways just

Too - small - not enough

The artists hunger:

To relay his world:

As he sees fit, and as he sees….

His eyes energy - as I watch

Against my morning screen

Taken from life - returned to art.

In this now in which we live

Defenceless we sit by this flame searching ire

As from an age past down and on and down and on…

Within which God forgot, in this second Golden Silicon age

From the lost book of Ovid’s metamorphosis.

Where the coffee flows freer than the Santa Monica freeway

Mortality is lost in a melee of the day to day chores

Ten velour-lined minutes from melting pot of…,

….a single celled day – through the accident of meeting

Driven to by classical error – never learnt

As this, oh, too, clever race now above errors

Of the forefathers. Above the forefathers.

Dubrovnik

Cloaked against something as hard as shadow.

They’ve come again.

The sun glassed camera eyed folk.

To visit life’s eyot and snap!

In this almost strangely nubile place.

A state of being in-it-self.

Untouched by the ‘what if’s.’

Or, the if’s or the if and only if’s.

Light and dark merge; in marriage.

The perfect souled untainted by,

An external worlds breath.

They who hold here as home. Homes heart.

In the white stone and bloods red slate.

Here remain: even - if – away. To touch.

Standing by a monument in a park

Space is hungry demanding.