Stephen Mead

Albany, NY USA

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. 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/

 

Completed 9th April 2020

 

Release Us, Corona,  O Viral Crown of Drops

 

If I love you is whispered to nestled collar bones or shoulders

do these bones resonate or only if love is felt by both

listener and speaker?

 

Once a simple clear glass of water was filmed with the word yes

written on its surface.  Microscopes closed in disclosing the lucidity

of molecular health from that monosyllable's common affirmation,

an enriched fresh oxygen component concentrated throughout.

The word no or one equally negative created an opposite effect.

Consider sensitivity as scientific and what elements humans are most

composed of, our flesh, a page for notations, our pores, parchment blotter

message after message canvasses like portraits and landscapes.

 

When the Holocaust camps were about to be liberated and prisoners,

if capable, fled out at the risk of being shot, so many, if they made it

to woods, left names, devotions, places to meet on scraps; paper or cloth,

for the trees to hold secret, like a forest of matchbooks waiting in case,

in case...so did bark and phloem take on what was sacred,

vouchsafe it for good whether found ever or not?

 

Pondering existence, what happens to us, is itself a forest of questions

life forms throughout time for the global horror houses

of twins vivisected by Mengele to the jungles, tropics, deserts, glades, flats

trafficked for commerce of all sorts from the vanishing indigenous,

the underground immigrants cartels process as oil, guns, drugs, sex...

 

Getting that picture requires shoring up souls as  rocking figures

who've had bad news hold one another in a slow weeping waltz.

 

Getting that picture is to acknowledge the dawning shock that, after all,

pestilence might not spare us and gone centuries hence

will be all human remnants.

 

Fuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkk!

 

Faith plea against this.  Faith speak, sing, plan, focus instead

on positive balance, a vision, lantern-lit from within

for here even in New York amid the whole world's latest pandemic

queer, contrary spring is rising up in buds pushing through,

in pulsing bulbs as pop-ups, daffodil, tulip, crocus,

and these alms are armed against the pall, are multi-tasking

with bird, insect, rodent, so that the whole season glows

as waves of nature coursing, an earth resurgence

in our faces, our senses, our blood, hearts and guts.