Poesie des Maskenzug

Jonathan Beale ~ Bill Mayer ~ Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 

 

 

Jonathan Beale

The power and the passion

 

Beginnings show us where and how the landscape is:

Each eternal infinite ache that greets - each eternal infinite new day.

Within the accidental mania of each new day.  Something always breaks.

And yet remains unobtainable in everything.  Otherwise all is lost.

 

Your orchid face against the forest of my nights tower:

Glimmering light makes shadows, giving life to shadows.

The puppet master gives all commands

Your gravity keeps me by a thread in the wind.

 

You are mine in the vacuum of all absence

The dulling faces trawl about their business of life:

As mountains block the light I found the darkened corner

And lay until morning.  When the sun will wake us.

 

 

King Lear

In a Russian perspective 

 

The Cyrillic tongue lent her-self to this slough of life

here in this inevitable frozen winter:

Inevitable.  Inevitable.  Inevitable.  

Within this architecture, this blueprint.

An evergreen psychocartograhpy

From leaf to love to loss. 

The throaty brogue makes whole

His life - staid to this point - 

Folded this way and that until the weakened

four score years - lays his soul to Bedlam.

Drowning in psychopathology

Edmund’s consummate silky smooth tongue 

Enmesh:  the need that reason, not.

Death whispers – that all so familiar off stage character.  

 

 

Cephalonia

 

The strange dream of now

We were drunk on the Greek air

As it greeted us.  Elmore Leonard’s

Narrative - threading

The words to Proust, echoing

À la recherche du temps perdu. 

The Greek towering worlds of

Argostoli, this queen of the Ionian

Delicately highlighting Proust’s

Perfectly parallel universe,

Completes this worlds day, perfectly.

 

 

 

Jonathan Beale has 300 plus poems published in such journals as Decanto, Penwood Review, The Screech Owl, Danse Macabre, DM du Jour, Poetic Diversity, Voices of Israel in English, MiracleEzine, Voices of Hellenism Literary Journal, The Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears, Down in the Dirt, & (Drowning: Down in the Dirt, July ‘13), The English Chicago Review, Mad Swirl, Poetry Cornwall, Leaves of Ink, Ariadne’s Thread, Bijou Poetry Review, Calvary Cross, Deadsnakes Review, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, The Dawntreader, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Pyrokinection, Festival of Language, ‘Don’t Be Afraid: An Anthology to Seamus Heaney’, Ygdrasil, the Four Seasons Anthology and The Seventh Quarry.  He was commended in Decanto’s and Café Writers’ Poetry Competitions of 2012. He studied philosophy at Birkbeck College London and now lives in Surrey, England. His premiere poetry collection, The Destinations of Raxiera, is available from Hammer & Anvil Books at Amazon.com.

 

 

 

Bill Mayer

Drei Operngedichte

 

What Siegfried and Tristan Drink, and Why

The potion is for betrayal. It gives us permission
to ruin our lives. Not to forget, but excuse.
It is strange how much we know
and how fervently we deny it, gulping down
whatever is at hand, whatever someone conveniently gives us,
a great flapping of wings that both astonishes and distracts.
In order to say we were faithful-faithless,
demonstrate our pain, justify the damage, mostly to ourselves.
Too canny for amnesia, too clever for oblivion,
we look out over the cliff in the half light,
waiting with our servant, whose role is also equivocal,
for the ship that never comes. Or bound joyfully into the fire,
a confidence without expectation, no reward or hereafter.
The potion prepares us by destroying hope.

 

 

Elsa

When they brought her before them to be questioned about her murdered brother,
she told them only of her dream. Though that made them angry,
and the crowd began to murmur, wanting blood, thinking she was both homicidal
and crazy. But she, still and rapt, spoke of the hero in her dream
who would protect her, and with absolute confidence, waited for him to arrive.
To have that confidence, to which we are all entitled, seems a gift, a miracle.
We accept it naturally in the opera and are, in fact, annoyed when later she begins to doubt.
Annoyed at her for being weak, or else angry at the unfair predicament
in which she is placed, perhaps blaming the Knight, or society,
we see her as victim, just as we see ourselves. We never think
we would have stood in that sweating crowd hating her beauty, and crying out for revenge.
We are secretly glad when she fails;
we do not believe her miracle and then find it fitting when she no longer can.

In the stillness late at night, I have lain awake in my sleeping bag,
my eyes open, my senses alert, wanting something magical to appear;
just as, when a child, I expected God to provide the proper evidence,
an airplane flying past when I wished, or something rather more dramatic
of my own choosing, a personal appearance, just for me. That night, it was aliens,
some flash in the great night sky, the brilliant green light from behind the black ridge
rising and swooping down on me, the mesquite ghostly, wavering in the sudden wind.
Forgetting the miracle is already here, in the distant calling of coyotes,
in the pleasure of just being in the great desert, and that silence.

Elsa is available to something fantastic, a swan drawing the shining Knight across the water,
trusting in her knowledge. I hold her close to me, knowing we will both doubt
the clear evidence tomorrow, claim with indignation that it never existed,
that others will assist us in our doubt, will whisper a conviction that we are not worthy,
are poor, helpless, sinful things. We’ll watch that marvel recede across the water,
victim only of ourselves, weak only in that we wish to be.

Next time, dear Elsa, whether in that great desert or the dense, low forests of the Brabant,
we will not make these same mistakes. Instead turn to the night sky,
to the alien inside us, and welcome him. There will be no more expectation
or hope for miracles. By then, they will be unnecessary.

 

 

The Emperor Turns to Stone

 

I feel it now, as we drive through the Austrian countryside.
I doubt either of us knows what is unspoken, only that something is.
It is a weird conversation we make; intimacy made its structure,
and yet we act almost as strangers. Ghosts hang in the air like mist,
or the metal grey Donau that moves swiftly, silently, east.
I hear it when I walk over the bridge from Mautern to Krems
after midnight. A man walks unsteadily in the dimness towards me.
I think perhaps he will jump, or maybe is too drunk to jump,
though the walkway is wooden slats next to the narrow pavement
and you can see the water rushing far below. When he finally approaches,
I greet him, but he says nothing, eyes glazed as he moves forward,
now half way across. Maybe the sound of the river eases his pain.
It fills the space around us as nothing did when I was almost twenty,
and had come home from college and sat in the den with my father,
the silence between us growing larger, immense as a river.
Where did it flow, that silence, the constraint between us?
Er wird zu Stein. But who is there to rescue him, or me?
As I walk along the river in the deep night after, and hear
only my footsteps and breathing in the sleeping city of Krems,
or drive later among the vineyards in the soft mist, heavy
with the unspoken, I feel my eyes moving while the rest of me
begins to freeze. Hard veins of granite and mica in me,
porphyry and feldspar, chunks of loess for my hands.
I sit behind the wheel conscious of my growing stiffness.
I am stone, my father is stone, my friend is stone.
Who will give his shadow for me, who would take mine?

 

 

 

Bill Mayer's latest contributions to DM are from Articulate Matter (Paroikia Press) Bill's fourth book, with an introduction by Joseph Stroud. He has just had a photographic exhibition at the Mythos Fine Art Gallery in Berkeley, California, and still imports German and Austrian wine. He writes from Berkeley.

 

 

 

Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Survivalists

They say a
Cockroach
Can survive
Sixty days
In a bottle
Of beer.

Me too.

 

 

Santa Sangre

In the poetry workshop
I learned to hide
My pen
Until the poem was worth
Writing in blood
The famous poet
Told the Yogi

Next time
Hide the poem
Was his reply

 

 

The Old Neighborhood

You fucked my sister,
Didn't you, she said
Brandishing a spatula

You don't have a sister,
I said,
Suddenly desiring flapjacks.

You created an imaginary
Sister with big tits
And fucked her in
Your dreams,
Didn't you, you bastard?

Yes, I was forced to confess,
I fucked your big-titted
Sister in a dream,
And she had red hair.

Tuesdays were always
Strange around there.

 

 

 

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is the editor of Zombie Logic Press. He is a Devo fan and a Cubs fan. (Ahem. - ed.) His work has appeared in DM, Chiron Review, Exquisite Corpse, Bogg, Pearl, Slipstream and Gargoyle.