Jonathan Beale

Cinq poésies

 

 

After, Just after

 

There is the curse that will lay

To trip and the idealist seed

That is planted, after nights long

desert smoke climbs upward to the window

Waves and currents

Raising some to amazing heights

Tomorrow to be revealed 

 

 

 

Soft ‘C’

 

Soft ‘C’: Cancer sounds soft

blending in with other soft ‘C’s.

Cell, Soft ‘C’ or as in cushion. Another.

 

But it’s not soft at all –

• Its cancer: lung cancer - (of course)

Sounds gentle – not something that…

That Kills?  Life teaches this.

Not everything is as it appears.

 

Afterwards

It was spoken of

Like ‘the other woman’ or ‘him’

Its gender unknown

The ‘C’ changed in tone

It dropped down as if going to hell

it became a hard ‘’C’

Metamorphosing.

In the throat ca ca ca

Becoming Ka ka

Almost needing to be spat out

As blood being coughed up   

 

 

 

Phaeton

(from the Phaeton from Ovid)

 

The playgrounds kids with their squeaking,

squawking, taunting, ripping, tearing,

He knew he must be – it had to be must be true.

 

Asking his mother why they don’t believe

why are they so cruel

Cyclamens’ his mother’s ears she told him

…And my father's a god a high god Phoebus

 

The pause vast.  Swallowing him up…

Then the titters smirks and laughs and roared

Why and how could He be anybody’s father?

The playground was cruellest hardest place to be when

 

The weight of humiliation – crushed his mother she saw

They don’t believe who I am – they think I’m foolish idiot

Cilymeme embraced her son what can I do mother

 

Mother for I must know – for if so

Phoebus is he that fathers sired me

The high god Phoebus I must know the truth

 

Why I am the son of a god I am

 

Father success millionaire god

Mother cleaner

 

Mocking the birds

Mestizo.  Mestizo.  Mestizo.  Mestizo

the chat grew louder and longer a wall

Impenetrable inescapable Mestizo. 

Mestizo, on and on they went….

 

 

 

A view of cattle

I used to watch them

Those characters, just cattle?

Drifting along

One - by- one. 
…as if in a David Lean

movie.  Against some

vast background

an ocean in which

only they could exist.

Some sat, some curled,

as statuesque in the rain.
The blindness of the cattle
Unapparent from the
cinematic distance. 
This base grasses greenness,
An apparent perfection.
As they take a day
and chew through -
Musing on and musing
on.  The daily notes
Whistled from
Another or another place
the air is the same
they breathe
as you or I breathe.
From the lines that

lead back to the

vanishing point,

 

 

 

The last Lear before the stage door

After Robert Stephens’ King Lear 1993

 

That footpath which leads

us all to King Lear’s door.

 

Angers torrent

grows ever colder –

Becoming a spent landscape.

 

His final performance

Left him long alone –

Long before the end of the run.

The Green Room

missed his presence.  

 

Becoming something

He’d never been….

The ‘off stage character’

Lear had become something else:

The creaking, creaking gate.

 

The flowers and applause

grabbed the moment.

Fading into the night

The night was full of

young Edmunds’ in their

 

mystery – in their skulduggery.

He’d lost his way to Lear’s

own door & somehow he

stumbled through the

garden gate.  After the final curtain.

 

 

 

Jonathan Beale is the author of The Destinations of Raxiera (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2015). He writes from Sussex, England.