Poetry By Strider Marcus Jones |British poet

Strider Marcus Jones

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.
 
 
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.
 
 
POMEGRANATE FLESH
 
ask those
who grow old-
some fruits are nicer
when they're riper.
you don't 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
it's 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 it's 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
 
 
TRAPPED IN MANUFACTURED TIME
 
so lost schooled-
but not a fool,
stands in cold sunshine
on golden heath
where no kings rule
and ancestors of cottons thief,
make poor ends meet for dirty dime-
trapped in manufactured time.
he sits
and fits
in the shadows of its shades
and lines
on Cribden hill-
where clouds spill
like wire brillowed blinds,
imagining a wintered witch
composing pagan spells and rhymes
with bones like martyred blades,
whose burned marrow curses
industrialists and tokened slaves-
to believe a full purse is
how life measures made.
the trees are gone,
and wandering tribes,
who worked and gathered everything as one-
now live down in gas warmed hives,
in settled serfdom's
truths and lies.