Strider Marcus Jones

Poetry

 

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The Portal in the Woods

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Seeing somnambulist sunrise

Through open window

Touch your face

After love rides

On moon tides

In ebb and flow

At tantric pace-

Love resides

Tasted

No asides

Wasted

Spices of the flesh

Soaking rooms in Marrakesh

How I ate your truffle in Zanzibar

While you smoked my long cigar.

 

Back home-

Tribes of bloods

And druids roam

Seeking out the overgrown

Portal in the woods

Where we hondfast

In this present of the past

Dance chanting

In stone bone circles

Like ooparts

Practicing

Magical arts

Settling

What chaos hurtles-

Reconnecting rhythms

In living and dead

To those algorithms

In nature's head.

 

We are rustic-

Romantic

In land and sky

The  air  fire  water

To warriors who slaughter

If Us or Them must die.

We wake

For clambake

Pleasure

In a cauldron lake

Of limbs together

Then cut sods of peat

From the bog under our feet

Exposing the pasts

That never last.

 

 

Cubist Ghettos

 

I think

To shrink

The distance

Of resistance

Inside self

To all else-

 

Knowing

Showing

Vulnerability

In the mystery

Leaves what is closed

Openly exposed-

 

To explanation

Under examination

When there isn’t one

That hasn’t gone

Until roof floor and sky door

Are no more-

 

Only roulette rubbles

Of drone troubles

Imprisoning

Reasoning

In cubist ghettos

Wearing jazz stilettos-

 

Flashing flamingo legs

To pink paradise Harlem heads

While new trees grow up mute

And ripen with strange fruit

Some whites too this time

A drowned boy me and mine.

 

 

The Forest of Forgets

i don't do remembers, or regrets,
not knowing, i belong in what comes next-
without the edge and angle of pretext,
find me in the forest of forgets-

watching your perfections dance and breathe
in my fires flames then read out gypsy leaves;
imagining your whispers in the wind and trees-
before they fade, and fall, and leave.

back inside the house, picture rails
of love hang empty
from bent hooks, that promised plenty,
leaving frameless tales in musty trails-

to dusty cabinets of more
trinkets and traces-
whose duality displaces
sky and floor.

 

The Head in His Fedora Hat

 

a lonely man,

cigarette,

rain

and music

is a poem

moving,

not knowing-

a caravan,

whose journey does not expect

to go back

and explain

how everyone's ruts

have the same

blood and vein.

 

the head in his fedora hat

bows to no one's grip,

brim tilted into the borderless

plain

so his outlaw wit

can confess

and remain

a storyteller,

that hobo fella

listening like a barfly

for a while

and slow-winged butterfly

whose smile

they can't close the shutters on

or stop talking about

when he walks out

and is gone.

 

whisky and tequila

and a woman, who loves to feel ya

inside

and outside

her

when ya move

and live as one,

brings you closer

in simplistic

unmaterialistic

grooved

muse Babylon.

 

this is so,

when he stands with hopes head,

arms and legs

all aflow

in her Galadriel glow

with mithril breath kisses

condensing sensed wishes

of reality and dream

felt and seen

under that

fedora hat

inhaling smoke

as he sang and spoke

stranger fella

storyteller.

 

Hopper's Ladies

​

you stay and grow

more mysterioso

but familiar

in my interior-

with voices peeled

full of field

of fruiting orange trees

fertile to orchard breeze

soaked in summer rains

so each refrain all remains.

 

not afraid of contrast,

closed and opened in the past

and present, this isolation of Hopper's ladies,

sat, thinking in and out of ifs and maybes

in a diner, reading on a chair or bed

knowing what wants to be said

to someone

who is coming or gone-

 

such subsidence

into silence

is a unilateral curve

of moments

and movements

that swerve

a straight lifetime

to independence

in dependence

touching sublime

rich roots

then ripe fruits.

 

we share their flesh and flutes

in ribosomes and delicious shoots

that release love-

no, not just the fingered glove

to wear

and curl up with in a chair,

but loving kindness

cloaked in timeless

density and tone

in settled loam-

beyond lonely apartments in skyscrapers

and empty newspapers,

or small town life

gutting you with gossip’s knife.

 

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Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from England with deep Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry are modern, traditional, mythical, sometimes erotic, surreal and metaphysical. When not writing, he can be heard playing his saxophone and clarinet (just ask his neighbours). 

 

His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, India and Switzerland in numerous publications including DM; mgv2 Publishing Anthology; And Agamemnon Dead; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; A New Ulster/Anu; Outburst Poetry Magazine; The Galway Review; The Honest Ulsterman Magazine; The Lonely Crowd Magazine; Section 8 Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts; Don't Be Afraid: Anthology To Seamus Heaney; Dead Snakes Poetry Magazine; Panoplyzine  Poetry Magazine; Syzygy Poetry Journal Issue 1 and Ammagazine/Angry Manifesto Issue 3.

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