Sunday, May 15, 2016

Jonathan Beale- Three Poems


The Cuban Cars

The colours are as states to the stars
Sharks circle under the weight of this ocean.
These bloodied Chevy’s down
but never broken. Still found playing

the game; running, drinking, playing cards
(just like their owners).  Casting an eye
from our table in La Guarida seeing across
the roof tops woven together by clothes lines

Against an army of straw hats, throbbing
street basses lubricated vessels of Daiquiri
Cuba Libre and the lush Cuban Ginger
the plod pressure here is a slow burning cigar

This own private mythology this other classicism 
This Havanan air leaves the recipients
Drunk and drunk and needing more however
Thin however old: each dawn bring a fresh sparkle



Dawn chorus in Moscow

I remembered the blackbird in the garden
Airing his song among the flora and fauna 

Now as distant Jupiter or Neptune
Here in the cold Russian night (or morning to be correct)

I lay here unable to sleep against Moscow’s
Urbane symphony no Mayakovsky Theatre

The birds converse to my exclusion
I try work out their meaning and meaning.

Life picks you and carries you on its current
The viabilities catch and divert

The birds here touch my mind
I cannot know what’s memory or aural



For the ghosts of they who passed by the night before

Early Sunday Morning 1930 by Edward Hopper

You don’t see us
Along life’s rails
The sleepers and paths
That veers away from
The split infinite.
Of the fire and
Passed by; under the window’s
Eyes, closed on the world.

The rats and foxes
On night maneuverers.
You cannot see them in doorways
Sanctuaries of the bum.
Sevenday absenteeists.     
Words that smooth and caress
All lovers are blind except for Echo –
A cast in these vast stone artefacts.

These places to store…
Created for building & making.
And ‘no’ not us, we’re the bums – lost, strayed.
Just the bums invisible, yet there.
There is reason.  There must be.  Reason!
Kant’s mind occupied him a lifetime
Sorting those colossal pieces of,
Bishop & knight …

We feel - the fork
No address: no, no, no,
Begging breeds, no ingenuity
The cream always finds
The way up – the wise will
Wield a new way.
We sit, sharing stories
So old now, they become rusted.

Stuck in time.  Their cells, their D.N.A.
Become and the story: that grows differently
The scene remains the same.
Life remains until the day grows.
The light cuts the polished shop window.
They have passed away.
The eyes of the morale and the moneyed
Will not see them today.




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