you taste of cinnamon and fish when you wish to be romantic- and the ciphers of our thoughts make ringlets with their noughts immersed in magic- like mithril mail around me stove dark forest, pink flesh sea touchings tantric- make reality and myths converge in elven riffs of music, so we dance it- symbols to the scenes of conflict, mavericks in dreams that now sit- listening to these pots and kettles blackening on the fire of rhetoric and murderous mettles- before we both retire to our own script.
Strider Marcus Jones | Chipmunk in Thiruvananthapuram
Does Her Far Beauty Know
does her
far beauty know
where my thoughts go
without her
when i walk
in lush rain lashing down-
squatting in enclosed fields
of remote wheat and barley
around told feudal cities and towns-
to talk
to fate and how it feels
to be emptied entirely
of hopes sounds-
these evolutions
fill rich men's purses
and revolutions
are poor universes
that try to bend
the unequal
to be equal
without end.
does her
far beauty know
where my thoughts go
with her
when i walk
in lush rain lashing down-
soaked in moments come to this
paradise and precipice
belonging
bonding
thoughts
serendipitous
blowing into us-
gives shelter to the self
of us and other else-
unlike bare rooms we rent
to leave behind
when change moves us to fit
into it-
with only our echo and scent
of passion and mind.
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 Portal In The Woods
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 handfast
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 natures 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.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He edits The Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of the Poetry Society, he has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. In his five published books of poetry Strider Marcus Jones reveals a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His poetry has been published in numerous publications including: The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine;The Recusant, The Lampeter Review and Dissident Voice.
somewhere in everywhere everybody happens in the patterns, like flocks of rocks gathered to the lobby of Saturn's rings, graded and sorted into ugly and beautiful useful things; all something out of nothing but not absolute nothing: it seems matter that Mad Hatter and plectrums of light make tunes of self similarity settle and fight repeating this same existence without remembered resistance.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in over 200 publications worldwide including: Dreich Magazine; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Melbourne Culture Corner; Literary Yard Journal; The Galway Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rye Whiskey Review; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; and Dissident Voice.
each evening is like taking off my coat. i sit down apart from the day and nothing happens. i let silence sing her supernatural note- in the air, i drown in how the lonely play as reality slackens. curdling in a chair with arms of broken branches that used to be and went somewhere in circumstance and chances- now greying, like wild hair at the end of all its dances with the gravity gone from its romances- i feel time’s weight compress the emptiness of fate, into some sort of nothing that held my hand, and left me something- to understand.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, and nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
“THE OTHER SELF” by Strider Marcus Jones Posted by MEELOSMOMon18 MARCH, 2024
Photo by JJ Jordan on Pexels.com
the other self abstracted in the press of turned down pages, gets mucked up in the mess and shows how unlaminated age is. if nothing else- these nude notes being played behind the curtain where the stage is, by soloist strings and hermit woodwinds- are far hopes of uncertain opening chords calling out to the duet i haven't come to yet. and afterwards, if all those afterwards could talk and kiss and spout, there would be no more misery move it out.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
Strider Marcus Jones (UK)
POSTED ON JANUARY 23, 2024 BY AGRONSH
MEPHISTOPHELES IS NOT ABOUT
this coffee is hot-
but paradise is cold,
and Mephistopheles is not
about, tempting me with gold
and pouting pleasures of the flesh
with their alluring mesh-
so Morpheus to hold
in broken secrets being told.
this dreamer in his underwear,
parts from the bottle, and leaves it there-
some touched,
not much
with stale camembert-
no fun alone,
moving around inside, unknown-
disturbed from bed to chair.
it synchronizes well,
how past and present both compel
a sleep on understanding-
the beat of love with sand in
the texture of its taste,
trapped in silence,
waxed to waste-
with nothings nonsense
in its face.
PARADISE OF ABYSS
opening old years
self similarity
untreated
is repeated
in a dirty
old paper rag
skin inky
and bloated with sag
full of swag
from eavesdropping ears
holding fears
the evidence said
deleted or deliberately
left in bags to lie dead
by compromised cops Met in the city.
close secret
policy briefings
disguised as drink and eat
social meetings
in elite
homes
move in and out of step
so utterly
and fluttery
her red hair
so well aware
of its butterfly effect
sending stooges and editors’ hacking
with immune transnational backing
two murdered angels silent phones
and others, famous or unknown
muckraking sad or sordid stories
and abusing soldiers shilling glories.
another summer Family dinner
butchers democracy
into a loser and winner
plutocracy
of front row millionaires
sitting and blurring
for fat cats punting
and purring
aped by the rootless
and lootless
rioting and burning
because nothing is theirs
in this towering
new world’s derivatives and shares.
wilful blindness
is a smug jest
of i confess
without punishment
for the richest
ten per cent.
wearing his blue clown pants
the red face rants
it wasn’t me
i didn’t do His dance
by giving my less vetted We
friend a second chance.
this quiff boss
salesman’s gloss
tries to bury the pattern
of before
in after what happened
hiding more
covering it fast
in long grass.
going back is forward now
Tom exposing understanding how
the past came to this
paradise of abyss.
CLAY AND WOOD
remember me
in clay
and wood
the way
we made free
complete love
on the floor
and kitchen table
against the door
and in the cradle
of an old armchair
in timber moonlight
and sun streaking bright
through branches of tousled hair-
and yes, it changes
and rearranges
these same more
intimate compartments
with other shared escarpments,
but we can still adore
the way our words and skin
age at their core
with meaning
like your fingers
modelling me
here now, in us
love’s tempest we.
STANDING STONES
i can still smell his shirt
when he tramped home from work
and slumped down beside us
in his chair,
lips cracked, shaking cotton fibres
from his tusselled hair.
he was like that:
never wore a vain hat,
or mask to hide the man he was
and what he was
from himself
or anyone else.
he told me my first joke,
showed me how to roll a smoke
in his thick, stained fingers.
oh, how his voice echo lingers
sowing moral ethics
into politics-
through the night,
like Lenin, in reason and fight,
making Attlee and Bevan’s lintels
bridge
the standing stones of Marx and Engels
over my youth.
rising like monolith’s
of truth,
opposing the dangers
of privileged
abyss,
i watched, his turned wisdom change us
into opposite strangers.
Us
we are composed
out of the fate of stars
a light dark light so old
and tuned that regards
most of Us as Other
peasants
who are clothed
without privileged presents
to burn wood in cracked stoves
under crumbling cover.
stitched to Their time
we entwine
in our own interpretation
of this spinning station.
only burlesque bright skies
and the iris flowers of abandoned eyes
can change the fixed views
of a selfish landscape
into united hues
of equal state.
our reality is broken-
we are the hosts
and ghosts
who have been stolen
the violated tokens
of corporatist totems
screen greed being traded
and invaded
then beaten for protesting by police
working for the Thief.
BHR Issue 17 Fall 2023 | Blue Heron Review
STRIDER MARCUS JONES
On the Road to Serendipity
i came by love
one evening
in a cathode rectangle,
through clouds of ether
on the road to
serendipity,
on The Great Wheel Of Time.
then alone in the forest
of old Lothlorien,
i wove a tapestry
from her infinite beauty
and timid nature to
time then, time now, time on
composed of smiling pixels.
I feel it now,
wet and wild and warm—
entering my essence
to its hearth’s heart’s core;
but stop the words
before they say too much
and return, like empty echoes.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His poetry has been published in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine, The Racket Journal, Trouvaille Review, dyst Literary Journal, Impspired Magazine, Melbourne Culture Corner, Literary Yard Journal, The Honest Ulsterman, Poppy Road Review, The Galway Review, Cajun Mutt Press, Rusty Truck Magazine, Rye Whiskey Review, Deep Water Literary Journal, The Huffington Post USA, The Stray Branch Literary Magazine, Crack The Spine Literary Magazine, A New Ulster, The Lampeter Review, Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine, and Dissident Voice.
Strider Marcus Jones (UK)
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.
CLOUDS OF CHAOTIC CROWDS
SmittenBitten
Like FaustusLeave the house dust
With fool’s gold
Unsold.
This conveyor belt lair
A castle in the air
For Dante’s dreams of doubt
To wander about
In, with voices that pretend
To be a different friendOh my, what a frame,
Too big to blame
And beyond a simple say
To save and staySo, close the dungeon door
To be what you were before
And walk away
Into the clouds
Of chaotic crowds
Falling as rain
On sterile plain.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil
servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland
and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry
Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of
The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry
https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick,
moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.His
poetry has been published in numerous publications including:
Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst
Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Melbourne Culture Corner;
Literary Yard Journal; The Honest Ulsterman; Poppy Road Review; The Galway Review;
Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary
Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine
Literary Magazine; A New Ulster; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine and
Dissident Voice.
I’M GETTING OLD NOW
i’m getting old now-
you know,
like that tree in the yard
with those thick cracks
in its skinbark
that tell you
the surface of its lived-in secrets.
my eyes,
have sunk too inward
in sleepless sockets
to playback images
of ghosts-
so make do with words
and hear the sounds
of my years in yourself.
childhood-
riding a rusty three-wheel bike
to shelled-out houses bombed in the blitz,
then zinging home zapped in mud
to wolf down chicken soup
over lumpy mashed potato for tea-
with bare feet sticking on cold kitchen lino
i shivered watching the candle burn down
racing to finish a book i found in a bin-
before Mam showed me her empty purse
and robbed the gas meter-
the twenty shillings
stained the red formica table
like pieces of the man’s brains
splattered all over the back seat
of his symbolic limousine
as i watched history brush out her silent secrets.
Under A Rowan Tree
under a rowan tree,
wet wings over me-
open metaphorically,
to drippled drenches
that soak through senses
combing ecstasy.
the long grass sways with rhythmic dancing
oblivious to times passing,
and murmurs flake from summer wind
on bough awake with happening-
afterwards,
in whispered chords-
the pollinated pieces of confession
pout love without repression,
watching pagan sun
through rowan blossom.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. All Rights Reserved
When You Came In
the air
Tore into shreds
around our heads
in the room
when you came in.
Bare
words
flew out of your chair
like accusing,
Hysterical birds
and pecked at my plume
of silence
spitting vile violence.
I wore the harness
of your darkness
and pulled its load
of false truth
behind my youth-
you told me i was old
and i lost a tooth.
in the scene, that cut the cable,
while we both sat at the table
in the garden-
love's sour jasmine
drooped,
poisoned in its ruined roots,
then you wept to me
and went to him
tears
trailing,
years
jading,
fading
beauty
again.
that was there.
that was then.
a solar flare
of raven hair
around its star,
last light more magnificent than most,
close but far.
Poet from England. Editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. A Poetry Society member, his five published poetry books reveal a maverick, roaming cities, tooting his sax.
https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/
‘My Lothlorien is a more peaceful world, with more tolerance of other individuals and cultures. Not perfect by any stretch but a place where people laugh, have their neighbours back and work with each other. A place of social justice and equality, music, poetry and art.’
In conversation with Strider Marcus Jones
i’m come home again
in your Lothlorien
Strider Marcus Jones wrote these lines about an idyllic utopia that was named Lothlorien by JRR Tolkien in Lord of the Rings. Jones writes beautiful poetry that touches the heart with its music and lyricality and recreates a world that hums with peace, beauty, acceptance and tolerance – values that have become more precious than gems in the current world of war, strife and distress. He has created his own Lothlorien in the form of a journal which he has named after the elfin utopia of Tolkien. An avid reader and connoisseur of arts, for him all his appreciation congeals in the form of poetry which draws from music, art and he says, perhaps even his legal training! Let us stride into his poetic universe to uncover more about a man who seems to be reclusive and shy about facing fame and says he learns from not just greats but every poet he publishes.
What started you out as a writer? What got your muse going and when?
In my childhood, I sought ways to escape the poverty of the slums in Salford. My escape, while gathering floorboards from condemned houses every winter and carrying them through back entries in crunching snow to our flat, above two shops for my dad to chop up and burn on the fire was to live in my imagination. I was an explorer and archaeologist discovering lost civilisations and portals to new dimensions our mind’s had lost the ability to see and travel between since the time of the druids. Indoors I devoured books on ancient history, artists, and poetry from the library. I was fascinated by the works of Picasso, Gauguin, Bruegel and many others and sketched some of their paintings. Then one day, my pencil stopped sketching and started to compose words into lines that became “raw” poems. My first mentor was Anne Ryan, who taught me English Literature at High School when I was fourteen. Before this, I had never told anyone I was writing poetry. My parents, siblings and friends only found out when I was in my twenties and comfortable in myself with being a ranger, a maverick in reality and imagination.
When I read your poetry, I am left wondering… Do you see yourself in the tradition of a gypsy/mendicant singing verses or more as a courtly troubadour or something else?
I don’t have the legs to be a courtly troubadour in tights and my voice sounds like a blacksmith pounding a lump of metal on his anvil.
I feel and relate to being gypsy and am proud of my Celtic roots passed down to me from my Irish Gypsy grandmother on my Father’s side who read the tea leaves, keys, rings, and other items telling people’s fortunes for years with scary accuracy. I seem to have inherited some of her seer abilities for premonition.
Like my evening single malt whiskey, age has matured the idealism of my youth and hardened my resolve to give something back to the world and society for giving me this longevity in it. The knocks from the rough and tumble of life have hardened my edges, but my inner core still glows like Aragorn’s calm courage and determination in the quest to bring about a more just and fairer world that protects its innocent people and polluted environment. Since Woody Guthrie, Tom Waits and Bukowski are influences I identify with deeply, I suppose I am a mendicant in some of my poetry but a romantic and revolutionary too, influenced by Neruda, Rumi, Byron, and Shelley shielded by The Tree of Life in Tolkien’s Lothlorien:
THE HEAD IN HIS FEDORA HAT
a lonely man,
cigarette,
rain
and music
in a strange wind blowing
moving,
not knowing,
a gypsy caravan
whose journey doesn't expect
to go back
and explain
why everyone's ruts have the same
blood and vein.
the head in his fedora hat
bows to no one's grip
brim tilted inwards
concealing his vineyards
of lyrical prose
in a chaos composed
to be exposed,
go, git
awed
and jawed
perfect and flawed,
songs from the borderless
plain
where no one has domain
and his outlaw wit
must confess
to remain
a storyteller
that hobo fella
a listening barfly
for a while,
the word-winged butterfly
whose style
they can't close the shutters on
or stop talking about
when he walks out
and is gone.
whiskey and tequila
with a woman who can feel ya
inside her, and know she's not Ophelia
as ya move as one,
to a closer and simplistic,
unmaterialistic
tribal Babylon,
becomes so,
when she stands, spread
all arms and legs
in her Eskimo
Galadriel glow,
sharing mithril breath,
no more suburban settlements
and tortured tenements
of death,
just a fenceless forest
and mountain quests
with a place to rest
on her suckled breasts,
hanging high, swinging slow.
war clouds HARP
through stripped leaves and bark,
where bodies sleeping in houseboat bones
reflect and creak in cobbled stones:
smokey sparks from smoked cigars
drop like meteorites from streetlight stars,
as cordons crush civil rights
under Faust's fascist Fahrenheit’s.
one more whiskey for the road.
another story lived and told
under that
fedora hat
inhaling smoke
as he sang and spoke
stranger fella
storyteller.
You seem to have a fascination for JRR Tolkien. You have a poem and a journal by the name of Lothlorien. Why this fascination? Do you think that JRR Tolkien is relevant in the current context? We are after all, reverting to a situation similar to a hundred years ago.
Yes, on all counts. Tolkien and his Lord of The Rings trilogy have been part of my life since I first read one summer when I was twelve years old. My young mind, starved of adventure and elevenses in Salford’s slums, willingly absorbed the myths and magic, lore’s and legends beguiling me to enter the ‘Age of Man’. This living in a time of relative peace alongside other, more ancient races with musical-poetic languages reflected part of my own reality in living through the Cold War decades under the impending doom of nuclear annihilation where daily life often felt the shadows cast by the Cuban Missile Crisis, war in Vietnam, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and famine in Biafra.
Sauron’s evil eye and invading armies echo an outgoing President Eisenhower’s ominous warning to curtail the influence and corruption of the banking-military-industrial-complex. Instead, Martin Luther King and President John F Kennedy were assassinated and a surveillance state and gilded slavery ideology is being imposed globally using artificial intelligence. Ancient civilisations in Iraq and Libya have been destroyed for control of oil and to maintain global Petro dollar power. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings is just as relevant today in Ukraine, Yemen, and Syria and as it was through the slaughters of Verdun, the Somme and Flanders Fields. It is a warning that good must prevail over evil and this burden is borne by those with courage and conviction who cannot be corrupted.
What is your Lothlorien? What does poetry mean to you and your existence?
My Lothlorien is a more peaceful world, with more tolerance of other individuals and cultures. Not perfect by any stretch but a place where people laugh, have their neighbours back and work with each other. A place of social justice and equality, music, poetry and art. It is no place for racism, sexism, ageism, corruption, or war. A kind of homestead with birdsong, forest, mountains and rivers, preferably in the French Pyrenees or Alaskan Bush. A place of words composed into poems and stories read and spoken, passed down and added to by each inspired generation in the Native American tradition. Poetry is all about communication and community in my existence. We are caretakers of our words and the world.
You have used Orwell, Gaugin and many more references in your poetry. Which are the writers and artists that influence you the most? What do you find fascinating about them?
Individuality of expression through fiction, poetry, art and music fascinates me. Now, at 62 years of age so many have influenced my poetry with or without me knowing or realising it. These include:
From the past – Chaucer, Tennyson, Shelley, Keats, Blake, W.B. Yeats, Auden, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Sexton, Plath, Kerouac, Heaney, Lorca, Orwell, Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Tolkien, Steinbeck, Heller, Donaldson, P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Vonnegut, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Rumi, E.E.Cummings, Neruda, Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Dylan, Tom Waits. So many.
From now – They know who they are. I have published their work in Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
You play instruments — saxophone and clarinet? Does that impact your poetry?
Saying I play instruments is a huge stretch of the imagination. I get strange notes out of my saxophone and clarinet that must sound like a hurricane blowing in anyone’s ears. My black Labrador, Mysty, covers her ears with her paws but I enjoy trying to play. I love jazz music, anything from the 1920s to early 70s, but Miles Davis, Monk, Coltrane, Mingus, and Ornette Coleman took jazz music to a level that transcends mortality.
Jazz music continues to be a profound influence in my poetry. I will explain how.
Does any kind of music impact your writing?
In some way, unbeknown to me, jazz music, particularly that of Davis, Monk and Coltrane runs parallel to and interweaves with the rhythms of how I think when I write poetry. It closes my mind to the distractions of the outside world. The sound of those perfect and imperfect notes opens a door in my mind, I close my eyes, float into this dark room and my senses fill with images and words, which hover in the air like musical notes where I conduct them into rhythms and phrases bonded to a theme. Some become poems, others disintegrate into specks of dust, the moment gone. Sometimes, the idea and train of thought sleeps in my subconscious for years. This happened with my poems “Visigoth Rover” and “Life is Flamenco” which come from my sojourns randomly wandering through Spain but were born years later listening to Paco playing Spanish guitar and Flamenco music which is another key influence in my poetry.
VISIGOTH ROVER
i went on the bus to Cordoba,
and tried to find the Moor's
left over
in their excavated floors
and mosaic courtyards,
with hanging flowers brightly chameleon
against whitewashed walls
carrying calls
behind gated iron bars-
but they were gone
leaving mosque arches
and carved stories
to God's doors.
in those ancient streets
where everybody meets-
i saw the old successful men
with their younger women again,
sat in chrome slat chairs,
drinking coffee to cover
their vain love affairs-
and every breast,
was like the crest
of a soft ridge
as i peeped over
the castle wall and Roman bridge
like a Visigoth rover.
soft hand tapping on shoulder,
heavy hair
and beauty older,
the gypsy lady gave her clover
to borrowed breath,
embroidering it for death,
adding more to less
like the colours fading in her dress.
time and tune are too planned
to understand
her Trevi fountain of prediction,
or the dirty Bernini hand
shaping its description.
LIFE IS FLAMENCO
why can't i walk as far
and smoke more tobacco,
or play my Spanish guitar
like Paco,
putting rhythms and feelings
without old ceilings
you've never heard
before in a word.
life is flamenco,
to come and go
high and low
fast and slow-
she loves him,
he loves her
and their shades within
caress and spur
in a ride and dance
of tempestuous romance.
outback, in Andalucian ease,
i embrace you, like melted breeze
amongst ripe olive trees-
dark and different,
all manly scent
and mind unkempt.
like i do,
Picasso knew
everything about you
when he drew
your elongated arms and legs
around me, in this perpetual bed
of emotion
and motion
for these soft geometric angles
in my finger strokes
and exhaled smokes
of rhythmic bangles
to circle colour your Celtic skin
with primitive phthalo blue
pigment in wiccan tattoo
before entering
vibrating wings
through thrumming strings
of wild lucid moments
in eternal components.
i can walk as far
and smoke more tobacco,
and play my Spanish guitar
like Paco.
Tell us about how music and language weaves into your poetry — “i’m come home again” — there is no effort at punctuation — and yet the poem is clear and lyrical. I really love this poem – Lothlorien. Can you tell me how you handle the basic tool of words and grammar in your poetry?
In my mind, music is poetry through sound instead of words. Like words, the combinations of notes and pauses have intricate rhythms and phrases. In many of my poems like “Lothlorien” and those above, I weave the rhythms and phrases of jazz music or Spanish guitar and words together with run on lines so there is no need for punctuation. This gives these poems, and many others a spontaneity and energy which feels more natural and real and has a potent, more immediate impact on the senses and emotions when combined with images and happenings. This whole process feels natural to me. It began in my early twenties, when I was listening to old Blues and the likes of Leadbelly and Robert Johnson alongside Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Tom Waits and Neil Young. These are the raw underbelly notes of my pain and anger at the world. Jazz is the mellow top notes. I hope this makes sense. It is hard to explain something that is natural to and part of who I am, so forgive any lack of clarity.
Sometimes, I just like to add a moment of mischievous fun to a serious poem as in these two:
REJECTING OVID
the fabulous beauty of your face-
so esoteric,
not always in this place-
beguiles me.
it's late, mesmeric
smile is but a base,
a film to interface
with the movements of the mind behind it.
my smile, me-
like Thomas O'Malley
the alley
cat reclining on a tin bin lid
with fishy whiskers-
turns the ink in the valley
of your quills
into script,
while i sit
and sip
your syllables
with fresh red sepals of hibiscus,
rejecting Ovid
and his Amores
for your stories.
OLD CAFE
a rest, from swinging bar
and animals in the abattoir-
to smoke in mental thinks
spoken holding cooling drinks.
counting out old coppers to be fed
in the set squares of blue and red
plastic tablecloth-
just enough to break up bread in thick barley broth.
Jesus is late
after saying he was coming
back to share the wealth and real estate
of capitalist cunning.
maybe. just maybe.
put another song on the jukebox baby:
no more heroes anymore.
what are we fighting for --
he's hiding in hymns and chants,
in those Monty Python underpants,
from this coalition of new McCarthy's
and it's institutions of Moriarty's.
some shepherds’ sheep will do this dance
in hypothermic trance,
for one pound an hour
like a shamed flower,
watched by sinister sentinels-
while scratched tubular bells,
summon all to Sunday service
where invisible myths exist-
to a shamed flower
with supernatural power
come the hour.
How do you compose a poem? Is it spontaneous or is it something you do? Do you hear the lines or voices or is it in some other way?
Most poems come from life’s experiences and observations of people, places, nature, and events. These can be from the past, or present and sometimes premonitions of the future which often overlap depending on the theme/s and where I want it to go.
When it comes to composing a poem, I am not robotic, and neither is my Muse. I have no set time and never write for the sake of writing something each day which I find disrupts my subconscious process. A poem can begin at any time of day or night, but my preferred time to think and write is mid-evening going through to witching hour and beyond. I put some music on low, pour myself a slow whiskey and sit down in my favourite chair with pen and folded paper. I never try to force a poem. The urge to write just occurs. I don’t know how, or why. It just happens. My subconscious finds the thread, thinks it through and the poem begins to unravel on the page. I care about the poems since they care about the world and the people in it. So, I often agonise for days and in some cases years, over lines and words and structure, crossing out words and whole lines until they feel right. Editing, and redrafting is a crucial part of the writing process and requires courage and discipline. Butchering your own work feels barbaric in the moment but enhances your poetic voice and strengthens the impact of a poem on the reader.
You are a lawyer and in the Civil Service in UK. How does law blend with poetry?
I am a law graduate and retired legal adviser to the magistrates’ courts/civil servant who retired early. I have never practiced as a lawyer.
I never think about law when I write, but I am sure the discipline brings organisation to the orderly chaos of Spinoza’s universe that resembles the space inside my head.
Tell us about your journal. When and how did you start it?
I started Lothlorien Poetry Journal in January 2021. I publish the online rolling blog of poetry and fiction and printed book volumes — currently standing at eight issues featuring established and emerging poets and fiction writers published on the LPJ blog.
We are a friendly literary journal featuring free verse/rhyming/experimental poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and occasional interviews with poets.
We love poems about enchantment, fantasy, fairy tale, folklore, dreams, dystopian, flora and fauna, magical realism, romance, and anything hiding deep in-between the cracks.
I publish Lothlorien Poetry Journal periodically, 4-6 issues every year. Contributors to each issue (selected from the best work published on the Journal’s Blog) are notified prior to publication and receive a free PDF copy of the issue that features their work.
We nominate for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
What do you look for in a poet as a publisher?
I look for a poet or writer’s distinct voice, that spark of originality in their theme/s, the rhythm and musicality in their language and phrasing. I have no boundaries as to style, form, or subject – prose, rhyming, free verse, sonnets, haiku, experimental or mavericks who break the rules and write about the darker underbelly of society – if it is good and not offensive, racist or sexist Lothlorien Poetry Journal could be the natural home for your work. The best way to find out is to come to Lothlorien, have a read, and decide to submit.
LOTHLORIEN
i'm come home again
in your Lothlorien
to marinate my mind
in your words,
and stand behind
good tribes grown blind,
trapped in old absurd
regressive reasons
and selfish treasons.
in this cast of strife
the Tree of Life
embraces innocent ghosts,
slain by Sauron's hosts-
and their falling cries
make us wise
enough to rise
up in a fellowship of friends
to oppose Mordor's ends
and smote this evil stronger
and longer
for each one of us that dies.
i'm come home again
in your Lothlorien,
persuading
yellow snapdragons
to take wing
and un-fang serpent krakens-
while i bring
all the races
to resume
their bloom
as equals in equal spaces
by removing
and muting
the chorus of crickets
who cheat them from chambered thickets,
hiding corruptions older than long grass
that still fag for favours asked.
i'm come home again
in your Lothlorien
where corporate warfare
and workfare
on health
and welfare
infests our tribal bodies
and separate self
in political lobbies
so conscience can't care
or share
worth and wealth-
to rally drones
of walking bones,
too tired
and uninspired
to think things through
and the powerless who see it true.
red unites, blue divides,
which one are you
and what will you do
when reason decides.
IN THE TALK OF MY TOBACCO SMOKE
i have disconnected self
from the wire of the world
retreated to this unmade croft
of wild grass and savage stone
moored mountains
set in sea
blue black green grey
dyed all the colours of my mood
and liquid language-
to climb rocks
instead of rungs
living with them
moving around their settlements
of revolutionary random place
for simple solitary glory.
i am reduced again
to elements and matter
that barter her body for food
teasing and turning
her flesh to take words and plough.
rapid rain
slaps the skin
on honest hands
strongly gentle
while sowing seeds
the way i touch my lover
in the talk of my tobacco smoke:
now she knows
she tastes
like all the drops
of my dreams
falling on the forest
of our Lothlorien.
Thanks for your lovely poetry and time.
(This is an online interview conducted by Mitali Chakravarty.)
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
1opoems = (5) poems + 5 = TEN poems….. By Strider Marcus Jones
WHY I LIKE IT: Poetry Editor HEZEKIAH writes… Strider Marcus Jones plays on words like an inveterate, pathological lyre as he bows and strums us, plucking me, at least, from my melancholy melodies, monotonous monotones and doggerel doldrums with his mellifluous meter and tone. (I spitefully longed to eliminate at least one of his ten poems, but woe is me.) His imagery is imaginatively immersing; his phrasing and figures of speech overflowing; and, his symbolism, story, syntax and sound spill over the page with cascading cadence in a most spellbinding scintillating style. (Besides, he owes me money and cheats at cards.) Here is a sampling of the scoundrels verse: “to watch you / swan turned shrew- / hairbrush out all memory and meaning,” “the heart of truth- / intact in youth,” A “Savage” homage to Gauguin: “beauty and syphilis happily cohabit,” “inseminating womb / selected by pheromones” (Presumably referring Paul’s pursuits after he left the banking business.) Lots more gems here, but don’t underlook ‘IN THE COME AND GO, I MIND YOU’ If I understand anything about inyou-end-oh, the double entendres are delightful… Nice tribute to Tolkien in there somewhere too for you LOTR devotees. Strider’s light, slight-of-hand writing is as masterful as his pockets are shallow and his head is swelled… (Spacing is poet’s own.)HS
SALTED SLUG
your words stung, and hung me upside down, inside out, to watch you swan turned shrew
hairbrush out all memory and meaning, from those fresco pictures on the wet plaster ceiling
that my Michelangelo took years to paint, in glorious colours, now flaked and full of hate. the lights of our Pleiades went out, with no new songs to sing and talk about
to hear deaths symphony alone, split and splattered, opened on the floor, repenting for nothing, evermore
like a salted slug, curdled and curled up on the rug
to melt away while you spoon and my colours fade to grey. the heart of truth
intact in youth, fractures into fronds of lies and trust, destined to become a hollow husk
but i found myself again in hopes congealing pools and left the field of fools to someone else
and put her finished book back on its shelf.
CHILDHOOD FIRES
late afternoon winter fingers nomads in snow numb knuckles and nails on two boys in scuffed shoes and ripped coats carrying four planks of wood from condemned houses down dark jitty’s slipping on dog shit into back yard to make warm fires early evening dad cooking neck end stew thick with potato dumplings and herbs on top of bread soaked in gravy i saw the hole in the ceiling holding the foot that jumped off bunk beds but dad didn’t mind he had just sawed the knob off the banister to get an old wardrobe upstairs and made us a longbow and cricket bat it was fun being poor like other families after dark all sat down reading and talking in candle light with parents silent to each other our sudden laughter like sparks glowing and fading dancing in flames and wood smoke unlike the children who died in a fire next door then we played cards and i called my dad a cunt for trumping my king but he let me keep the word
LOTHLORIEN
i’m come home again in your Lothlorien to marinate my mind in your words, and stand behind good tribes grown blind, trapped in old absurd regressive reasons and selfish treasons. in this cast of strife the Tree Of Life embraces innocent ghosts, slain by Sauron’s hosts; and their falling cries make us wise enough to rise up in a fellowship of friends to oppose Mordor’s ends and smote this evil stronger and longer for each one of us that dies.
i’m come home again in your Lothlorien, persuading yellow snapdragons to take wing and un-fang serpent krakens, while i bring all the races to resume their bloom as equals in equal spaces by removing and muting the chorus of crickets who cheat them from chambered thickets, hiding corruptions older than long grass that still fag for favours asked.
i’m come home again in your Lothlorien where corporate warfare and workfare on health and welfare infests our tribal bodies and separate self in political lobbies so conscience can’t care or share worth and wealth: to rally drones of walking bones, too tired and uninspired to think things through and the powerless who see it true. red unites, blue divides, which one are you and what will you do when reason decides.
WOODED WINDOWS
as this long life slowly goes i find myself returning to look through wooded windows. forward or back, empires and regimes remain in pyramids of power butchering the blameless for glorious gain. feudal soldiers firing guns and wingless birds dropping smart bombs on mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, follow higher orders to modernise older civilisations repeating what history has taught us. in turn, their towers of class and cash will crumble and crash on top of Ozymandias. hey now, woods of winter leafless grip and fractures split drawing us into it. love slide in days through summer heat waves and old woodland ways with us licking then dripping and sticking chanting wiccan songs embraced in pagan bonds living light, loving long, fingers painting runes on skin back to the beginning when freedom wasn’t sin.
OVIRI ( The Savage – Paul Gauguin in Tahiti )
woman,
wearing the conscience of the world
you make me want less civilisation and more meaning. drinking absinthe together, hand rolling and smoking cigars
being is, what it really is
fucking on palm leaves under tropical rain. beauty and syphilis happily cohabit, painting your colours on a parallel canvas to exhibit in Paris the paradox of you.
somewhere in your arms
i forget my savage self, inseminating womb selected by pheromones at the pace of evolution. later. I vomited arsenic on the mountain and returned to sup morphine. spread ointments on the sores, and ask: where do we come from. what are we. where are we going.
IT’S SO QUIET
it’s so quiet our eloquent words dying on a diet of midnight toast with Orwell’s ghost
looking so tubercular in a tweed jacket pencilling notes on a lung black cigarette packet
our Winston, wronged for a woman and sin re-wrote history on scrolls thought down tubes that came to him in the Ministry Of Truth Of Fools where conscience learns to lie within. not like today the smug-sly haves say and look away so sure there’s nothing wrong with wanting more, or drown their sorrows downing bootleg gin knowing tomorrows truth is paper thin. . at home in sensory perception with tapped and tracked phone the Thought Police arrest me in the corridors of affection
where dictators wear, red then blue, reversible coats in collapsing houses, all self-made and self-paid smarmy scrotes
now the Round Table of real red politics is only fable on the pyre of ghostly heretics. they are rubbing out all the contusions and solitary doubt, with confusions and illusions through wired media defined in their secret encyclopedia
where summit and boardroom and conclave engineer us from birth to grave.
like the birds, i will have to eat the firethorn berries that ripen but sleep to keep the words of revolution alive and warm this winter, with resolution gathering us, to its lantern in the bleak, to be reborn and speak.
MIRROR, MIRROR
mirror, mirror, in the hall age comes to us all, and looks wither through the play of years slipped away, away in the lapsed lingo of street and road, where tangents meet and move with innocence up summits of experience told, whose fruits we eat then weep when they implode. these reflections in this autumn of adventurous directions, mean more standing in the door of ebb and flow watching people come and go wearing introspections of what they know after listening to a stranger’s small confessions on midnight radio.
THE COMET OF HER WORDS
he sheds his matelessness and shapeless statelessness undormed to lie with her undressed in woods earth warmed. after drinking and thinking in the hollow trunk of an ancient tree she reads his tea leaves
and he hears her nature in the pattern of her years, saying now we happen and the comet of her words weaves its sentences in his, let’s go of bleakness walking through wilderness light footsteps in senses.
IN THE COME AND GO, I MIND YOU
in the middle, where i find you, i wriggle in behind you all the way.
in the come and go, i mind you, what we were is reconciled, you let it stay.
this template, for being tender, is our state to remember into grey;
beyond the time of soil and ember, into nothingness’s timbre- be it, play.
LOOKING IN LOVE’S GLASS
looking in love’s glass at what we have drank and haven’t drank to quench our thirst slow and fast not the first not the last- beauty is flesh is your womanliness and i find your mind grows branches into mine we climb
so compatible and indelible, to others forgettable crashed dream on screen
we know we go out of scene.
THE POET SPEAKS:
I like the company of people but prefer solitude. I like to listen to people talk, the way they see it and say it. For me, poetry spans our past, present and future. These poems, and those in my books, are about the themes of love, relationships, peace, war, racial, economic and sexual equality, cultural integration, poverty, mythical romance, the magic of childhood and experience of growing old as a Bohemian maverick. The strings of chance and consequences meld with music and art in Spinoza’s orderly chaos of the universe.
Life is hard and uncertain for most of us now, but also rare in our corner of the universe, so I strive to express my own understanding of it. Thinking time is my creative cove. My English teacher, Anne Ryan inspired me to write poetry when I was thirteen. The poems have grown with me and reflect much of who I am now. Some poems sleep for years. Mere jumbles of words, themes and rhythms in subconscious gaseous clouds. Their form and meaning evolve in Spinoza’s orderly chaos. Other poems just happen, triggered by a single word or phrase, a sound, smell, or shape that relates to something from our past, present, or future. Writing a good poem makes me feel like the artist who can paint, or the musician who can play – joy in creating something that others enjoy and feel inspired to try doing themselves.
My first poetical influences were the Tin Pan Alley lyricists and composers like Sammy Cahn, Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart. I love the fun, rhythm and interplay between lyrics and music. Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen influence my poetry in the same way, allowing me to experiment with metaphor, form and rhythms.
Relationships and love are one of the main themes in my poetry. Two books which have travelled with me through life are Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Tess Of The D’urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy is a big influence on some of my work. My favourite poets who have influenced my work include: Shelley, Keats, Yeats, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Bishop, Szymborska, Langston Hughes, Plath, Art Crane, Larkin, Forough Farrokhzad, Neruda, Rumi and Heaney.
What inspires you?
Salford – my home town. My working class Irish and Welsh roots. My Muse and Children. The natural and industrial landscape. Archaeology. Astronomy. Social history. The struggle to overcome adversity and oppression. Contemporary poet, musician and artist friends. Trying to play more than three notes on my saxophone and clarinet. Working on my next poem.
Who are some writers you admire?
Adding to those previously mentioned – e e cummings, Bukowski, Brian Aldiss, Chaucer, Marlowe.
What is your writing process?
I write most days with pen on A4 paper folded into quarters. Strings of ideas and phrases. Any time of day, but I prefer the evening and through the night. Some poems survive the first draft. Others go through minor edits to language, theme and structure. Some get butchered and others are sent to hibernate until I return to them.
AUTHOR BIO: Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between forests, mountains, cities and coasts playing his saxophone and clarinet in warm solitude.
INTERVIEW—Issue 10 (Poetry) Poetry Editor Hezekiah Scretch with Strider Marcus Jones
Greetings, O Glorious Bard! Tom and Charles asked (or was it badgered) me to select the poet of my choice for the Poetry Interview to be published in Issue 10 (November) and you were the one. If you’d be interested in participating I’ve some questions for you about your poetry and your writing in general. I am brashly smitten by your work and all I want to do is read more, more and more. Answer as you please. There is no word count so your answers can be as long or a short as you like. I would need them no later than October 31 ( if I’m not to end up in the dog house with its flea-infested mat). Looking forward to hearing from you.
HS: Can you describe what aspect of your nature draws you to write poetry?
SMJ: I have always been sensitive to people and my surroundings and often sense things before they happen. My father thought I had inherited this mild psychic reaction to things and situations around me from my Gypsy grandmother. Perhaps, and with the forward looking Aquarian in me and my two Piscean fishes – one swimming through radical and unnatural changes into the future, the other time travelling back into the past, writing poetry has been my natural form of expression about the interconnectedness of Life, Nature, Science and the Arts. I believe that most things are sentient – the universe, people, animals, bees, the mountains, forests, bodies of water, air and land. In the distant past, we understood this and that the symbiotic relationships once formed co-existed with each other. Through the quest for progress and profit, humankind has lost its way, thinks it is smart enough to go it alone and rule like usurping Gods over everything else. Myths and Legends exist as warnings from the past. Humankind wants the power and discards everything else. I explore these metaphysical relationships when I write poetry and feel their influence on the world.
HS: The breadth of your writing is replete with classical references and metaphysical reflections; do you find such profound thoughts intrusive in your day-to-day life and feel obliged to exercise them on the page…avoiding costly therapy sessions?
SMJ: I am not a classics scholar and knew nothing about my metaphysical reflections until a novelist friend pointed them out to me. I write what I feel and sense, often in fluid stream of consciousness. I hate punctuation – it looks like dirty marks in a poem – when you think and the lines come in your mind, you don’t think capital letter, comma full stop. The run on lines, line breaks and where the thought ends are the natural punctuation and rhythm in my poems. I like to leave the reader some freedom to interpret this in their own way. Classical references, I have absorbed subconsciously on life’s road sometimes pop into my head as I write. I don’t know how, or why and I am just as likely to reference Monty Python underpants, Thomas O’Malley the Alley Cat, Tom Waits and whisky, Monk’s jazz or Picasso’s and Hopper’s paintings and Birlini’s sculptures in a serious or comical way. I don’t find them intrusive in my day-to-day life – more like old friends meeting up in a café cos it’s been a while. I don’t know any poets who can afford therapy sessions. A therapist would need a therapist after a consultation with a poet.
HS: Do you set scheduled time aside to write your poetry? Or, like a saxophone, you just pick it up when the mood striker joneses you?
SMJ: I prefer to be a free spirit, not a robot. I have no set times to write, but am a nighthawk – love the quiet hours to write or play my sax and clarinet badly.
HS: Can you attribute your muse in part to your legal training, blowing into brass instruments, civil service or some other tragic event?
SMJ: Like most people, I absorb what life throws at me and try to stay strong. I am not afraid to change the road I’m on and have done so when the road forks in this lifetime. My muse has a will of her own and the urge to write just occurs. I don’t know how, or why. It just happens at any time and place, so I always have a pen and scrap of paper in my pocket with other man-junk to scrawl down the idea or opening lines. My legal training and civil service work has given me a forensic way of thinking mellowed by listening to Jazz and tooting my sax.
HS: Who do you like to read or have been influenced by in your writing?
SMJ: From the past – Chaucer, Tennyson, Shelley, Keats, , Blake, W.B. Yeats, Auden, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Sexton, Plath, Kerouac, Heaney, Lorca, Orwell, Dickens, Tolkien, Steinbeck, Heller, Donaldson, P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Vonnegut, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Rumi, e.e.cummings, Neruda..so many. From now – They know who they are. I have published their work in Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
HS: Do you as often labour over lines or do they more so flow as you go once the spirit moves you?
SMJ: Most poems start off as a thought or idea coiled tight, like a clock spring or ball of string. I don’t force the process. The subconscious finds the thread, thinks it through and the poem begins to unravel on the page. When I was younger, I tended to let it just pour out and the poem was what it was. I did not have the craft or discipline to edit it. I have lugged around a hold-all full of journals and notebooks, with over 800 poems I wrote between the age of 13-25. Bad poems with some half decent ideas that make me cringe and want to burn them. Since then, I have tended to care about the poems since they care about the world and the people in it. Now, I can labour for days and in some cases years, over lines and words and structure, crossing out words and whole lines until they feel right now and after I have popped my clogs. Butchering your own work feels barbaric in the moment, but enhances your poetic voice and the honest impact of a poem on the reader.
HS: Last question. How do you feel about growing old?
MSJ: “yéni ve lintë yuldar avánier” -“the years have passed like swift draughts”
Peace, Love and Light, Strider
Lovely work, Thanks for an illuminating interview! Hezekiah Scretch Poetry Editor/FOTD
dark drawn man in two – legged sedan, Diogenes least the more i am. a worn down crease — opens like blotched butterfly wings, that drop in tokens on imaginings — lost, but living through drought and giving.
dark drawn man of wiccan, glam rock and folk — who likes a smoke; hermit and ham, sometimes a dam for the waterfall of it all — bohemian and gothic, romantic, hypnotic, un-photographic hates cam.
dark drawn man whose thought beats flam on sticks of words his focus and blurs without tricks of prussian blue and cadmium red the way Modigliani drew his mistress on his bed.
Sophocles was right! the darkest days, catch chinks of light — running out of Ram, but love is who i am.
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.
scenting tree bark and squelchy moss with pheromones.
naked tall bones
hiding in robes of silver birches,
walk with random tribes of bluebells
bringing us to pagan churches-
where we leave offerings
for mineral blessings
on trickling rocks-
like hat bells
and single socks.
at the base,
we looked up at Arthur or Merlin’s face,
trying to rewind
and prime
our supernatural clocks
to that forgotten time
we can’t replace,
but only got
the echo of physical and mental mines
under this surface.
no more homes
gather round the circle stones-
no more druid dreads
to connect our disconnected threads
up on Alderley Edge-
and as we wandered back down
to get on the train out of town,
i felt my ear-ring
while I was thinking-
and found a ribbon of moss
spangled in my celtic cross.
QUANTUM IN SPACETIME
sorrow sings
like medicine in me,
bewitching strings
of melancholy;
heavying fate
like a paperweight-
crushing cryptically.
emotions close
round your briar rose-
ham actors in a dream,
with parts to play
on this Broadway-
sit back, unfold the scene.
given what you know,
besame, besame mucho-
through quantums years in spacetime’s strings
we make each moments grain of sand-
evolve from past to present in our hand
to give this now new meanings.
WILD HORSES
Horses play Run ragged, roam free, And after today Remember me.
Horses run, And trot, and gait, Have your fun- Before its too late:
For time is faster Even than you- You can’t outlast her And mankind too.
Tell the rabbits And birds and dogs without cares, To hide their habits- The world’s not theirs:
For man the hunter And ender of life, Is killing the world With technologies knife.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in over 200 publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Melbourne Culture Corner and Literary Yard Journal.
i sense you in summer wind and try to redefine the Other ring that binds us in this tormenting show of come and go.
in the sentence of a sound i hear your pain then turn its fate to break the blame mending happenings and broken strings.
footfalls confide shadows duet in our divide on a bridge of dark persuasions i follow you into night through corridors uncurtained dreams and surreal scenes.
time’s corrugated face marks motions set to mimic leaned upon the balcony of fate where rites and runes evoked her scent to hear the music in her ways smile and quicken upon his gaze.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
Smitten- Bitten Like Faustus- Leave the house dust With fools gold Unsold. This conveyor belt lair A castle in the air For Dante’s dreams of doubt To wander about In, with voices that pretend To be a different friend- Oh my, what a frame, Too big to blame And beyond a simple say To save and stay- So, close the dungeon door To be what you were before And walk away Into the clouds Of chaotic crowds Falling as rain On sterile plain.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal
A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in over 200 publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Melbourne Culture Corner and Literary Yard Journal.
HOT ROD
fast and furious
archangel in paint and chrome
brings me home-
purring megaphonious,
combusting with sav and sap
that i glimpse
peeking into warm grill chintz-
then she lifts her corset bonnet
and lets me touch her glinting bones
secreting home spun
pheromones
attracting, like moon and sun-
mysterious
and mnemonic
old senses,
fallow and fenced
soon become drenched
quiller and squirter
in that linguistic converter-
glow mapping,
overlapping,
slowly blown
in the metronome.
OLD CAFE
a rest, from swinging bar
and animals in the abattoir-
to smoke in mental thinks
spoken holding cooling drinks.
counting out old coppers to be fed
in the set squares of blue and red
plastic tablecloth-
just enough to break up bread in thick barley broth.
Jesus is late
after saying he was coming
back to share the wealth and real estate
of capitalist cunning.
maybe. just maybe.
put another song on the jukebox baby:
no more heroes anymore.
what are we fighting for-
he's hiding in hymns and chants,
in those Monty Python underpants,
from this coalition of new McCarthy's
and its institutions of Moriarty's.
some shepherd sheep will do this dance
in hypothermic trance,
for one pound an hour
like a shamed flower-
watched by sinister sentinels,
while scratched tubular bells,
summon all to Sunday service
where invisible myths exist-
to a shamed flower
with supernatural power
come the hour.
POMEGRANATE FLESH
ask those
who grow old-
some fruits are nicer
when they're riper.
you dont stop
the clock
on the one who chose
you to hold-
her pomegranate
is still your sonnet
of sepia feelings and flesh,
sensuously sweet and fresh.
although the mirror never lies,
it shows the beauty that lives
as it dies
and gives
its own reflection
of your perfection
to me
then and now,
each memory
taken
by the lenses
somehow,
preserved
by your words
and curves
in my senses.
our dance,
that thrilled
in its intricate
tango on the floor,
is still filled
with time intimate
romance
and more-
talking rubicon of reason,
in layer, upon layer of season
so sedimentary
since you entered me-
and i consumed
your silky mesh
of pink perfumed
pomegranate flesh
LOTHLORIEN
i'm come home again
in your Lothlorien
to marinate my mind
in your words,
and stand behind
good tribes grown blind,
trapped in old absurd
regressive reasons
and selfish treasons.
in this cast of strife
the Tree of Life
embraces innocent ghosts,
slain by Sauron's hosts-
and their falling cries
make us wise
enough to rise
up in a fellowship of friends
to oppose Mordor's ends
and smote this evil stronger
and longer
for each one of us that dies.
i'm come home again
in your Lothlorien,
persuading
yellow snapdragons
to take wing
and un-fang serpent krakens,
while i bring
all the races
to resume
their bloom
as equals in equal spaces
by removing
and muting
the chorus of crickets
who cheat them from chambered thickets,
hiding corruptions older than long grass
that still fag for favours asked.
i'm come home again
in your Lothlorien
where corporate warfare
and workfare
on health
and welfare
infests our tribal bodies
and separate self
in political lobbies-
so conscience can't care
or share
worth and wealth:
to rally drones
of walking bones,
too tired
and uninspired
to think things through
and the powerless who see it true.
red unites, blue divides,
which one are you
and what will you do
when reason decides.
I'M GETTING OLD NOW
i'm getting old now-
you know,
like that tree in the yard
with those thick cracks
in its skin bark
that tell you
the surface of its lived-in secrets.
my eyes,
have sunk too inward
in sleepless sockets
to playback images
of ghosts-
so, make do with words
and hear the sounds
of my years in yourself.
childhood-
riding a rusty three-wheel bike
to shelled-out houses bombed in the blitz,
then zinging home zapped in mud
to wolf down chicken soup
over lumpy mashed potato for tea-
with bare feet sticking on cold kitchen lino
i shivered watching the candle burn down
racing to finish a book i found in a bin-
before Mam showed me her empty purse
and robbed the gas meter-
the twenty shillings
stained the red formica table
like pieces of the man's brains
splattered all over the back seat
of his symbolic limousine
as i watched history brush out her silent secrets.
More bio: His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice. Check out the first 3 issues of the Lothlorien Journal see the website listed above for more & to order.
Poetry Drawer: Mavericks: The Blood That Makes Us Black: In Maid’s Water: The Head in his Fedora Hat by Strider Marcus Jones Posted on by Deborah Edgeley Mavericks you taste of cinnamon and fish when you wish to be romantic- and the ciphers of our thoughts make ringlets with their noughts immersed in magic- like mithril mail around me stove dark forest, pink flesh sea touchings tantric- make reality and myths converge in elven riffs of music, so we dance it- symbols to the scenes of conflict, mavericks in dreams that now sit- listening to these pots and kettles blackening on the fire of rhetoric and murderous mettles- before we both retire to our own script.
The Blood That Makes Us Black imagine yourself, in a photo-fit picture with every nothing that’s new- minus in health, quoting icons and scripture under the whole black and blue. optimum dreams turn out fake in the mirror facing what’s been like fallen heroes- in so many scenes like a ghost who is giver passing on wisdom, who knows- the blood that makes us black of two from one, is schooled by fungus fortunes and faiths old hat to be sold on- like tamed-trained gangs, making golden dunes.
In Maid’s Water we’ve left the well-footed road, the rutted and rebutted road of shadows cast by towered glass. opened closed curtains for fusty moths, chanted white spells with Wiccan’s goths; left pictured rooms and halls- become un-scriptured hills and squalls- in maid’s water pouring down her erect chalk man, like a wild gypsy, love tipsy partisan, smelling of cinnabar and his cigar, swirling like whirling clouds while the changed wind howls.
Minds and Musk so now we both came to this same branch and bough- no one else commutes from different roots. me carrying Celtic stones with runes on skin over bones- and you, in streams on evicted land trashed ancients panned- our truth dreams under star light crossing beams. in here, there is no mask of present building out the past with gilded Shard’s of steel and glass shutting out who shall not pass. the tree of life breathes a rebel destiny believes- we are minds and musk no more husks and dust.
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 a flow 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.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
You can find more of Strider’s work here on Ink Pantry.
sat with you, reflections bond over the pond of summer solstice,
and Mr Blue sky with eggy eye subliminally sends Otis
into ribbons and ripples of hair and faces, through sensual trickles in hidden places
that glances bring on summer wind. i know your notes tacking on water like paper boats,
and the rigging string vibrating through notches in the mast so love and living last.
###
LIFE IS FLAMENCO
why can’t i walk as far and smoke more tobacco, or play my Spanish guitar like Paco, putting rhythms and feelings without old ceilings you’ve never heard before in a word.
life is flamenco, to come and go high and low fast and slow-
she loves him, he loves her and their shades within caress and spur in a ride and dance of tempestuous romance.
outback, in Andalucien ease, i embrace you, like melted breeze amongst ripe olive trees- dark and different, all manly scent and mind unkempt.
like i do, Picasso knew everything about you when he drew your elongated arms and legs around me, in this perpetual bed of emotion and motion for these soft geometric angles in my finger strokes and exhaled smokes of rhythmic bangles to circle colour your Celtic skin with primitive phthalo blue pigment in wiccan tattoo before entering vibrating wings through thrumming strings of wild lucid moments in eternal components.
i can walk as far and smoke more tobacco, and play my Spanish guitar like Paco.
###
NURTURING EACH NOTE
lying back into you i share a smoke all sucked out and stroked thick cummings swallowed by you followed my drinking sips from licks of lips and clit. our closeness breaks the darkness open and such things in touchings spoken compose coupled music in the throat nurturing each note.
in here we hide under His sheet shroud from the unsettled crowd of happenings outside- top down tycoons and bankers, royalty and political cankers seedy greedy opulence driving past needy kettled poor pandemics to banquets rustling markets cash supporting famine and eugenics.
###
OLD CAFE
a rest, from swinging bar and animals in the abattoir- to smoke in mental thinks spoken holding cooling drinks.
counting out old coppers to be fed in the set squares of blue and red plastic table cloth- just enough to break up bread in thick barley broth.
Jesus is late after saying he was coming back to share the wealth and real estate of capitalist cunning.
maybe. just maybe. put another song on the jukebox baby: no more heroes anymore. what are we fighting for-
he’s hiding in hymns and chants, in those Monty Python underpants, from this coalition of new McCarthy’s and it’s institutions of Moriarty’s.
some shepherds sheep will do this dance in hypothermic trance, for one pound an hour like a shamed flower,
watched by sinister sentinels- while scratched tubular bells, summon all to sunday service where invisible myths exist-
to a shamed flower with supernatural power come the hour.
###
NO ROADS
with no roads on our map of conversation, we began without plan, and climbed, into the branches of imagination, past the twigs and leaves- those apothecaries of lost libation, into houred improvisation- through its desert wanting rain after years of stasis, in a slow camel train searching for that oasis- with moving dunes and negative runes fending off the grey in a charmed, nomadic way. happen then, that this cold acoustic tune, met your luteful lagoon of mosaical notes- and the baton moved, as was proved round the wheel with ambient spokes, conducting without rules our forgotten fools. somehow, go now, through the eye of words, to the heart of this rhythm and the scion of its schism; then home, like migrating birds into separate nests- for now, love rests.
###
LOVE IS STRIPPED TO SHARING BREAD
we were kissing and dancing to a kitchen song, talking with our wine and smoking bong; then you pushed your pierced pin of forged fire further in the groove of my desire with your tongue. later, up the creaking wooden escalator- “let me do you” i said peeling back your petals with my voice: love is stripped to sharing bread abroad-in plain rooms-where Nora and Joyce reject precious metals. it brings to craggy green cliffs that STILL talk- of two minds, in the sea born mist of one thought- why should four legs walk under clouds adrift. glum damp rock moss cups when we go to ground under body musk and pagan sound- the meaning of the hour when lit lusts flower fills the air everywhere at last and the future does not imitate the past.
###
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
does her far beauty know where my thoughts go without her when i walk in lush rain lashing down —
squatting in enclosed fields of remote wheat and barley around told feudal cities and towns — to talk to fate and how it feels to be emptied entirely of hopes sounds —
these evolutions fill rich men’s purses and revolutions are poor universes that try to bend the unequal to be equal without end.
does her far beauty know where my thoughts go with her when i walk in lush rain lashing down —
soaked in moments come to this paradise and precipice belonging bonding thoughts serendipitous blowing into us —
gives shelter to the self of us and other else — unlike bare rooms we rent to leave behind when change moves us to fit into it — with only our echo and scent of passion and mind.
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.
(ii)
CLOUDS OF CHAOTIC CROWDS
Smitten- Bitten Like Faustus- Leave the house dust With fool’s gold Unsold. This conveyor belt lair A castle in the air For Dante’s dreams of doubt To wander about In, with voices that pretend To be a different friend- Oh my, what a frame, Too big to blame And beyond a simple say To save and stay- So, close the dungeon door To be what you were before And walk away Into the clouds Of chaotic crowds Falling as rain On sterile plain.
(iii)
DOES HER FAR BEAUTY KNOW
does her far beauty know where my thoughts go without her when i walk in lush rain lashing down-
squatting in enclosed fields of remote wheat and barley around told feudal cities and towns- to talk to fate and how it feels to be emptied entirely of hopes sounds-
these evolutions fill rich men’s purses and revolutions are poor universes that try to bend the unequal to be equal without end.
does her far beauty know where my thoughts go with her when i walk in lush rain lashing down-
soaked in moments come to this paradise and precipice belonging bonding thoughts serendipitous blowing into us-
gives shelter to the self of us and other else- unlike bare rooms we rent to leave behind when change moves us to fit into it- with only our echo and scent of passion and mind.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; A New Ulster; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Piker Press; oppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice; & Poetry Life and Times,Artvilla.com.
when words don’t come easy they make do with silence and find something in nothing to say to each other when the absinthe runs out. his glass and ego are bigger than hers, his elbows sharper, stabbing into the table and the chambers of her heart cobalt clown without a smile. she looks away with his misery behind her eyes and sadness on her lips, back into her curves and the orange grove summer of her dress worn and blown by sepia time where she painted her cockus giganticus lying down naked for her brush and skin, mingling intimate scents undoing and doing each other. for some of us, living back then is more going forward than living in now and sitting hereat this table, with these glasses standing empty of absinthe, faces wanting hands to be a bridge of words and equal peace as Guernica approaches.
Lothlorien Poetry Journal’s first published volume of poetry and prose features the work of sixty- three internationally renowned poets and authors. Join us on our journey in The Fellowship of the Pen. Be moved and inspired by their individual poetic voices from every continent on Earth and discover that there is more to life that unites us than divides us.
Strider Marcus Jones – Editor
Contents – Poets
Editorial Poem by Strider Marcus Jones Pages
J S Watts
1. Bubblewitches 14-18
2. Craft
3. Two Crows
Steve Klepetar
1. On the Snowy Street 19-20
2. Unfinished House
3. Lazy Starling
Lauren Scharhag
1. Priestess 21-27
2 The Gilded Monk
3. Necromancy
4. Where Man Doth Not Inhabit
5. Orenda
John Drudge
1. A Hunger in Positano 28-31
2. At the Shore
3. Rage
4. Spout
5. The Pull of Stonehenge
Antonia Alexandra Klimenco
1. Irish Whisky 32-36
2. Pisces Rising or Why Mermaids Don’t Limp
3. If Ever
Gopal Lahiri
1. Reorder 37-39
2. Photo Frame
3. Unheard Echo
Adele Ogier Jones
1. Dragon mountain (i) 40-43
2. Dragon mountain (ii)
3. Dragon mountain (iii)
4. Growing earth
John Grey
1. Married Name 44-48
2. When the Other is Dreaming
3. Dan, the Naturalist
4. The Beach in Winter
Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon
1. Insomnia 49-53
2. Bonfire Night
3. His Mind Games
4. Devotion response to Trinity by Adelia Prado
5. Ardnamurchan Point
DAH
1. Existential trauma 54-59
2. Saying All There Is To Say
3. Invention Of A New Meaning
4. The Uncertainty Of Glass Locks
5. An Eye Is Seen, And Still Another
Louise Ceres
1. Count Voivode’s Valentine 60-63
2. Sacral Inner Space
3. The Black and Silver Realm
4. Insoluble Separation
Michael Minassian
1. Desire 63-67
2. Close Relatives
3. For The Rest Of Us
4. Light
5. Razor’s Dawn
Simra Sadaf
1. Wasted Youth 67-71
2. Autumns
3. Kite and Manjha
Moe Seager
1. November Western Pennsylvania 72-75
2. I October
3. Bird Talk
4. Valentine offering
Patricia Walsh
1. Asking for It 76-81
2. Praise of Zeitgeist
3. Pushing and Pulling Envelopes
4. Chocolate Soldier
5. Breaking Another Window
Scott Thomas Outlar
1. Masquerade 82-85
2. Of Frequencies Resplendent
3. Apples & Owls at Midnight (Space Wave Version)
Yuu Ikeda
1. Because, Although, But, I Love You 86-87
2. It Was My Life
J D Nelson
1. Why is there no world in the book? 88-89
2. Is that you humming?
3. Like smart a-macks that period o’ the text
Fotoula Reynolds
1. Harmony 90-91
2. Almost found
3. Language floats
Terry Wheeler things that splinter
1. Nomenclature 92-96
2. who
3. omelette
4. murakami
5. shadow play
Denise O’Hagan
1. Nature’s grand chandelier 97-100
2. Still the rain kept falling
Max Heinegg
1. Kidney Stone for Jeff Albertson 101-103
2. Stumper
3. The Groundhog of Gull Bay
4. Odd Man Out
5. Kindling
Attracta Fahy
1. The Blue Flower of Chernobyl 104-107
2. Tired of news
Stephen House
1. The Moo-Moo Café 108-112
2. Caroline
Lorraine Caputo
1. Iguana Dreams 112-115
2. Astray
3. Arica
4. Ghosts
Ryan Quinn Flanagan
1. Deck Chair 116-118
2. Apologies, Zephyr!
3. Hand’s On
4. Mustard Lip
5. Throwing the Game
Laily Mahoozi
1. Exile 119-122
2. Sterile Colour
3. Fixed
4. Revel
5. Diplomacy
Christopher Cadra
1. At Sea 123-124
2. Another
3. Omission
4. Maybe Zombies
Christine Tabaka
1. Darkness Unfolds 125-128
2. Dust to Dust
3. No Turning Back
4. Nursery Rhymes
G J Hart
1. How Things Begin 129-132
2. Morning Run
3. Washing Up
Lynda Tavakoli
1. Cold Tea 133-135
2. The Coldness of Crows
Prithvijeet Sinha
1. She Once Bloomed Like The Daisy 136-137
Elizabeth Mercurio
1. Elegy for Ophelia with the Sky Full 138-139
Robert ( Roibeard ) Shanahan
1. The Edenic Sequence 140-150
2. Mutualism
Christina Martin
1. The Gift 151-155
2. Paradise
3. Sea Haiku Sequence
4. Steamed Yellow
5. Sky Cow
Tim Heerdink
1. Final Flight as the Fog becomes Night 156-161
2. The Fourth Horseman
3. The Knottseau Well
4. TRAUM(A) for John Berryman
Isobel Granby
1. Tolkien Sonnet 1 162-163
2. Tolkien Sonnet 2
Poul Lynggaard Damgaard
1. The last human being 164-166
2. Notch
3. The distance of silence
Jeanna Ni Riordain
1. Beneath the Chimney 167-168
2. The city stirs to life
Tom Montag
1. From The Old Monk Poems 169-170
Susan Tepper
1. Withheld 171-172
John Patrick Robbins
1. Beyond The Deception 172-173
2. Death in Doses
3. New Poems In Old Shoes
Angel Edwards
1. Maybe Angel Wings 174-176
2. All of them Spirits
3. Bourbon
John W Sexton
1. Riding a Giraffe 177-178
Soodabeh Saeidnia
1. The Mansion She Inherited 178-181
2. Rootless
3. Garden of Memory
4. Micropoetry
Jonathan Butcher
1. A Swift Divide 182-185
2. Second Sight
3. Domestic Circus
4. The Opposite
Patricia Nelson
1. First Sailor 186-189
2. The Three Weird Sisters Speak to Macbeth
3. Macbeth
Michael Durack
1. Angel of Death 190-193
2. Venus And Madonna
3. A Key In The Lock
4. In The Forest of Language
Kathryn Crowley
1. Daisies In Jamjars 194-196
2. Ode To Crows
Roger Haydon
1. Our Privilege 197-199
2. Where I Walked as a Child
Sultana Raza
1. Keen on Tolkien 199-202
2. Epitaph
3. Orphic Crown
Januario Esteves
1. Caelum 203-204
2. Perseus
3. Libra
Margaret Kiernan
1. Flash Fiction 205-207
Grant Tarbard
1. Overture 208-209
2. Visit Your Blessings When You Exit The Gift Shop
Lothlorien Poetry Journal is a literary journal featuring free verse/rhyming/experimental poetry, short stories, flash fiction, video poems and occasional interviews with poets. Journey with us on the road to poems that linger and haunt. Discover poems of enchantment, fantasy, fairy tale, folklore, dreams, dystopian, flora and fauna, magical realism, romance, and anything hiding deep in-between the cracks.
Lothlorien Poetry Journal publishes periodically, 4-6 issues every year. Contributors to each issue ( selected from the best work published on the Journal’s Blog ) will be notified prior to publication and will receive a free PDF copy of the issue that features their work. A print and E-book version of each issue will be available to purchase from lulu.com and Amazon Books.
Lothlorien Poetry Journal nominates for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
I want to go Where words go After we say them And settle on their receivers thought To ease their mind if caught, And warm their heart throughout. I want to roam about Where words hang out When no one hears them, And watch them enter someone else Invisible with stealth To make them hope or doubt. I want to be a word Profound or absurd And be adopted or rejected.
Mark Jones: Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
your words stung, and hung me upside down, inside out, to watch you swan turned shrew- hairbrush out all memory and meaning, from those fresco pictures on the wet plaster ceiling- that my Michaelangelo took years to paint, in glorious colours, now flaked and full of hate.
the lights of our plaeides went out, with no new songs to sing and talk about- suspended there inside sobs of solitude and infinite despair- like soluble syllables of barbiturates in exhaust fumes of apology and regrets.
you left me prone- to hear deaths symphony alone, split and splattered, opened on the floor, repenting for nothing, evermore- like a salted slug, curdled and curled up on the rug- to melt away while you spoon and my colours fade to grey.
the heart of truth- intact in youth, fractures into fronds of lies and trust, destined to become a hollow husk- but i found myself again in hopes congealing pools and left the field of fools to someone else- and put her finished book back on its shelf.
EVER AFTER TOMORROW
throw all your dreams in a bottle of river- so they can sink and drag you down slow; pick out their seams, make them gone from the giver- over the brink, but dont let it show. drowning, just drink- you’re a spectral forgiver, shades have the means to laugh at each blow- life is to think, it is for the beginner, but less than it seems ever after tomorrow- the cover of sleep screams awake and gives her love with body, scribed with ink inside a rainbow.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
the dark emerald green descends in a dream that was thin sliding down old Benbulbin.
the mossy rocks set, like elemental clocks don’t move- slow time is worn smooth.
then us hive bugs mortal in summer duds slide past to the bottom hanging on before forgotten.
understanding change- others need to be strange in it all- to repented blame they go walking in lashing rain some less tall-
back to town lank hair matted down in the bar the same drink too far.
Strider Marcus Jones has had poems in several journals and anthologies including Dreich Magazine, The Racket Journal, Trouvaille Review, Poppy Road Review, and The Huffington Post. He has written several self-published books of poetry; most recently, Pomegranate Flesh (2012), Wooded Windows (2011), and Mavericks (2008). He holds a law degree from De Montfort University and lives in Hinckley, Leicestershire, England. He is also the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
voices make their choices in the game- to remain loyal, or abstain and stunt reputation for self gratification.
get real profits of career soon heal the sacrifice of bold ideal- when the grey suits in the system say: preserving status quo, is the wisdom in this play. other tunes, are moments of fame- memorable then forgotten in the main stagnating stream of politics, where embedded institutions share the same out of tune,
out of reach hot air balloon playing unmusical licks treading us down in the gravity of tribal tricks with ghost notes wearing uniforms of halved normality in the foreground and background with loaded guns inside and outside their tunic coats- ready to suppress any massed intention of Bastille insurrection.
you don’t have the right to repeal my name, or make me think and do the same as you. your way, is extinction- only seconds as time reckons, a philosophy founded on myths, twisted in technological trysts tuned to suit you.
THAT BLACKSMITH FELLOW
crumpling crumbling heart
war thump peace pump stall start
cave hunting and gathering in groups
to farms with crops and hoofed livestocks drink beer, eat meat and soups.
that blacksmith fellow, with fire and forge, hammer and bellow, is still the alchemist-
malleolus like his mettles when everybody settles into civil lists.
in us now, the subliminal plough sets our furrows footsteps-
so summer’s run and winter’s plod, with, or without god in and out of upsets.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
pull the roof off knock the walls down touch the forest climb those mountains and smell the sea again. watch how life decomposes in death going back to land to reform and be reborn as something and someone else. there’s no great secret to it all. no need to overthink it through food and shelter fire and shamans clothes and coupling used to be enough with musicians artists and poets interpreting the dance. then warriors with armies religions with god and minds buying and selling stole the landscape and changed time. smash the windows break down the doors melt the keys rub evil words from their spells and puncture the lungs of their wheels before they kidnap you from bed call you dissident hold you without charge wheel you out on a stretcher from waterboard torture for years without trial in Guantanamo Bay. they are selling the sanctuary we made with our numbers bringing back chains making some of us slaves outside the dance in the five coloured rings making winners and losers holding flags and flames.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. Find him at: https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/
her hair tumbles blowing like unfurled cotton through unforgotten fumbles in vegetation of our own interpretation of each other in the dark.
my desk grown out of a tree sown from my lover where i carved these words in the bark sitting in her branches knowing what life is all about as i look out of wooded windows
and absorb it’s shows as it goes through each obscenity of extreme supremacy- a woman must not let a man forget she is a suffragette in her soul and under his blanket so never kept
or chatteled forever to the custom weather of his debt.
A Woman Does Not Have To Wait
under the old canal bridge you said so i can hear the echoes in your head repeating mine this time when it throws our voices from roof into water where i caught her reflection half in half out of sunshine. that’s when i hear Gerschwin playing his piano in you working out the notes to rhapsody in blue that makes me float light and thin deep within through the air when you put your comforts there. Waits was drinking whisky from his bottle while i sat through old days with Aristotle knowing i must come up to date because a woman does not have to wait.
The Two Saltimbanques
when words don’t come easy they make do with silence and find something in nothing to say to each other when the absinthe runs out.
his glass and ego are bigger than hers, his elbows sharper, stabbing into the table and the chambers of her heart cobalt clown without a smile.
she looks away with his misery behind her eyes and sadness on her lips, back into her curves and the orange grove summer of her dress worn and blown by sepia time
where she painted her cockus giganticus lying down naked for her brush and skin, mingling intimate scents undoing and doing each other.
for some of us, living back then is more going forward than living in now and sitting here-
at this table, with these glasses standing empty of absinthe, faces wanting hands to be a bridge of words and equal peace as Guernica approaches.
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 lovingkindness cloaked in timeless density and tone in settled loam- beyond lonely apartments in skyscrapers and empty newspapers, or small town life gutting you with gossips knife.
Oviri (The Savage – Paul Gauguin in Tahiti)
woman, wearing the conscience of the world- you make me want less civilisation and more meaning.
drinking absinthe together, hand rolling and smoking cigars- being is, what it really is- fucking on palm leaves under tropical rain.
beauty and syphilis happily cohabit, painting your colours on a parallel canvas to exhibit in Paris the paradox of you.
somewhere in your arms- i forget my savage self, inseminating womb selected by pheromones at the pace of evolution.
later. I vomited arsenic on the mountain and returned to sup morphine. spread ointments on the sores, and ask: where do we come from. what are we. where are we going.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
if i could take the word love, and give to it the sound of how you speak, then look inside its shell and find you- living out the years like you belong:
i would wear its shape and substance in the shadow of myself, and hold it in my empty hand to not feel so alone- then raise it to my lips and taste its phrase and something more-
as i head home, along that rutted road of fallow fields and ancient tracks, through what was, and is now, and might become- while posing pines, stand and hang in quiet air absorbing spoken thoughts like silent sentinels.
have seat stone jar with heart old as peat; you’ve come this far- seen history shoot itself to repeat the past but nothing else is made to last- why weep and fast, while others sleep and blast this sorrow from the same face tomorrow- and what fool am i to keep thinking that the thinkers will remove the old ways blinkers- and speak.
sleep old name; erase this lame membrane of days- where tracks of trust go to dust and empty in-out trays, crack like blowed skin under amphetamine sun, remembering how promises persist in metaphores of mist-
and that box of rumours the neighbours hold, like chocolate tumours behind lace curtains- knew your rock fired the clay and shaped his pot to aroused assertions- then the moon-tide quickening and coming in, like soupy potions thick and thin, front to back on constellation grainy black.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com
A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His poetry has also been published in numerous publications around the world.
standing silent proud, alone, or in a crowd life glazed mood and skin outside and in- for you, i think out loud and take you in- where thoughts abound reversible and convertible- where saying being wrong reaches out beyond the natural need to win. moulded by my hands to this shape that understands; its cloth of clay holds you warm, a mummer masked in costumes storm- react with its receptacle of reason for sorting truths from treason, but you don’t need to have a season to put your flowers into me- swaying here, in wind and wild, as born so be.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
I want more time To ponder life, For understanding In the cosmic soup.
I want to bend time To travel backwards and forwards, To see what was and what will be To fathom actions and consequences.
I want to unmould time From how we shape it, To be free of it Unchained to think.
I want to teleport To the past and now and on from here, Faster than light In the nothingness it takes to make a thought:
To find the answer- To where we come from To who we are To why we are here
And where we are going To be free from time.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. He is also the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
if i could take the word love, and give to it the sound of how you speak, then look inside its shell and find you- living out the years like you belong:
i would wear its shape and substance in the shadow of myself, and hold it in my empty hand to not feel so alone- then raise it to my lips and taste its phrase and something more-
as i head home, along that rutted road of fallow fields and ancient tracks, through what was, and is now, and might become- while posing pines, stand and hang in quiet air absorbing spoken thoughts like silent sentinels.
SUMMER WIND
you remind me of the rhythms in myself-
no house to play to
or the sound in someone else-
that drives their dreams
in simple scenes.
your music, is the motion of the waves
soul troubled too-
by yesterdays,
searching for a sigh that isn’t wrong
to be its song.
your meadow, is a harvest shimmering
in light and hue,
in summer wind,
waiting, for a stranger passing through-
to settle in its simmering.
taste the rain
and take it in you,
long for it to come again-
meanings grow when fates continue
to reach for reasons, and remain.
WHEN THE ROAD FORKS
soft scented ring
on straightened bow,
the joy you bring
inside me now-
the candle burning, slowly down,
the mirror showing more of you-
arched back and shoulders golden brown,
hips rock, hair tumbling too-
as hope and passion rise and fall
in symmetry and space,
the perfect beauty of it all,
enraptures face and place-
and be it now, or beyond this,
with gentle hands and loves soft kiss-
to trace your smile and touch your thoughts,
still, after this, when the road forks.
ADUMBRATE LOVES SHALLOWS
goddess of the moon
fusion of light and shadow,
come now, light my room-
make darkness shrink and narrow.
gravitate to me
awake inside un-natural light,
half written, half unknown i be
eclipsed in doubt, but inward bright.
bring your blooms to this fallow bed
alone in fates sad stare,
wrap me in your ethereal thread,
to reset time and covet care.
adumbrate loves shallows
in my sanctum core,
where the pastels fade and pallow
without depth and shade on dwindling shore.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
ancient lay lines
illuminate oral lore
a global stone grid
black coffee swirling
in a spiral galaxy
stargate in a cup
obelisk to sky
glyphs and hypogean
can we crack the code
leaves are falling
the circle of life and death
undertaker crows
honeysuckle grows
around the arch of midnight
into the wormhole
a trodden nettle
still offers herself to bees
and us to make tea
curious magpies
search ploughed field for baubles
sunlight glints on them
faded photographs
moments hanging on the wall
futures blank behind
cherry blossoms bloom
then fall in wind and rain on
human chameleons
red chrysanthemums
show fractals of clarity
time sows mutations
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, he is the creator and editor of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. His five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
in detritus metronomes of human habitation the ghost of Shelley’s imagination questions the elemental, experimental chromosomes and ribosomes of DNA, reverse engineered that suddenly appeared as evolution yesterday.
her monster mirrors dark wells of monsters in our smart selves, the lost humanity and oratory that fills laboratory test tubes with fused imbued genes to dreams of flat forward faster distinction to disaster and barbarism’s ectopic extinction.
this is our pyramid prison, where all souls and proles climb the debased opposite steps of extremism, like Prometheus Unbound, defaced sitting around the crouching sphinx abandoned by missing links.
free masons of money and wars, warp the altar of natural laws, so reason withers and wastelands rust — no longer rivers of shared stardust
in the equal symphony of spheres in space, filling our ears with subwoofer bass, definitive primitive medieval evil waste.
Strider Marcus Jones Is the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. He is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His work has been published in over 150 poetry journals, magazines, reviews and anthologies in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, India and South Africa including : Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice and Piker Press. He is the author of five books of poetry: Pomegranate Flesh, Wooded Windows, Mavericks, Inside Out and Aspects Of Love. The links to his books can be found below.
For his published poetry books: Aspects Of Love; Inside Out; Mavericks; Wooded Windows and Pomegranate Flesh see: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/strider…
the fabulous beauty of your face- so esoteric, not always in this place- beguiles me.
it’s late, mesmeric smile is but a base, a film to interface with the movements of the mind behind it.
my smile, me- like Thomas O’Malley the alley cat reclining on a tin bin lid with fishy whiskers-
turns the ink in the valley of your quills into script, while i sit and sip
your syllables with fresh red sepals of habiscus, rejecting Ovid and his Amores for your stories.
Strider Marcus Jones Is the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. He is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His work has been published in over 150 poetry journals, magazines, reviews and anthologies in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, India and South Africa including : Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice and Piker Press. He is the author of five books of poetry: Pomegranate Flesh, Wooded Windows, Mavericks, Inside Out and Aspects Of Love. The links to his books can be found below.
For his published poetry books: Aspects Of Love; Inside Out; Mavericks; Wooded Windows and Pomegranate Flesh see: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/strider…
mirror, mirror, in the hall age comes to us all, and looks wither through the play of years slipped away, away in the lapsed lingo of street and road, where tangents meet and move with innocence up summits of experience told, whose fruits we eat then weep when they implode. these reflections in this autumn of adventurous directions, mean more standing in the door of ebb and flow watching people come and go wearing introspections of what they know after listening to a stranger’s small confessions on midnight radio.
the latitude of love paddles an imperial pedalo in someone’s waters- and i had to go native in a foreign land to understand where my own backward blood has brought us.
in the mosque in the mihrab in Cordoba, no one is lost as Christian and Arab respect how they cross over.
inside: the scallop shell, with its white marble hood and cathedral bell above ancient wood, keeps everyone equal and safe from hell- but outside: other forces blow the people and their pedalo.
the other self abstracted in the press of turned down pages, gets mucked up in the mess and shows how unlaminated age is. if nothing else- these nude notes being played behind the curtain where the stage is, by soloist strings and hermit woodwinds- are far hopes of uncertain opening chords calling out to the duet i haven’t come to yet. and afterwards, if all those afterwards could talk and kiss and spout, there would be no more misery move it out.
this now my thoughts open at the image of your name won’t be revealing the secrets they explain- do you do the same on these out walks remembering the rain drop fractals on us feeling.
back we go again, without preachers or bad teachers, harvest high with hope just us and frayed strands of poetry and bands on this bridge of notes our mind spans.
in give we’ve got the bloom of this plot in garden to river shaping start and stop the melting clock of body quake then quiver through the Dreamtime day night and soul spirit lit by landscape light.
we climb the Orange Rock to revert back far but have no Gaelic croft to live in who we are. it has changed hands until the purpose of these lands shoots dissenting music out of birds and sucks all truth from ancient words
somewhere in everywhere everybody happens in the patterns, like flocks of rocks gathered to the lobby of Saturn’s rings, graded and sorted into ugly and beautiful useful things; all something out of nothing but not absolute nothing: it seems matter that Mad Hatter and plectrums of light make tunes of self similarity settle and fight repeating this same existence without remembered resistance.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine and Dissident Voice.
voices make their choices in the game — to remain loyal, or abstain and stunt reputation for self gratification.
get real profits of career soon heal the sacrifice of bold ideal — when the grey suits in the system say: preserving status quo, is the wisdom in this play. other tunes, are moments of fame — memorable then forgotten in the main stagnating stream of politics, where embedded institutions share the same out of tune, out of reach hot air balloon playing unmusical licks treading us down in the gravity of tribal tricks with ghost notes wearing uniforms of haved normality in the foreground and background with loaded guns inside and outside their tunic coats — ready to suppress any massed intention of Bastille insurrection.
you don’t have the right to repeal my name, or make me think and do the same as you. your way, is extinction — only seconds as time reckons, a philosophy founded on myths, twisted in technological trysts tuned to suit you.
Strider Marcus Jones – is the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogs…. He is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford/Hinckley, England with proud 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 http//www.lulu.com/spotlight/stridermarcusj…. He is a maverick, moving between forests, mountains and cities, playing his saxophone and clarinet in warm solitude.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain and Switzerland in numerous publications including 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; Section8Magazine; Danse Macabre Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts; Don’t Be Afraid: Anthology To Seamus Heaney.
For his published poetry books: Aspects Of Love; Inside Out; Mavericks; Wooded Windows and Pomegranate Flesh see: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/strider…
A poet, law graduate, and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales, he is also a member of The Poetry Society. His five published books of poetry reveal a maverick moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His poetry has been published in over 150 literary publications worldwide including Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; and Dissident Voice. More about his work can be found here:
when you are broken like a once loved doll, and those spurs, that still hurt, have spoken you blind with methanol- the mental heather that holds it all together, finds you on its well-worn path and in the aftermath, walking alone it takes you home- through the Spanish orange groves where old men sit with expired widows thinking silently i suppose what everybody and no one knows. then musical scripts of hidden songbirds play and mix with secret symbols of illuminati in the terracotta garden for my ghost at its own party of father’s day stardom, while my prince and princess smile at me, with their mother’s Maltese eyes- in their more, i am less but keep my loss disguised. this is their day to me- their prose in how it goes- like lambas bread in what is said as we journey.
Strider Marcus Jones – est un poète, diplômé en droit, et ancien fonctionnaire de Salford, en Angleterre, avec de fières racines celtiques en Irlande et au Pays de Galles. Membre de La société de poésie d’Angleterre, ses cinq recueils de poésie publiés révèlent un franc-tireur, se déplaçant entre les villes, jouant de son saxophone dans des salles enfumées. https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com
Sa poésie a été publiée aux États-Unis, au Canada, en Australie, en Angleterre, en Écosse, en Irlande, au Pays de Galles, en France, en Espagne, en Allemagne; Serbie, en Inde et en Suisse dans de nombreuses publications dont : The Piker Press; Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany, Serbia, India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: The Piker Press; Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
Les grains de sable
imaginer traverser le Sahara avec les touareg; dormir sous un seul vaste dais d’étoiles, consolé par les constellations qui a jadis regardaient les forêts anciennes et les montagnes érodées par le vent plus vieux que ceux-ci ici maintenant. tout se répète— les lits de la rivière et les rochers retour à la mer, où des étrangers temporaires s’assoient comme Robinson Crusoé sur des plages bruyantes ratissées par des tracteurs dans des odeurs de sel et des moules non-trouvées regarder les vagues, penser à l’intérieur d’eux aller et venir comme des amis dont on a peur comme la nature se réaccorde ignorant notre signification devenant des grains de sable.
Grains of Sand
imagine crossing the Sahara with the Tuareg; sleeping under one vast canopy of stars, consoled by constellations that once looked down on ancient forests and wind worn mountains older than these here now. it all repeats itself— the river beds and rocks return to the sea, where temporary strangers sit like Robinson Crusoe on loud, tractor-raked beaches in smells of salt and missed mussels watching the waves, thinking inside them coming and going like friends to be afraid of— as nature retunes herself ignoring our significance becoming grains of sand.
Les fenêtres en bois
Alors que cette longue vie avance lentement je reviens regarder à travers les fenêtres en bois. en avant ou en arrière, les empires et les régimes restent dans les pyramides du pouvoir massacrer les irréprochables pour un gain glorieux. soldats féodaux tirant des fusils et des oiseaux sans ailes lâchant des missiles autoguidés sur les mères, les pères, les filles, les fils, suivent des ordres plus élevés pour moderniser les civilisations anciennes répéter ce que l’histoire nous a appris. à leur tour, leurs tours de système de classe et d’argent va s’effondrer et s’écraser au-dessus d’Ozymandias. hé maintenant, bois d’hiver saisissent sans feuilles et nous y entraînant. glissade d’amour en jours à travers les vagues de chaleur estivales et vieux voies forestiers avec nous lécher puis dégoulinant et coller chanter des chansons wiccan embrassé dans les liens païens vivions lumière, aimé longtemps, doigts peignant des runes sur la peau retour au début quand la liberté n’était pas péché.
Wooded Windows
as this long life slowly goes i find my self returning to look through wooded windows. forward or back, empires and regimes remain in pyramids of power butchering the blameless for glorious gain. feudal soldiers firing guns and wingless birds dropping smart bombs on mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, follow higher orders to modernise older civilisations repeating what history has taught us. in turn, their towers of class and cash will crumble and crash on top of Ozymandias. hey now, woods of winter leafless grip and fractures split drawing us into it. loveslide in days through summer heat waves and old woodland ways with us licking then dripping and sticking chanting wiccan songs embraced in pagan bonds living light, loving long, fingers painting runes on skin back to the beginning when freedom wasn’t sin.
WHY I LIKE IT: Poetry Editor HEZEKIAH writes… Strider Marcus Jones refines a language all his own. While the arrested of us employ our word into service to project our modest biddings, communicating as best we can. His are formed to dance, prance, pluck and strum. Singing and swinging as though they are truly enjoying his penetrating, orphic-like process; happy in their work as they leap and bound off the pages and back. Revealing themselves as they spring from his distinct and galvanizing lexicon, anxiously awaiting to be called into action, to snap to attention, and rejoice in a festival of words and featured imagery. But don’t settle for my pitch, screwballs mostly throw junk—spin googlies. Not Jones, he’s all cricket, he’ll bowl you over with lithe precision and lightning tempo.
MAVERICKS
you taste of cinnamon and fish when you wish to be romantic- and the ciphers of our thoughts make ringlets with their noughts immersed in magic- like mithril mail around me stove dark forest, pink flesh sea touchings tantric- make reality and myths converge in elven riffs of music, so we dance it- symbols to the scenes of conflict, mavericks in dreams that now sit- listening to these pots and kettles blackening on the fire of rhetoric and murderous mettles- before we both retire to our own script.
TWO MISFITS
it was no time for love outside- old winds of worship found hand and mouth in ruined rain slanting over cultured fields into pagan barns with patched up planks finding us two misfits.
i felt the pulse of your undressed fingers transmit thoughts to my senses- aroused by autumn scents of milky musk and husky hay in this barn’s faith we climbed the rungs of civilisation so random in our exile-
and found a bell housed inside a minaret- with priest and muezzin sharing its balcony- summoning all to prayer with one voice- this holy music, was only the wind blowing through the weathervane, but we liked its tone to change its time.
THE BLOOD THAT MAKES US BLACK
imagine yourself, in a photo-fit picture with every nothing that’s new- minus in health, quoting icons and scripture under the whole black and blue.
optimum dreams turn out fake in the mirror facing what’s been like fallen heroes- in so many scenes like a ghost who is giver passing on wisdom, who knows-
the blood that makes us black of two from one, is schooled by fungus fortunes and faiths old hat to be sold on- like tamed-trained gangs, making golden dunes.
VISIGOTH ROVER
i went on the bus to Cordoba,
and tried to find the Moor’s
left over
in their excavated floors
and mosaic courtyards,
with hanging flowers brightly chamelion
against whitewashed walls
carrying calls
behind gated iron bars-
but they were gone
leaving mosque arches
and carved stories
to God’s doors.
in those ancient streets
where everybody meets;
i saw the old successful men
with their younger women again,
sat in chrome slat chairs,
drinking coffee to cover
their vain love affairs-
and every breast,
was like the crest
of a soft ridge
as i peeped over
the castle wall and Roman bridge
like a Visigoth rover.
soft hand tapping on shoulder,
heavy hair
and beauty older,
the gypsy lady gave her clover
to borrowed breath,
embroidering it for death,
adding more to less
like the colours fading in her dress.
time and tune are too planned
to understand
her Trevi fountain of prediction,
or the dirty Bernini hand
shaping its description.
THAT BLACKSMITH FELLOW
crumpling
crumbling
heart
war thump
peace pump
stall start
cave hunting
and gathering
in groups
to farms with crops
and hoofed live stocks
drink beer, eat meat and soups.
that blacksmith fellow,
with fire and forge, hammer and bellow,
is still the alchemist-
malleous like his mettles
when everybody settles
into civil lists.
in us now,
the subliminal plough
sets our furrows footsteps-
so summer’s run and winter’s plod,
with, or without god
in and out of upsets.
IN MAID’S WATER
we’ve left the well-footed
road,
the rutted
and rebutted
road
of shadows cast
by towered glass.
opened closed curtains
for fusty moths,
chanted white spells with Wiccan’s
goths;
left pictured
rooms and halls-
become un-scriptured
hills and squalls-
in maid’s water
pouring down her
erect chalk man,
like a wild gypsy,
love tipsy
partisan,
smelling of cinnabar
and his cigar,
swirling
like whirling
clouds
while the changed wind howls.
THIS IS THE FIELD
this is not the field
for truth to grow in.
its furrowed lips are sealed
with knowing
nothing can sing
in the wrong wind.
the crop is stunted
self expression blunted
opinion gagged
and head sagged
waiting for the final blow
from the farmer’s shadow.
the field hands
cut to His commands
and every leathered face
has served in its place
like all the others, for centuries
in these peasant penitentiaries,
without bolting
or revolting
in union, except for the Tolpuddle few,
who knew what to do
but were jailed, or transported
and thwarted.
WATER AND MIST
let the world do what it does,
and when the desert
comes for us
we will be water-
sow the seeds of new ideas
replace the wars and fears
of decadent thrones
spying on the homes
of those they slaughter.
bring on the people’s revolution,
that returns our stolen
land into our hands
from these swollen
fat cats, with their final solution
and fascist FEMA plans.
let the world do what it does,
and when the guns
are turned on us
we will be mist-
eclipsing everything they’ve done
when we resist.
strike them like ghosts
in the halls of their hosts,
topple their temples of sin-
dissolve all their banks,
then their missiles and tanks,
leave no corrupted survivor-
cleanse what’s within
for a new way to begin
by severing each head from this hydra.
THE DOOR
the door
between skyfloor
topbottom
is rankrotten
portalbliss
or abjectabyss.
it contains conversations
confrontations,
hiding loves two-ings
in lost ruins-
shuts us inside our self
with or without someone else.
we,
the un-free,
disenfranchised poor
have no bowl of more-
only pain
on the same plain
as before,
homeless
or in shapeless boxes,
worked out, hunted, like urban foxes-
outlaws on common lands
stolen from empty hands.
files on us found
from gathering sound
where mutations abound
put troops on the ground.
MIND’S AND MUSK
so now
we both came
to this same
branch and bough-
no one else commutes
from different roots.
me carrying Celtic stones
with runes on skin over bones-
and you, in streams
on evicted land
trashed ancients panned-
our truth dreams
under star light crossing beams.
in here, there is no mask
of present building out the past
with gilded Shard’s of steel and glass
shutting out who shall not pass.
the tree of life breathes
a rebel destiny believes-
we are minds and musk
no more husks and dust.
THE POET SPEAKS: I like the company of people but prefer solitude. I like to listen to people talk, the way they see it and say it. For me, poetry spans our past, present and future. These poems, and those in my books, are about the themes of love, relationships, peace, war, racial, economic and sexual equality, cultural integration, poverty, mythical romance, the magic of childhood and experience of growing old as a Bohemian maverick. The strings of chance and consequences meld with music and art in Spinoza’s orderly chaos of the universe.
Life is hard and uncertain for most of us now, but also rare in our corner of the universe, so I strive to express my own understanding of it. Thinking time is my creative cove. My English teacher, Anne Ryan inspired me to write poetry when I was thirteen. The poems have grown with me and reflect much of who I am now. Some poems sleep for years. Mere jumbles of words, themes and rhythms in subconscious gaseous clouds. Their form and meaning evolve in Spinoza’s orderly chaos. Other poems just happen, triggered by a single word or phrase, a sound, smell, or shape that relates to something from our past, present, or future. Writing a good poem makes me feel like the artist who can paint, or the musician who can play – joy in creating something that others enjoy and feel inspired to try doing themselves.
My first poetical influences were the Tin Pan Alley lyricists and composers like Sammy Cahn, Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart. I love the fun, rhythm and interplay between lyrics and music. Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen influence my poetry in the same way, allowing me to experiment with metaphor, form and rhythms.
Relationships and love are one of the main themes in my poetry. Two books which have travelled with me through life are Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Tess Of The D’urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy is a big influence on some of my work. My favourite poets who have influenced my work include: Shelley, Keats, Yeats, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Bishop, Szymborska, Langston Hughes, Plath, Art Crane, Larkin, Forough Farrokhzad, Neruda, Rumi and Heaney.
AUTHOR’S BIO: Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between forests, mountains, cities and coasts playing his saxophone and clarinet in warm solitude.
EXOTIC BIRDS & LIFE IS FLAMENCO. Poems by Strider Marcus Jones https://www.artvilla.com/plt/exotic-birds-life-is-flamenco-poems-by-strider-marcus-jones/
EXOTIC BIRDS & LIFE IS FLAMENCO. Poems by Strider Marcus Jones
i love the substance of eccentric style in your beauty- the enchanting glance of old fashioned romance in your smile that softly soothes me after the external joust dust of modernity settles on precious metals sought by Faustus stealing gas and oil from African soil. i love the dink in the middle of your back where my fingers sink when i trace and track the road of your spine in perfect sync of mind with mine. i last, near and far in your scented clouds of cinnabar, singing, with you, want you, words like intoxicating exotic birds- ready to leave poisonous suburbs to disturbed self and same arrogant and vain vices and vines embracing abyss in eclipsed times.
(ii.)
LIFE IS FLAMENCO
why can’t i walk as far and smoke more tobacco, or play my Spanish guitar like Paco, putting rhythms and feelings without old ceilings you’ve never heard before in a word.
life is flamenco, to come and go high and low fast and slow-
she loves him, he loves her and their shades within caress and spur in a ride and dance of tempestuous romance.
outback, in Andalucien ease, i embrace you, like melted breeze amongst ripe olive trees- dark and different, all manly scent and mind unkempt.
like i do, Picasso knew everything about you when he drew your elongated arms and legs around me, in this perpetual bed of emotion and motion for these soft geometric angles in my finger strokes and exhaled smokes of rhythmic bangles to circle colour your Celtic skin with primitive phthalo blue pigment in wiccan tattoo before entering vibrating wings through thrumming strings of wild lucid moments in eternal components.
i can walk as far and smoke more tobacco, and play my Spanish guitar like Paco.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https//stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. —————————————— His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: The Piker Press; Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
Strider Marcus Jones Is the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal. He is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. His work has been published in over 150 poetry journals, magazines, reviews and anthologies in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, India and South Africa including : Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice and Piker Press. He is the author of five books of poetry: Pomegranate Flesh, Wooded Windows, Mavericks, Inside Out and Aspects Of Love. The links to his books can be found below.
For his published poetry books: Aspects Of Love; Inside Out; Mavericks; Wooded Windows and Pomegranate Flesh see: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/strider…
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. Pomegranate Flesh.
POURING OUT AND IN
i must have broken every scripture
thinking about the sculpture
of your face
your blossom face.
modelled in skin
with bones hid in
expressions
and confessions-
understanding them
i feel again
impressions of your senses
aroused when sensual steam condenses
on quivering quill and quim
pouring out and in.
smoking in the dark-
still floating, on the pillows, you used to arch
giving up to me
quaffing thirstily-
then, i stand glowing
with sweat like a god
from the peat bog
lovelust growing
mo anam chara
mo ghra.Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. Wooded Windows.
MAVERICKS
you taste of cinnamon and fish when you wish to be romantic- and the ciphers of our thoughts make ringlets with their noughts immersed in magic- like mithril mail around me stove dark forest, pink flesh sea touchings tantric- make reality and myths converge in elven riffs of music, so we dance it- symbols to the scenes of conflict, mavericks in dreams that now sit- listening to these pots and kettles blackening on the fire of rhetoric and murderous mettles- before we both retire to our own script.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. Mavericks.
EVENSTAR
i wait and listen for the faint fall of her footsteps and the soft lilt of her ethereal voice that hangs in the air to the shape and sound of musical notes that move like Degas’ dancers around the thoughtful beauty of her fabulous face to become lucid with loves weight but weightless and warm once worn as their essence enters me.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. Inside Out.
FALLING FOR YOU
so far back deep in the magma of you, with thoughts i lack suddenly coming too.
so far back in your words and feelings hue, your molten track a furnace of fire anew.
the pleasures foretold in this word unglued, now mine to behold falling for you.
come love, etch your runes onto sensuous skin, and make my empty waiting rooms ripple with longing.
rich man and peasant understand coins change hand, despite the Magna Carta we must all barter to live —
only communists give nothing something sometimes — same crimes.
so, when reason rains, i drag my convict chains to the barrow bog and cut peat in feral fog where motives meet.
six feet down, sucked back five thousand years the old town settlement appears in full formation of chattel, cattle and battle still at station preserved to serve.
around the round late night fires, power plays and lust desires hearth home homogenous in Mars and Venus making love in animal skins wearing the same sins.
on the long walk home, some alone and those together, believe never can be changed and are called strange.
late afternoon winter fingers nomads in snow numb knuckles and nails on two boys in scuffed shoes and ripped coats carrying four planks of wood from condemned houses down dark jitties slipping on dog shit into back yard to make warm fires
early evening dad cooking neck end stew thick with potato dumplings and herbs on top of bread soaked in gravy i saw the hole in the ceiling holding the foot that jumped off bunk beds but dad didn’t mind he had just sawed the knob off the banister to get an old wardrobe upstairs and made us a longbow and cricket bat it was fun being poor like other families
after dark all sat down reading and talking in candle light with parents silent to each other our sudden laughter like sparks glowing and fading dancing in flames and wood smoke unlike the children who died in a fire next door then we played cards and i called my dad a cunt for trumping my king but he let me keep the word
Strider Marcus Jones – is the founder, editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogs…. He is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford/Hinckley, England with proud 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 http//www.lulu.com/spotlight/stridermarcusj…. He is a maverick, moving between forests, mountains and cities, playing his saxophone and clarinet in warm solitude.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain and Switzerland in numerous publications including 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; Section8Magazine; Danse Macabre Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts; Don’t Be Afraid: Anthology To Seamus Heaney.
a rest, from swinging bar and animals in the abattoir- to smoke in mental thinks spoken holding cooling drinks.
counting out old coppers to be fed in the set squares of blue and red plastic table cloth- just enough to break up bread in thick barley broth.
Jesus is late after saying he was coming back to share the wealth and real estate of capitalist cunning.
maybe. just maybe. put another song on the jukebox baby: no more heroes anymore. what are we fighting for-
he’s hiding in hymns and chants, in those Monty Python underpants, from this coalition of new McCarthy’s and it’s institutions of Moriarty’s.
some shepherds sheep will do this dance in hypothermic trance, for one pound an hour like a shamed flower,
watched by sinister sentinels- while scratched tubular bells, summon all to sunday service where invisible myths exist- to a shamed flower with supernatural power come the hour.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
i discover who you are in the notes of my guitar- love songs sad songs, good wronged grown back songs, plucking soft and strong in nowhere for somewhere to belong. chords fill the space around the beauty of your face, with lyrics in the breeze on this road of serendipity, where silver trees mark the way to go, and be.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
why can’t i walk as far and smoke more tobacco, or play my spanish guitar like Paco, putting rhythms and feelings without old ceilings you’ve never heard before in a word.
life is flamenco, to come and go high and low fast and slow-
she loves him, he loves her and their shades within caress and spur in a ride and dance of tempestuous romance.
outback, in Andalucien ease, i embrace you, like melted breeze amongst ripe olive trees- dark and different, all manly scent and mind unkempt.
like i do, Picasso knew everything about you when he drew your elongated arms and legs around me, in this perpetual bed of emotion and motion for these soft geometric angles in my finger strokes and exhaled smokes of rhythmic bangles to circle colour your Celtic skin with primitive phthalo blue pigment in wiccan tattoo before entering vibrating wings through thrumming strings of wild lucid moments in eternal components.
i can walk as far and smoke more tobacco, and play my spanish guitar like Paco.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
sat with you, reflections bond over the pond of summer solstice,
and Mr Blue sky with eggy eye subliminally sends Otis
into ribbons and ripples of hair and faces, through sensual trickles in hidden places
that glances bring on summer wind. i know your notes tacking on water like paper boats,
and the rigging string vibrating through notches in the mast so love and living last.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
he plays his flamenco guitar knowing who you are, seducing his singer to bring her from bleak harbour masts to his contrasts. he knows the equations of her close flirtations and doesn’t judge her glances for wanting what romance is- vibrating in voices and strings of fornicating feelings. her prose photosynthesis illuminates his shades that colour mountains and drops of wishes in mosaic fountains- she loves the Picasso from his pen and horse smell like Andalucian men her reversed body senses inside his defences- as her sea wind billows in his revealing Avalon through the mist, sweet loved, firm kissed.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
pull the roof off knock the walls down touch the forest climb those mountains and smell the sea again.
watch how life decomposes in death going back to land to reform and be reborn as something and someone else.
there’s no great secret to it all. no need to overthink it through
food and shelter fire and shamans clothes and coupling used to be enough with musicians artists and poets interpreting the dance.
then warriors with armies religions with god and minds buying and selling stole the landscape and changed time.
smash the windows break down the doors melt the keys rub evil words from their spells and puncture the lungs of their wheels
before they kidnap you from bed call you dissident hold you without charge wheel you out on a stretcher from waterboard torture for years without trial in Guantanamo Bay.
they are selling the sanctuary we made with our numbers bringing back chains making some of us slaves outside the dance in the five coloured rings making winners and losers holding flags and flames.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. Read other articles by Strider Marcus.
This article was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2021 at 8:03am and is filed under Poetry.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: The Piker Press; Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
you remind me of the rhythms in myself-
no house to play to
or the sound in someone else-
that drives their dreams
in simple scenes.
your music, is the motion of the waves
soul troubled too-
by yesterdays,
searching for a sigh that isn’t wrong
to be its song.
your meadow, is a harvest shimmering
in light and hue,
in summer wind,
waiting, for a stranger passing through-
to settle in its simmering.
taste the rain
and take it in you,
long for it to come again-
meanings grow when fates continue
to reach for reasons, and remain.
WHEN THE ROAD FORKS
soft scented ring
on straightened bow,
the joy you bring
inside me now-
the candle burning, slowly down,
the mirror showing more of you-
arched back and shoulders golden brown,
hips rock, hair tumbling too-
as hope and passion rise and fall
in symmetry and space,
the perfect beauty of it all,
enraptures face and place-
and be it now, or beyond this,
with gentle hands and loves soft kiss-
to trace your smile and touch your thoughts,
still, after this, when the road forks.
ADUMBRATE LOVES SHALLOWS
goddess of the moon
fusion of light and shadow,
come now, light my room-
make darkness shrink and narrow.
gravitate to me
awake inside un-natural light,
half written, half unknown i be
eclipsed in doubt, but inward bright.
bring your blooms to this fallow bed
alone in fates sad stare,
wrap me in your ethereal thread,
to reset time and covet care.
adumbrate loves shallows
in my sanctum core,
where the pastels fade and pallow
without depth and shade on dwindling shore.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
Metal mania In twisted sculpture; Welded gods With scornful eyes— Inhabit the space of neon galleries Amused by all the gossip and lies Oozing from In the know la de das Who soak their boredom In high-class bars.
—Strider Marcus Jones
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate, and former civil servant from Salford, England, with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
1. Submissions are always open and free. Lothlorien Poetry Journalpublishes periodically throughout the year. * Poems: Include 1-5 poems in the body of your email or attached as a word doc in font Times New Roman 12-14 point, 150 lines or less. I also consider Haiku, Senyru and Tanka (minimum 5 each) and video poetry readings. Title your submission – eg. Poetry Submission by John Smith and send to LothlorienPoetryJournal@outlook.com. Also include a brief bio of 200 words or less and your photo. OR * Flash Fiction: Include 1 flash fiction piece, no more than 1000 words in the body of your email or attached as a word doc in font Times New Roman 12-14 point. Title your submission – eg. Flash Fiction Submission by John Smith and send to LothlorienPoetryJournal@outlook.com. Also include a brief bio of 200 words or less and your photo. * DO NOT SEND POEMS AND FLASH FICTION AT THE SAME TIME.
2. We prefer unpublished poetry/flash fiction but will consider previously published work if the publishing rights have reverted back to you as author and you credit the original publisher. Do not send simultaneous submissions. 3. If published, please wait two weeks before submitting again. If your submission is rejected, please wait one month before submitting again.
4. Failure to follow these simple guidelines will ensure that your submission is immediately deleted. I have many submissions to read through and do not have the time to reply to someone and explain why I can’t accept their submission. 5. Lothlorien Poetry Journal acquires exclusive one-time online/electronic and print rights to publish poetry and to maintain archives that contain current material. After publication, all rights revert to the author. If the work should be published in the future, Lothlorien Poetry Journalasks only for credit. 6. All works will be published on a rolling basis. Expect a wait time of 2-4 weeks for a response. 7) Unfortunately, at this time, we are unable to pay our contributors but we will promote the work we publish on Facebook and Twitter. We hope to see your poems soon. 8) Lothlorien Poetry Journal publishes periodically, 2 or 3 issues every year, so every 6 or 4 months. Contributors to each issue ( selected from the best work published on the Journal’s Blog ) will be notified prior to publication and will receive a free word doc copy of the issue that features their work. A print and E-book version of each issue will be available to purchase on Amazon Books and Lulu.com. Lothlorien Poetry Journal nominates for the Pushcart Prize.
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we move the wheel that turns through each mistake, giving motion to the roles we chime until both trickle out of time like brittle steel that rusts and breaks into lapsed devotion.
less, or more, you imagined it was sure sharing the road with you, treading under dark, grey and blue sky, wondering where it went going to unfold in fates wind blowing fondling your full face to some top-to-bottom place.
we have moved the wheel, only to reveal our high Metropolis is still the same Acropolis of extremes and obscenes spreading gangrenous genes.
we have separated Dream from Time and live in mirages like Bacchus and Libera duped in an era condoning crime, altering the images of it’s illustrious self stealing the wealth of massed, divided synergies.
###
THE HERMIT
off rink i think and sit like a hermit but time isn’t mine to design. the images erased from memory in this cave reverses the lathe of shaped corruption to avoid self destruction. to an unseen, individual, prime residual unlit spark in the integral strum of strings that turns in revolutions rings, the equal hands on the cosmic clock, plays rhythms we know but have forgot, neither quick or slow, but just so, with natures tow. this solitary Eden, paradise without our seed in beneath the clouds of atmosphere, alters with us here overthrowing Older Orders without consent in the deafening, silent firmament and near in conditioned fear.
###
I WANT TO BEND TIME
I want more time To ponder life, For understanding In the cosmic soup. I want to bend time To travel backwards and forwards, To see what was and what will be To fathom actions and consequences. I want to unmould time From how we shape it, To be free of it Unchained to think. I want to teleport To the past and now and on from here, Faster than light In the nothingness it takes to make a thought: To find the answer- To where we come from To who we are To why we are here And where we are going To be free from time.
###
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
it was summertime with flowers colouring the pantomime in feudal fields as i walked on flat wheels with your humming bird in my head from the tropical warm of your bed- where we bent the grass again and made the rain that doesn’t come from clouds dampen skin rumpled shrouds.
i watched your beauty glisten sweetly while i held you like Bernini before you went to work flaked in bark of silver birch naked chalice south and siren priestess mouth of pagan church.
you were converting fussy ghosts and their sullen hosts from bribed tribes walking past without guides- some, so inverted and duped like shades with every ethic stooped labouring like quislings under Darwinist siblings- slowly drifting back to druid stones that serve us more than glorious domes, more equal in each equinox of chaos turning natures clock.
i know, i ramble for reasons to make sense of changing seasons- and find none where i am one- only fallen lintels on the floor like broken words that speak no more at sunrise and sunset remembering what we forget.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry reveal a maverick, moving between forests, mountains, cities and coasts playing his saxophone and clarinet in warm solitude.
Poet/Photographer Jennifer Matthews’ poetry has been published in Nepal by Pen Himalaya and locally by the Wilderness Retreat Writers Organization, Midway Journal, The Somerville Times, Ibbetson Street Press and Boston Girl Guide. Jennifer was nominated for a poetry award by the Cambridge Arts Council for her book of Poetry Fairy Tales and Misdemeanors. Her songs have been released nationally and internationally and her photography has been used as covers for a number of Ibbetson Street Press poetry books and has been exhibited at The Middle East Restaurant, 1369 Coffeehouses, Sound Bites Restaurant in Somerville and McLean Hospital.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
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.
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.
we walk by the river talking inside ourselves, like rhapsodies in two reflections- different, but the same.
the path, the fence, the fields- unknown obstacles that stare through then, and now, beyond- have heard love chime before.
ahead the river breaks going separate ways, but we stick to the same side in the willow woods
and farms of flooded fields- with ascension stroking each reaction phosphorous in the rain.
SO IT GOES
when i look back in a moment of quiet acquired dignity that comes to some with age, it is with patience, for i was much the same when everything seemed bigger than it was as uncertainty wore the other shoe to confidence and followed it step for step.
the energy of youth that often acts without respect and understanding- to bluff and blag its way in fashion and musical rebellion- skips like stones on the ponds of those who have it all from Parliaments revolution- but their ripples wane through treacled trends in this dumbed down democracy soothed by drugs and drink.
apathy watches and laughs at these new roundheads and royals- jigging their booty to tunes composed by capitalist cavaliers- wearing each despotic Emperor’s new clothes, and a known assassins kiss of death waits for anyone who questions-
so it goes.
MEPHISTOPHELES IS NOT ABOUT
this coffee is hot-
but paradise is cold,
and Mephistopheles is not
about, tempting me with gold
and pouting pleasures of the flesh
with their alluring mesh-
so Morpheus to hold
in broken secrets being told.
this dreamer in his underwear,
parts from the bottle, and leaves it there-
some touched,
not much
with stale camembert-
no fun alone,
moving around inside, unknown-
disturbed from bed to chair.
it synchronizes well,
how past and present both compel
a sleep on understanding-
the beat of love with sand in
the texture of its taste,
trapped in silence,
waxed to waste-
with nothings nonsense
in its face.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. All Rights Reserved.
it was no time for love outside- old winds of worship found hand and mouth in ruined rain slanting over cultured fields into pagan barns with patched up planks finding us two misfits.
i felt the pulse of your undressed fingers transmit thoughts to my senses- aroused by autumn scents of milky musk and husky hay in this barn’s faith we climbed the rungs of civilisation so random in our exile-
and found a bell housed inside a minaret- with priest and muezzin sharing its balcony- summoning all to prayer with one voice- this holy music, was only the wind blowing through the weathervane, but we liked its tone to change its time.
THE DOOR
the door
between skyfloor
topbottom
is rankrotten
portalbliss
or abjectabyss.
it contains conversations
confrontations,
hiding loves two-ings
in lost ruins-
shuts us inside our self
with or without someone else.
we,
the un-free,
disenfranchised poor
have no bowl of more-
only pain
on the same plain
as before,
homeless
or in shapeless boxes,
worked out, hunted, like urban foxes-
outlaws on common lands
stolen from empty hands.
files on us found
from gathering sound
where mutations abound
put troops on the ground.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. All rights reserved.
i want what others want– synchronicity and simplicity in life of free will– sharing some land i can work with my hands no more slave still.
time trapped. lines tapped. steps tagged. voice gagged.
this elite mafia of Orwell and Kafka has built Metropolis on old Acropolis,
reducing proles to zombie roles in constitutions of constructed evolutions,
with blood to dust faiths riding like dark wraiths bullets shredding bombing and beheading
the innocents and dissidents to steal their lot and not share what you’ve got.
THE CUP
Strider Marcus Jones
a smelted celebration of victory and carnal coronation moulded in dark history– the chalice divine to inhuman crime, blessing unjust law and futile war.
my dearest holds the coffee i pour into me, or sometimes tea when i want to see who is different in the present.
upturning the cup and turning it such to read the leaves– a gypsy’s lore and ancient blood has always understood–
who and what controls the plot, keeps us in the base and dregs looking up, without the legs to climb the slippery clay into dark deceit counterfeit deception and decay.
take back how to think, stand at your own sink and wash away this cold custodian, old Eton and Bostonian suited slick affray–
of corporate hoodies and big house bullies hunting and shooting laughing and looting, smeared in oils that anoint herding us to the vanishing point.
THE DANCE
Strider Marcus Jones
pull the roof off knock the walls down touch the forest climb those mountains and smell the sea again.
watch how life decomposes in death.
going back to the land to reform and be reborn as something and someone else.
there’s no great secret to it all. no need to overthink it through.
food and shelter, fire and shamans. clothes and coupling used to be enough with musicians artists and poets interpreting the dance.
then warriors with armies, religions with god, minds buying and selling stole the landscape and changed time.
smash the windows, break down the doors. melt the keys, rub evil words from their spells and puncture the lungs of their wheels
before they kidnap you from bed, call you dissident, hold you without charge, wheel you out on a stretcher from waterboard torture for years, without trial, in Guantanamo Bay.
they are selling the sanctuary we made with our numbers, bringing back chains, making some of us slaves. outside, the dance in the five coloured rings making winners and losers,
holding flags and flames.
THE DOOR
Strider Marcus Jones
the door between skyfloor, topbottom,
is rankrotten,
portalbliss, abjectabyss.
it contains conversations, confrontations, hiding loving two-ings
in lost ruins-
it shuts us inside ourself with or without someone else.
we, the un-free, disenfranchised poor have no bowl of more- only pain. on the same plain as before, homeless, or in shapeless boxes, worked out, hunted, like urban foxes– outlaws on common lands, stolen from empty hands.
files on us found from gathering sound where mutations abound put troops on the ground.
HOPPER’S LADIES
Strider Marcus Jones
you stay and grow more mysterious 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 lovingkindness.
cloaked in timeless density and tone, in settled loam, beyond lonely apartments in skyscrapers and empty newspapers, or small town life. but
gutting you with gossip’s knife.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate, and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India, and Switzerland in numerous publications including Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
i’ve set so many fires in the deepest desires on this road and am close to what they hold- the most for human love and equal revolution without the bloody fist and glove of brutal evolution. see, how gold cartel caravans and religions in corrupt polarity have usurped the pagan shrines of all humanity- making us serfs again in unframed Lothlorien, in chains that were strings, ciliced by mortifications mesh, while our mind and limbs long for love’s pomegranate flesh.
The poems in this collection show Strider’s gift of being able to weave words into creative and surprising configurations. He manipulates words to do his will, taming them with his love for the sounds, rhythms and cadence of language. The result is poetry that is fresh, wild, sensual, and new. His poetry lulls the reader into hypnotic and sensual trances with imaginative renderings of lush landscapes of the mind, body,and nature. Pomegranate Flesh is a wonderful compilation of poems, resonating with a poet’s passion for life, love, and language.
The Pomegranate is the national fruit and symbol of Armenia. It represents fertility, abundance and marriage. One ancient custom widely accepted in ancient Armenia was performed at weddings. A bride was given a pomegranate fruit, which she threw against a wall, breaking it into pieces. Scattered pomegranate seeds ensured the bride future children.
This was a gift from my daughter because it contains one of my all time favourite poems, ‘Lothlorien’, and what a poem this is. The words skip and dance hypnotically to create a poem that has a real epic feel to it – I could honestly read a book of Lothlorien – the rhythm feels soporific, but suddenly a line will appear that punches you right in your conscience. A wonderful weave of fantasy and reality with tension between the natural in terms of tribe and habitat with the unnatural in terms of politics and corporate corruption. Reads like a song, reminds me of the tempo of some classical epics like the Ancient Mariner.
There are so many poems I loved in Pomegranate Flesh, notably the title poem but another absolute favourite was ‘Childhood Fires’ for its honesty, descriptive power and the well crafted positioning of the poets background in terms of class and family. In my opinion, this is a well delivered slice of social history in poetic form, that avoids caricature due to the poets skill in painting a picture with words, that evoke strongly poignant memory. Stylistically, for me, it was evocative of Ken Loaches ‘Kes’. Timeless and Northern. A brilliant poem.
the stars are those we have forgotten both living and dead, floating in clustered constellations not labouring in rows- with hair growing grey and teeth going rotten singing songs, God’s godless pray. harvesting crops. chants drowned in clocks of tobacco and cotton, the peasants and slaves of civilised nations duped by liberty in recent history- dug out canals, made railways and roads out of tarmac to tread- into factories like tribal junkies hooked on cheap gin and beer instead of joining the cholera’s watery dead- ten to a room in a slum and led- like human batteries, sleeping without moonlight on sarsen stones, or druid voices in their homes- where thoughts have no dreams or flight, just sleep, recharge, get bled. you have to be poor, to think utopia can be something real- not to exploit or steal that ambrosia aura of women and children and men for the spoken wages of despair- that suck you in, glad but grim when time’s clock punches that card by the door and mass myopia conditions all to labour, keyboard and pen for food and shelter with a roof and fourth wall shanty made out of cardboard, wood and tin in sunny Sao Paolo, where the samba rain leaks in while orphaned children beg and play eating the forage of capitalist waste dodging death squads night and day imitating Socrates at football to hope to taste what’s inside the cold, glistening towers casting invisible powers behind the smoked glass and soldiers of stone leaving blood and bleached bone from over there- where the ascent of money doesn’t care about it all because its infinity is small.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between forests, mountains, cities and coasts playing his saxophone and clarinet in warm solitude.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, India and Switzerland in numerous publications including 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; Section8Magazine; Danse Macabre Literary 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.
so now we both came to this same branch and bough- no one else commutes from different roots. me carrying Celtic stones with runes on skin over bones- and you, in streams on evicted land trashed ancients panned- our truth dreams under star light crossing beams. in here, there is no mask of present building out the past with gilded Shard’s of steel and glass shutting out who shall not pass. the tree of life breathes a rebel destiny believes- we are minds and musk no more husks and dust.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. All Rights Reserved.
Strider Marcus Jones is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry can be viewed at https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/
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 lovingkindness
cloaked in timeless
density and tone
in settled loam-
beyond lonely apartments in skyscrapers
and empty newspapers,
or small town life
gutting you with gossips knife.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. All Rights Reserved.
Bird sun-dance On blue water: Eagle fly Free in sky.
Salt flats basin Great white sea Bare of grass And prairie tree.
Shadow That Comes Inside Says the white-man’s wasting kiss, Grows because he does not know, Where the center of the Earth is.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. All Rights Reserved.
ISSUE 7
From the Editor: Mysti S. Milwee
Congratulations to all my fellow brothers and sisters that have contributed to Issue 7 of Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal. Warmest Welcome, y’all have a “uwoduhi adanvto” (beautiful spirit). Issue 7 highlights a rather diverse beautiful collection of Poetry and Prose; Collaborations in Art and Poetry; Photography and Art Photography that transcends with beauty evoking nature, beauty, animals, and Native American culture. The Cover Art “HARVESTING THE FALL” is rendered by the Editor and is an ekphrastic collaboration with poetess Venus Jones. I hope you all enjoy and share the beauty of this issue with fellow poets and creatives in the world. Thank you for contributing!
Congratulations to the following fellow contributors for Issue 7:
mop my stain
of thoughts
from their existence,
before they grow too old
and follow me,
into disrepair
and rigid ways-
but leave one drop
of luminous ribosome
to feed its reason
if i choose to let mortality
become transhuman,
then i, so acting shaped
to mime and mummer
like a paradise peacock
in a rainy coat of chaos-
would delete myself
born blind, gone wise.
When The Day Breaks Down
when the day breaks down,
i look rain drowned
like that hole in the ground
trapped road where i wait
floating in the pool of fate.
which way is sound.
back
is gone,
and forward
the unfound
wild track
moves on.
sideways
yours and my ways
shout
then separate out
in pieces of broken pre-Raphaelite plate
and coffee stained passages of forgotten Blake,
now ornaments
of visionary discontents-
i removed when
to begin again.
Doing Nothing
doing nothing
is a way
of doing something
with the day
if you leave it open.
just think,
what was, has been
a long drink
from the same stream
and you are not broken.
love flown and fled
shared who you are,
happened, was said
but only so far
sound spoken.
Broken Line
i keep seeing you forever,
but forever
isn’t time;
its now
is only never,
and its plough
isn’t mine:
but those fields, were not faking
in the wind and rain
of mime-
when giving, was worth taking
to remember the same
soft swaying, then making
broken line-
on loves ketch,
so ebbed and etched
in sips of moated wine,
whose sober stillness
of fathoms reflect-
this nearness
each dominion can't confine.
Grains of Sand
imagine
crossing the Sahara
with the Tuareg;
sleeping
under one vast canopy of stars,
consoled by constellations
that once looked down
on ancient forests
and wind worn mountains
older than these here now.
it all repeats itself-
the river- beds and rocks
return to the sea,
where temporary strangers
sit like Robinson Crusoe
on loud, tractor raked beaches
in smells of salt and dog shit
watching the waves,
thinking inside them
coming and going
like friends to be afraid of-
as nature retunes herself
ignoring our significance
becoming grains of sand.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, India and Switzerland in numerous publications including 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; Section8Magazine; Danse Macabre Literary 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.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones from his books Pomegranate Flesh and Wooded Windows.
BIO
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and ex civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities playing his saxophone in warm solitude.
—————————————————————–
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine.
her hair tumbles blowing like unfurled cotton through unforgotten fumbles in vegetation of our own interpretation of each other in the dark.
my desk grown out of a tree sown from my lover where i carved these words in the bark sitting in her branches knowing what life is all about as i look out of wooded windows
and absorb it’s shows as it goes through each obscenity of extreme supremacy- a woman must not let a man forget she is a suffragette in her soul and under his blanket so never kept
or chatteled forever to the custom weather of his debt.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
pull the roof off knock the walls down touch the forest climb those mountains and smell the sea again.
watch how life decomposes in death going back to land to reform and be reborn as something and someone else.
there’s no great secret to it all. no need to overthink it through
food and shelter fire and shamans clothes and coupling used to be enough with musicians artists and poets interpreting the dance.
then warriors with armies religions with god and minds buying and selling stole the landscape and changed time.
smash the windows break down the doors melt the keys rub evil words from their spells and puncture the lungs of their wheels
before they kidnap you from bed call you dissident hold you without charge wheel you out on a stretcher from waterboard torture for years without trial in Guantanamo Bay.
they are selling the sanctuary we made with our numbers bringing back chains making some of us slaves outside the dance in the five coloured rings making winners and losers holding flags and flames.
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms. —————————————— His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: The Piker Press; Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
it contains conversations confrontations, hiding loves two-ings in lost ruins-
shuts us inside our self with or without someone else.
we, the un-free, disenfranchised poor have no bowl of more- only pain on the same plain as before, homeless or in shapeless boxes, worked out, hunted, like urban foxes- outlaws on common lands stolen from empty hands.
files on us found from gathering sound where mutations abound put troops on the ground.
Copyright Strider Marcus Jones
Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. A member of The Poetry Society, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.
His poetry has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Germany; Serbia; India and Switzerland in numerous publications including: Dreich Magazine; The Racket Journal; Trouvaille Review; dyst Literary Journal; Impspired Magazine; Literary Yard Journal; Poppy Road Review; Cajun Mutt Press; Rusty Truck Magazine; Rye Whiskey Review; Deep Water Literary Journal; The Huffington Post USA; The Stray Branch Literary Magazine; Crack The Spine Literary Magazine; The Lampeter Review; Panoplyzine Poetry Magazine; Dissident Voice.
Poets are the forefront of white sun rises, Are the muse and souls of dreams, Are breadth of musicality and precious words, Are the brightest colors of our humanity in a principled civilization.
Article © Strider Marcus Jones. All rights reserved.
Poetry by Strider Marcus Jones 