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Julian Beever Works

http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm 

My Friend Writes Poetry

Read and be inspired...

Poems by Maitri Mehta.

Works in Progress 5/23/06

001. Things to Ask a Fellow Passenger While Riding the Subway

 

What about:

Hi, how are you, was your day filled with light?

And do you enjoy the dawn when the sky bleeds cotton candy

Or the purple haze of dusk slipping numbly into night?

And do you have any vices that keep you ashamed and your

Head hung low, like snorting lines or doing time or

Dancing in a dream in a field of nicotine? Or do you bottle up

Your passion in an aerosol can and blast it onto public walls

With the pretense of "stickin' it to the man?"

Is your small intestine traced around in pencil or pen?

And did you scratch away your salty tears that blurred you

through Of Mice and Men? ... Do you even know who Steinbeck is?

The Grapes of Wrath and all of that? Or do you limit yourself

to People magazine and consider yourself up on current affairs

knowing Lindsey Lohan's current weight and the current colour of her hair?

I bet Brokeback Mountain is "OMG the saddest thing you've ever seen!"

But you couldn't call to being the most heart wrenching thing you've ever read.

What about when you find out Piggy's dead?

Plummeting to an early grave that he already had one foot in, a

foreign blur against an aching blue sky  just like Icarus

whose awesome waxen wings simply melted when he tried to fly too high,

the same ignorant fault of mankind

destroying a legendary bronze Grecian and a kid with bad eyesight.

And would you ever leap into a concrete paved pool if,

at the last second, Jesus whispered in your ear and told you water would appear?

Because I'd say, "No way in hell, Christ, unless you go first."

And you know damn well if the oasis showed to quench his thirst

he'd float right down but he hesitates and only desperate

doubt can make the messiah wait

and perhaps the son of God was beaten as a babe;

lashed with scientific truths and cut with lonely rage and

in every parallel universe some bastard God

is waiting just long enough to be called a fraud

and suddenly you're in his tired sandals and he's in your Air Force Ones

and you've got his beard and bloody hands but he's got your gun

and the barrel's in your mouth. He says,

"The joke's on you, son."

 

Or: Is this your stop?

 

002. Ban Harry Potter, it's the Work of a Satanic Witch Woman! And Other Anecdotes

 

Heres something incredible: down in Vatican City,

Jean Paul, the most pious man on earth,

Was cruising around in a Pope Mobile.

So if you were ever in a hurry, you could just

Race him to the intersection and get a Blessing On the Go.

But God blessed his soul, and Im sure right this minute

Theyre chatting up gas prices over heavenly mochas.

Theoretically,

Theres nothing wrong with spreading

Your philosophy. In the back of church on a Sunday morning

The monologues reverberate off the stained glass and fill you,

Religious soul or not, with this- something;

If not from the content of the words then from their rich, cherry wood tones.

But then: enter Dan Brown with his sophisticated plot twists and

Credible allusions; thesis, example, thesis, example,

So cunning and quick with his words that suddenly a whole generation of

Indie followers are boasting to their friends about the Priory of Sion

Holding the holy key to the Holy See and they

Straightaway forget they picked up The Da Vinci Code off the fiction shelf.

In London, Madonna slips on her Gucci sunglasses with

A Kaballah bracelet swathed hand;

The little red thread that screams, ''God and I are tight!''

And 12 million teenage girls are Googling online tapes and how to's

To get in stride with their Jewish side.

Tom Cruise insists on having his baby birthed silently and aquatically,

Proclaiming his everlasting love to little Katie Holmes in

A frenzy of logorrhea on Oprahs carefully upholstered

Sofa, and the fact he himself could be her father slips right past

All the stay at home hopeless souls mixing

Martinis at three in the afternoon.

In the Supreme Court someone is pushing intelligent design be taught nationwide,

But that high school sophomore is one step ahead;

Pushing on his classmates

That God must have put us here and evolution? Forget it.

The History Channel is full of hour long specials,

Subject: ''Proving that the Bible is true!''

And in holy lands the Torah and Quran

And Buddhists

And Hindus

And agnostics

And atheists

Get buried in the words,

''Lost souls,'' claimed so by the xenophobes;

And Mel Gibson, of course.

 

003. Newspaper Personals in the 21^st Century

 

He writes:

I am nothing but grey scale so

Discover me and colour me incredulous.

I suppose the filter was black and white

But that's all right because that means

That I am classic, like watermelon on a

Summer morning or Fred and Ginger, damn it.

Like the cool whisper of autumn when the

Leaves are loosening up, I've got this air of ambiguity

That

You

Just

Cant

Understand.

The soft, well worn melody that gets twisted in your mind

And tangled on your tongue, caught in the knots of your

Hair and I will sleep there, nestled in your roots.

I would say you smell like flowers but that's cliché

So I pick pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving Day.

I would say your eyes shine like diamonds but that's lame

So I pick amber, holding the traces of history because

Your soul is old and infinity,

So take me to the ends of time

And I will

Take

You

To

The top of the world.

 

I write: thank you,

But the top of the world doesn't sound too good. I hear

Mount Everest is damn cold.

 

[Sometimes I think literalism ruins any

chance I have

At romance.]

 

004. xemoxcorex

Pathetic. Pronunciation: p&-'the-tik
Function: adjective

State in which you are so overcome with grief

That it strains against your mouth in nonexistent words,

And you must refer to Coldplay and Dido

And The goddamn Cure to speak your mind with

Generic lyrics that have been scribbled already

In 1,001 emo girl diaries.

 

 

How did sadness become synonymous only with

Self mutilation and copious amounts of black eyeliner?

With thin red alleyways lining adolescent arms,

So precariously displayed in such a way that says,

"Look, but I dare you to ask."

Suddenly, tears and torment can only mean you

"Cut your wrists and black your eyes'' and

Every song on your I'm Feeling Down playlist

Is clumsily spelled out in raspy screams and minor chords.

But what about the quiet side of despair?

The contorted limbs and harsh cerulean that punctuate

Picasso's old guitarist, the downcast eyes and boney

Fingers plucking at the very veins of desolation,

So terribly silent that they must lead right to a hypothermic aorta.

Or the deafening echoes of Mozart's compositions, a deep

Wail exhaling with every long piano key reviving lost

Images of a siren's expanding larynx and resounding grey teeth

Reflected in the river Styx on Halloween.

Or the painful graphics of Frida's acrylic soul,

The suffocating loneliness of a womb without a citizen

Conjuring Spanish blood and Mexican tears and broken

Pelvis shadows lining a wall that haunts more so than a tomb.

Or the bittersweet honey tunes that drip from a saxophone

That boost up Muddy Waters or Bessie Smith as

They rage through the Blues, and if you strain your ears

You can make out the weight of shackles and a white man's

Whip looming in the shadows by the bar.

Or the black insanity of Edgar Allen Poe, tightening his

Straight jacket with every pinpricking verse of the

Raven's vacant eye that seems to say,"You are lost and so am

I but every human soul was fated to one day die."

But according to the critiquing army of the Myspace generation,

none of the classic misery

Can ever measure up to Greenday.

 

005. P.O. Box Nowhere

 

In the midst of a heat drenched July

The rain refused to fall no matter how many

Times I asked the sky kindly, and all the

While as I tried to pray for natural salvation

You clutched my fingers in your palm

Thinking you had all the right moves. My courteous

Ancestors begged me to stay quiet, and I am no

Traitor to the name I holdbut I was aching

To let my echoes go, I belong to nobody!

So under the eye of midnight I leapt out of

Your window and back into the sea.

For 10 split seconds I hung suspended on

Moonshine fishing wires, afraid that my

Worn shell would simply float away like

Dust and sand and ancient bones; but ironic relief came

When oxygen crushed me like a paperweight

On bible pages and my gills reopened and I was

Buried in a salty mess of blue. Tired denim

Gave way to scales in a thousand colours but

I was clumsy and out of tune, rusty nails in a

Bucket of soapy water. These subzero residents

Didnt know me any longer, I had become a ship

Docking in the wrong port, and as I consulted a bored

Humboldt squid I discovered my ears had grown

Foreign to the ocean tongue. I was no mermaid

Any longer but a tenant of broken fins. Day was barely

Clocking in, espresso in hand, when I unzipped my

Flippers and swung on the curtain vine through your

Open panes. You tossed and turned my way and said Did

You just wake? my courteous ancestors begged me to

Stay quiet, and I am no traitor to the name I hold so

Spoke with convincing ease and smiles.

 

But I belong to nobody,

I belong to nowhere.

I hope everyone's first blog sucks...

Because this one certainly might. I have been browsing the rank-and-file of noteworthy blogs. Let me tell you something. They are all noteworthy, to be sure, and I find myself wondering how they got that way. Honestly, this first-post-thing is painful. 

The basic list of elements for the average, spectacular post is as follows:

• A picture; sometimes with a good, old-fashioned caption;
  

   Once upon a time there was a princess who got married, pregnant and had stretch marks like everyone else.

• A poem. I don't know many, but I love them. Here an insightful favorite;

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

-Robert Frost

• Some include a short anecdote, some a writhing masterpiece about their least favorite tooth paste. I don't know how I'll fare in this section. I might end up sticking with the pictures, quotes and poems. My most recent titillating narrative was that an alum of my college told my class to quit the journalism major and industry all together if we want to have job security, food and a roof over our heads. I think she said the word "depressing" at least 12 times in her rant. 
• Other blogs get creative and lucrative with gadgets and adds. But hey, if you follow me, I'll follow you. Kind of a "you-scratch-my-back" approach. On the plus side, journalism is a conversation, and what I am passionate about. So let's talk.