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.
OUR TALK
the soft wind, stroking your smiling face, fingers your fine combed hair, in out of place- and i know when you go nothing can make this mood, or give its famine food.
our talk, branching through woods and sky like young leaves, suddenly knowing why- they need the sun again to be, and to remain- more than a copied canopy to reach the plain out to me.
i lounge, in your living words libation, with uncommon nouns, uncovered in creation, and wait for wantings i can be- where complex minds dwell in that simplicity, where feelings go to touch and come to mean so much.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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.
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.
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.