Jonathan Beale- Three Poems

A possible Bowie cut up lyric

1. From Viaticum  by John Pack

My mind was racing

It was some years from now.

                                                James Fenton

Ravines shoaling were as we waited

Temple’s rhythm calling

For wishbones caught in

Through lichen’s guide

They will last within this

Termless threshold.

Then – beyond… beyond

Towards the waiting faces

Through the rivers interior drum

Dust runs after the cloud

Still beyond the threshold

Yes, still bey-ond that

Thres- hold

That… thr - thr - threshold…

Until the deer prints

This…. his mountain….

The last Lear before the stage door

‘We throw flowers on the casket to make death smell better….’ Rollo May 

After Robert Stephens’ King Lear 1993

That footpath which leads

us all to King Lear’s door.

Angers torrent

grows ever colder –

Becoming a spent landscape.

His final performance

Left him long alone –

Long before the end of the run.

The Green Room

missed his presence.  

Becoming something

He’d never been….

The ‘off stage character’

Lear had become something else:

The creaking, creaking gate.

The flowers and applause

grabbed the moment.

Fading into the night

The night was full of

young Edmunds’ in their

mystery – in their skulduggery.

He’d lost his way to Lear’s

own door & somehow he

stumbled through the

garden gate.  After the final curtain.

16 Years after….

A visit with Christopher & Don, Santa Monica Canyon 1984

After David Hockney’s painting

The artist in the east - writer in the west

They have boxed the compass.

(in their own private way, their own style).

Why is the sphere so economic?

The scientist questions as the artist accepts

The globe is spinning still on its spindle. 

In the unengaging world – where the industriousness

Of the world of the brush and pen find.

And can be unacknowledged – still they beaver

On and on, in the world of words untangling

the tread of clarity and redefining the world

In another shape and form and style. 

As they look circumnavigating the globe

They’re eyes pass forming…

a perfect circle and a perfect world.

Orwell’s prediction, just around the corner.

How the world’s taxonomy falls into boxes

& cubes this perfectly Post Cubist manor.