Three Pieces
Stephen Mead
Our Crystal Ancestry
Knots are in the veins sand-sure with pearl cohesion.
Between the ears also so often is that shell tightening.
Clam up martyrdom voices so the cross can be got off
& wood meet its needs.
Always instead there's been the saints babbling stream
perfecting every stigmata while still criticizing each stain.
Rose, how much daily crucifixion will it take
to please the crown of thorns with enough self-lacerating pelts?
Guilt, your so gracious inward hate, has weighed the radiance
of this translucence with one albatross too many.
Now it is Autumn time. The gardens bed down brown
& the shedding ritual takes up its scythe again.
Aches reawaken to beckoning sleep, but may we pace
our seasons just so, our stored falls from grace.
May we mute accusing shrikes, each blunt cudgel's striking ruler
of sanctimonious piety & rise free of crime.
Tell me, what prayers have we not prayed enough?
What lapse in the kind & the good in our averted gazes?
On my mother's deathbed rosaries bled from her mouth,
each bead a clot, each strand a hemorrhage
her own mother bore delirious too in the tongue's final rant
of addresses mixed up with phone & social security numbers,
those psalms against being lost.
A testament too is in the chain of our legacy
that has damned us enough for the shy sensitive sins
on an altar of wants suppressed.
Still, at the edge of rest, what voices have called,
their lips, our own names? Still, during dawn's blue,
what guardian whispers have watched as you slept,
watched you dream?
Yes, be it the Seventh Seal or biochemical,
there is a scripture to deliver us from the evils never committed
& back to the innocence, glass-sheer, with which we were born.
Runaway
What are you missing?
Where's the needle just set down, the loaf of bread
left for cooling, that book in a window open before Elms?
Did you hear whistling, soft laughter, not a thing?
Someone's been passing through here, someone smelling
of weathered stone, of moss under it, of subway rains
& snow-washed blacktop.
Attraction is a shack of hay private as slept-on-news
beneath a channel finding ports.
Attraction is the blood of it, the arduous desperation
& giddy pins & needles traveling through the act.
Carrying that brilliance, all the pinched cemetery
flowers, all the back pack homes & scant clothes
in brisk Autumn, the flash has a message:
I was here. Of it; think nothing.
I was here. Now I'm not though you secret the jewel,
though you finger the scars, though you wonder who's running
off where you return to what's missing which is a part
of us both.
Avoidance Tendencies
Sunday evening, early November,
leaves of the deepest yellow drift down
past the street lamp. With a very soft crunch
they touch the ground. Staring up, breathing in,
the night is quite a large see-through pot.
Particles, luminosities, the papery sounds stirred
against vast stretches is an implication: things reflect.
Gather this, every bit, the air, clear water,
the lit windows, squares of Margarine,
& not a single impression melting
though all is fluid, though living is glass.
Next block, scents of dinner.
Next corner, shouts, whispers, conflicts
of somebody or others'. These are porches.
These are newsstands. That's a mailbox. That's a siren.
Hey, walking the dog, so golden & dopey, oblivious in fact
to every howling mutt picking up the heat of his musk,
what is to be made of this neighborhood, the jotted scenes,
the autumn leaves, existence as it were while dreaming
of opera, grand tragic Aida blasting from every street?
Now, going home, a poem of letters closing,
so much yellow drifts, shivers still with tenderness
intimate past the branches, the good black, & the answer,
my avoidance, strolling, means to know.
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. Currently he is resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall, https://thestephenmeadchromamuseum.weebly.com/