(The Shattered Mirror of Avignon)
Five women stand, yet all are broke.
Against a curtain of ochre, blue, and white,
Picasso breaks the world with a savage stroke,
Reordering flesh into jagged, painted night.
Two sit in masks of African heat,
With eyes of daggers, vacant and intense,
Their limbs disjointed, monstrous, yet complete,
A fierce assault on beauty’s old defense.
See the prostitute on the left—archaic, frozen—
A nod to Spain, a shadow of the past,
While her sisters, on the right, remain chosen
To bear the mask, a spell of anger cast.
No sensuous reclining, no soft embrace,
But angularity that confronts the gaze,
Stealing the viewer’s quiet, private space,
And holding him within this broken maze.
They do not smile; they threaten from the canvas,
An “ugly” genius, a scandal wrought in 1907.
Rejecting perspective, a violent impetus,
Turning a brothel into a fragmented heaven.
It is the birth of the machine, the modern, cold,
A mirror shattering the Renaissance view,
Where beauty is not worshipped, but controlled,
And all that was known is made anew.
After a brief illness the world rolls back
as a globe atlas seeking its gimbal.
It occurs to me that the planet has no legs,
that legs are a mark of the ephemeral nature
of all angularity. Roundness the real
mark of the Lord Thy God.
I then wonder if I still have a fever of the brain?
My bowels are irregular
I dump fiber into my coffee, munch on dry toast.
A host of ridiculous thoughts plague me still.
Being perhaps still ill and loosely fitting
I bang my head upon a poem
and pray that it may recover all by itself.
THE COFFER
through the threshold
carried by the wind
a summer skirt below my knees
a request to enter with a sales brochure
an invitation to pitch perfume and jewelry
unbeknownst she’s decorated
her parlor space daring a drop-dead stare
the heaviness of dust, that hides my eyes
from any other prize my sale unavoidably detained
the coffer falls out of time and space
not unlike H.G. Wells time machine
the end of the world might have come
when one sees stars angularity
and the sun splashing in one’s eyes
forthwith, the ejection of a breath-holders breath
a sinking emotion of a pilot’s imminent death
but this darling of the skies survived
to let in this down-to-earth Avon rep
2/28/2019
*Coffer used more as an expression of a treasure
found in my eyes as I spy this pilot’s ejection seat
Every time I lose your love,
Every time eyes open to dreams
That can't corral your quiet flame,
The silent corners of what’s real
Wash out, their angularity softens
As before a clear night sky
That has no moon or stars...
Still infinity surrounds me
Feels as close as my own heart beat,
Its darkness surprisingly light.
In this space the hum of fireflies
Becomes an almost tactile force,
(Possibly the sound of your breath beside me?)
And so much softer than a fan knifing air,
Almost like gnats trapped in your ear.
So lost am I in my “little death” that
The fireflies’ extinguished flash
Is really the only warmth
That calls me back to hope that
The sun will rise again.
But I suspect that all dark dreams must turn
At last to song, where petals
Touch is anticipated with joy,
Rainfall’s coolness floats God’s ark of souls,
And His promise shines in a rainbow...
For always when my dreaming ends,
I wake to find you there!
Brian Johnston
February 23, 2016
mentally enveloped with the psychological angularity of a multidimensional prism, thoughts infinitely circulating inside my brain slowly building like an aneurysm, i bring to sight revelations unveiled by a genius but still they all surround with skepticism. the darkness that once entered me is bound to break free eventually, a disposition where mass murder and famine both come essentially, a mastermind rises and succeeds where hitler had failed consequentially, a massacre of hidden variables constructing inside exponentially, a child broken and left for dead grows up to be a little disturbed mentally.
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