Jonathan Beale- Three Poems

Absinthe

from the painting Absinthe 1902 Alex Torneman 1880 1925

Now her days have grown long & dark

And again darker still. The slippery green

beast erodes and corrodes….

She is now lost:  behind the masses

and the wintering sun – life has grown blurred

as memory has grown increasingly empty.

Her hat once peaked in grander days

has now slipped down toward – her own

private inferno marked by pennilessness.

She now must live among the shadows,

Their shadows, her back to them as

they go about – their lives blind to her as they pass.

Her eyes are now cold, cold, and hard

Her eyes devoid love - soulless

The Thin black petals of her pupils empty.   

The day, now dark. Spent, gone and lost

down and down.  Believing and dreaming

The gleaming luring green she can overcome.

As the candle burns slower & lower and Lower & slower. 

The cigarette smoulders away as her consumptive

nature.  The world’s weight flicks past….she’s extinguished.   

Departing

Watching those hulks go

Passing along somehow just

Blown along with all manor

Of colours shapes and sizes

Places written across (unlike)

Me or you – our place or our city

Not marked on us

We were untied

How close to those

Steel breasts we are

We’re like demo graphs

Knew us too well.

Once they passed on and over

To their new day and me to and mine

The days departing as an

Tide we knew only tomorrow 

The muses tease a poet  

            Earth receiving receiving

And beholden to the sod. The sod

            And what of life that’s peeling

Shows an idea but never the true God

            Of the metre in which you write

So strangely, so strangely

            It’s on to keep the sacraments out of sight

As you are so ungainly.

            And why does the north wind blow so cold

And the time of man so short

            Is all that glitters not gold?

Or is it not as we thought

            …And then.  The day light is due. The dawn. The dawn

Why did the troglodyte come out?

            To shop, celebrate, or mourn

Cordially chatting above a whisper or a shout

            And then, like a mother recognised the time

To pass and to take the exit required

            Time had passed eroded as if in lime

And left spent cold and hard only to be admired