Jonathan Beale- Three Poems

Artist’s dine together  

After the empty space – freezing

Colour breeds stillness

Waiting for it to come.

The world, in its’ beginning –

the subject caught in the artists mind

develops into an unreal object.

Where the artist transfers his world on to another

The weight of transference:

The wait for the aperitif.

The evening rolls on & around.

The air is as easy as art is virtue

as life is to mood of cool and stylish.

He was as avuncular as Freud - to the

true dreamscape of the unreality…

we tasted (aperitifs’ began the talk followed

 as the moon’s airy dull misty mornings on the shore

they Nibble.  This immortality…The void …

They drink tickles their minds….

Exclaiming to the table

The strange avuncular figure across the nights beckoning

As the wine and talk mingle.

A cigarette, more wine.

A metamorphosis of identity.

As a thing of flesh and blood – being made in to something other than itself. 

Leaving a cold Germanic tradition to root in its roots.

On Jacobs Ladder between Ernst and Chagall

The floating world….

Strange poetry {(is what?) Fugitive as (wrong side of Pound or Wittgenstein) Wyndham knew and relayed}. Tarr.

Convulsive identity must live, a death must kill stagnant identity

A brush blocking the colour -

A stroke of inanity  -

Made aware only in time to come, waiting.

“Creator, you denied!”  Yet creator you were; the contradiction of the worlds

Both in and outside of it. The clock ticks. 

Transference – viewer to some fourth dimensional eye who may understand –

…if it can be bothered

Suddenly I fall before the lust for life….

As is the Temptation of St Antony but Saint Jude really knew.

Conceptual geometry breathes fire and life.

Brushes colour eyes, hope imagination shape theme and form are all I have.

Immortality as the smoke meanders out the window

We leave into the night, still not knowing

And strangely caring even less

The bed beckons. Even the muses never sleep.

The reader

From a photograph by Paul Harris

1.

Caught in black and white; caught in times gel

The stage is set for grey.  Grey the queen of modes

The lines perpendicular – as Jacob’s ladder

            There he sits

                        Inside a world – Within an external world

The lined spaces bottled metaphors

As ships or butterflies’ in bottles

Empty vessels waiting to filled

 Of the drunk whose hope is lost in the nights yearning.

2.

The vast feet like those of nation

In it is history failing and state - as-it-is-written

He can fall his foundations are

His words are within

Crossed legged arms poised for flight or fight

Electing every time for flight – freedom

Of the non-conflict – there is only where a conflict

Is what make both an idea and idea become whole

Become real

3.

The his greyness from a white purity and balance

He so it’s at one end never in the middle; never his stance

He could sit and read his days away, and on until they

Are all gone to bed and given up?  And his eye worn away

They are like the slates some gone some failed and lost

Like even a memory so full must make a sacrifice for the cost

The cold poverty makes no effect on the reader’s eye or mind

Known only as a verb rather nouns eternal bind

His world ticks on silently chiming against the wind

Here he cannot be held to account as this not as the sin is.    

 

On Beale St

The white on green steered me miraculously to -

Somewhere between St Patricks Nights 

And downtown in the 1920’s….to find the key

Between heaven & hell for which Jacobs tool took me.   

Then Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin voice came over me

this is the greatest ‘eye’ poem you’ll ever know -

sound and vision together “You’ll ever see!”

So then, I suppose as Virgil lead Dante, now we must go!

A Saxophone drew us in to The Tap Bar – the 12 bar blues

Hypnotised us or me at least. I found myself walking in a dream

I wondered through - this accidental thoroughfare

of downtown Memphis, Tennessee.

 

Feeling like I’d downed  in some voodoo bourbon

It’s all there, all there on Beale St, the true elixir of life -

Since 18 when seeds were sown for this Eden

There is just blues and Bourbon fumes to breathe.

Finding Zip TN 38103 a place divined by blues and Jazz

and divided by and united in musicality in all its base forms.

The threadbare lives – interwoven with deceitful chords and riffs

in a new and blinding truth or rather trying to be.

Evoking a hard unmistakable mood moulded from a wheel

Of man’s invention from God to Copernicus – the centre of which is Beale St.

The exclamation punctuating the moment seen in its myopic trance

unable to refuse or resist the touch of the air. Nothing is stale with its passing

Each voice and soul is a pen to write and scratch their opinion

on the pale blue slate of today, on now! The past is printed in the memory

and upon the stone that is always heard to moan. Hung-over I was left dry

Waking mind and soul were saturated needing to dry.