Monday, September 16, 2019

Two Poems by Stephen Mead



The Driven

Wipers, the windscreen, voice-
less but
the syncopation, tribal----
Something is drumming,
depositing its bond, name-
less, a weatherscape-----
Hands, paws, hooves, fins…
each not a mimicry just
functions air and terra firma
swish with the sluice work of.
No wonder
I love
the geography of bodies,
our squabbles never eternal
severance.
Could life die due to a mood?
The wheeling, galactic axis
pivots on waiting
for global recognition-----
We     You     Me
are one as grass, stars & fish,
all incapable of really being
each other but
glimpsed still perhaps
where arcs pass
& expand





Voices Off

Dreams are the genius of a secret tongue
in the incoherency of sleep.  Every
body needs this and perhaps that other thing
some still believe in and call the spirit.
Flesh and bone, animate that!
Note the sense of wonder which comes
from sparrows in shrubs of parking lots.
What worlds they create amid the tossed
bottle caps and passing traffic's miasma.
What else is felt from the peripheral,
that not-quite oblivious mind's eye corner
keeping proximity in check
with enough distance to bluff:
do not touch?
Oh, go for it.
It might not always be painful or dangerous
despite what genetic defense says to survive.
So the self opens for larger selves in the world
and suddenly more than one of them too.
Here quietness dances in tandem
with the acknowledgement
of what also may be bountiful amid
every ongoing variety of tragedy.
Take that
cemetery where picnic blankets
are smorgasbord-spread and extra plates set
for the absent that are back, celebratory
with pinwheels spinning, fresh English ivy,
wild violets planted galore.
It is some sort of pageant
even those solitary skeletons tossed adrift as
forgotten, unloved to begin with
may be moved by through the rocky earth's
opposite tenderness
when turned over as silt.
Shovel, hoe, pick-axe
excavate the invisible kites dreamt about
from every slumbering grave
gone from nightmares to untroubled skies,
stars, suns, endless at last.






A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is an Outsider multi-media artist and writer.  Since the 1990s he's been grateful to many editors for publishing his work in print zines and eventually online.  He is also grateful to have managed to keep various day jobs for the Health Insurance. In 2014 he began a webpage to gather links of his poetry being published in such zines as Great Works, Unlikely Stories, Quill & Parchment, etc., in one placePoetry on the Line, Stephen Mead -- For links to his other media (and even merchandise) please feel free to Google Stephen Mead Art.

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