Confessions
of a Latter Day Cynic

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A Poet’s Confession

Filled with yearning, righteous angst and an off-hand nostalgia, Confessions of a Latter-Day Cynic marks the work of a poet in the throws of a mid-youth crisis.

Romantic delusions, career woes and grandiose ideals are all exposed here in these pages. Paul J. Bean deftly juggles these varying concepts while maintaining a wily, and, at times, wistful perspective.

With influences as far ranging as Keats, Coleridge, Plath and Eliot, the Confessions are comprised mainly of poems from the authors’ formative years. An enjoyable read lies ahead on this journey of the mind and heart in these challenging and strangely comforting stanzas.

Some samples from the book:

Newport
and the rocking of the waves dashed my side,
locking the hull, sealing the pulse, future force
flung far, past the reef of regret, the sand bar
seared by the blindly white bas relief, painted dour

over canvasses of time, a deaf mime, watching the hours
as the crow clocks tones of raging tomes, storied stories
under the bulwark of the cannon, frozen in time
as long brushes followed short, etch, etch, etch...

the final sketch, the sea-scape clear of endless years,
shining down the horizon line of countless setting solace
suns, shadows far from sight, colors scored the night
and justice followed wave, the light (the sea) to save

Rouge
Bloodlets form on my brow
To the pulse of passionate beats
As formless freaks they freeze
On contact with corrupt cares
Expunged from mortal mind-voids of ether—
The nether region that neither I nor I
Care to kill as crimson drops on the canvas
Tales of rhyme no longer told truthfully
Mix melancholically on the maudlin matte
How flat and faceless it fallways becomes
When bronze, bloodless courtly breasts
Curve round on the short stroke, hard on the long
Winter waxes carelessly as the widows bay wanes on.

Tired Song
Like icebergs on my eyes
I wake to greet the day.
Frozen beyond thaw is my mind
Yet it conjures obtuse images
[Resembling sleep] of night—
Yet rudely awakened I now
Slog to the pedantic beat
Of the morning machine,
Punching in, freaking out,
As dawn cracks over the computer
And my morning java my lifeline
Saves me from torturous
Thoughts of peace, tranquillity, rest.

Still Life with Child
those hands that cradled your daughter dear
have callused before your twentieth year
as she you loved did grow and play
the idyllwild among the matted hay

feel the palms of your daughter’s skin
you say you love her yet crush her whims
look to her eyes, how brown they are
and be not angry at her birth-born scar

now sweep her hair aside, (gently now)
kiss her wild world-weary brow,
sit her on your bended knee and sing,
a hymn to mock all eternal things,

then, locking fingers with her curls,
a remnant of her father’s curse
tell the tale of a goblin pater near,
the only truth she will ever hear.