Jonathan Beale

Poetry

 

 

 

Yeats dreams of his times whilst taking a tram in Dublin

 

And like the kiss of truth: cold and liberating.

Fresh as a morning mist embracing the flesh

and as necessary as the air.

Breathing life into the disenchanted. 

You left your mark – never to be forgotten.

Not leaving the bruising or sores.

As if there’d been a silent blood loss

A force.  Like of light as subtle as the night. 

 

“So why then crazy Jane ?”

They met God, ghosts, and rhyme without reason.

“And why?”

You do not question

“And why?” 

Again you still don’t question, or can you not?

“And why?“   

No reply is heard – the desert grew into the darkness.

From where the sky meets their anger.

And a strangers imbibing eyes

Just a portent to be feared and passion

Remain and self perpetuate.

 

…and so Mad Mary who somehow

Knew only what the sane failed in

Those slave’s to the chore and every sin

Madness has no vanity and needs not bow

 

 

 

A Song of Mood

 

From inside the mind Van Gogh  

 

That crashing, drowning, motionless cloud

Sitting over me. Just sitting

There - a vast yolk, for me

Not the oxen.

  

You found some space to strike out with….

Finding: colour, form, and theme

A precursor to the rain that may… or

May not come and wash the chalkboard clean.

 

You lay under threadbare blankets

in a bare room. Laying foetally – needing and wanting

To reverse - this life cycle to alleviate

The mystical weight that hit you – full in the face

 

The cloud just sits over

Keeping the light back - toying with what

I cannot have.  My eyes slowly melt

Fearing and wanting rain.

 

The vast heat and darkened rain

Both constricting – I sat on bench looking out.

The day trotted along at its own sweet pace

The men with their papers, and drinking coffee.

  

One morning the dawn swept aside

The previous darkness. It was gone

The scene: dull, grey, humdrum, overcast

And yet my inner heart leapt.  

 

 

 

The Picasso of language

For Despina Karvounis

 

          The other side of you  T.S. Eliot

 

As sunlight strips and scars back to the subjective.

The connection revealed – where there is scarring

or the breaking point uncovered takes the meaning

to the point of discovery -

 

Youth and age like ink and page will invariably

be as we thought of….Not how it really was:

the mind is too foolish to deceive.  The eye to

gullible and memory always grows too small.  

 

Along the corridors alive with chatter as The Cities

of Crossed Destinies – in the abstract world - swirls

along in its eel-like mode.  How could the world

be painted as it is when the other side needs revealing.

 

There he cuts the perception of all syntax.

When does the line end?  He peers around

the beginning of the ascension to seek what is

behind – for curiosity and criminality.

 

Here the laws grow contorted, wild, and unkempt -

And lay aside as an exhausted dog against

the heatless hearth – while one dimension is just

As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s flicking the

 

coin into in improbability – down and round as

the profile spins into the next dimension and

next up the ladder to the infinitive dimension.

To the other-side of which Picasso knew

 

and knew you had to see, as the finger that

touches the moon and draws round the face

to see what’s there on the dark side. Before this

Picasso of Language must alter this world.   

 

 

 

Francis Bacon Psychologist (1944)

 

Part 1. Second version of the triptych part 1

 

Abstract:

 

An unusual femininity, that is. Pulchritude.

A beauty that cannot be understood, not by you idiots.  

Looking at, the looking just the looking does not by, or in itself increase the beauty or makes the beauty justified to either the viewer or viewee

 

As the Greeks knew and you cannot and never will

 

The unusual beauty – in a bullring or somewhere you’d not expect to find. Born from the some dark canal; a ravine between an unknowing and a base wantonness.

The eyes still suffocate, the air dries, the conversation stops;

“Who is she”? – Where does she come from?

“I love her” - “me too” and then the red background I’d be there for the next generation to be born unto. 

 

In her agedness, she still sits

As some old dusty picture in a gallery – it purpose forgotten.

The point of where something begins and ends is reflective

As the oil on the canvas (and so on)

           

Part 2 Second version of the triptych part 2

 

No abstract: Where are we now?

 

We have found where we should be.

As our eyes lead us on to the place where we must be.

The smile tells it all “doesn’t it?”  Look at me!  I have succeeded

Therefore, ergo, I am happy, I am knowledgeable

I know what Latin means and how mix metaphor with poetry (and desire)

Please, come in. You passed the Jag

On your way to the front door

By the way the door old oak from a reclamation yard

And see the wine, Barolo from my vines in the heart of Tuscany

 

I see them smile and laugh

As go to work, they cannot wait to see me

Just by being there -I make them happy

I tell them about…my latest purchase and what a bargain I got

And my eyes, my eyes. I like you see in my father

An error of which I am the cure -I therefore must stand

For the man who is the pathway. Whom with mother I destroy

 

Part 3 Second version of the triptych part 3

 

Francis Bacon: Psychologist

 

As the Bacon stands for the ancient geometry only ever felt

The knife that.  The knife that is. The knife that does.

By its drawing across the grain of the surface draw up the flesh that it irritates aches pulsates and somehow is indivisible and cannot be hidden from noir moved away from it is there as the dogs relents lust after the buried rates in the bank.

 

The form of Bacons the mouth that can cry – can cry out

But is it heard? Is the thing seen? Or seen and ignored

The sightless think to itself somebody’s sexual fantasy

To us a hideous deformity of joints and the physiologic

Anatomy of disaster a surgery of errors

That to self is the thing that it is

 

It is the most beautiful person beneath the spinning ball

At the cocktail bar. As it dribbles its Martini over the floor

Whilst admiring self in the mirrors behind

As the cocktail waiter sneaks away to hide his eye

And dream of the accident of love and lust

When once it smiled upon him

 

The scene is not sincere inwardly and externally it is a turmoil of fumblings, fears and failures of humanity that which we decline to acknowledge as we see the beauty as the sightless eye the eyeless being if bacon is us in all our lust to be the think of beauty and by not being we do not live forever

 

 

*

 

 

I hear your grey metallic heart - tick-tock-tick-tock-tocking...

The metronomic metre of your eyes and hearts rhythm, still I hear

your grey metallic heart still tick-tock-tick-tocking in the alluring night.

Drawing me toward the rhyme as it draws the current of life on and on.

 

The night train rolls on… in this second world’s burning.  The fire of night. 

As the dogs harmonise in the night with the poets who sing their verses.

The night was made for dogs to sing into and the poets’ to serenade and serenade.

Blackest night lights up night with his song.  The muses kiss the cortex.

 

Once this light has deserted us: once the light has gone.

The blood pulsates until it coagulates into a poem – amongst breeze & brine.

And so what is hope: the invisible mistress?  And why do we need it?

And that passion that flows from you, making new cities.

 

Two reminders of a kiss – in the shadows by clock tower in the town square.

Hopelessness is a solitary room, that you have the key.

The fire you have ignites and quenches as the sea sprays

The self-defined poet is drawn up in the song & carved from marble.

 

 

Jonathan Beale writes from England.