Other Angels The scepters, the breasts, Joan of Arc’s shield being this Sharon Rose, this trumpet Lily, the names each an alias… Know them by oils anointing each doorway perfume purifies like a key. My eyes are on that needle calling for Ariadne’s stitch, for oceanic landscapes resembling fish with iridescent clouds… Surely angels cavort with swords of honor just above the statuary steeples & eaves. Please Angels descend. Familiars hover. I dab this neck, this wrist, & wait.
Peace Pockets
Some pita to slip in, pull over, be a pieta of tenderness snug in the fiber, the dough’s warming host. Listen, famine amid feasts, you may need this like soft rains fan-filtered all night for a summer after a season of swallowing long swords. Afterwards, siphoning your own gas vat, the plentiful pills, the hemp for Catalpas, yes, you might actually find the surprising pleasure of air again, air the answering anchor, air as an envelope, the impressionist’s senses, this melody of the lark
Last Touch
This is a privilege: holding your hand, & a kiss for your shoulder while feeling your fever break all amid the final breaths… Go, go now baby, right wherever you always wanted. The waiting, the fighting is over here as beloved ones come… Pacifist, warrior, noble in your Madonna blue gown, these sheets a pieta, & all machines turned away as you turn to float further beyond what is still… Listen, I am a romantic. I believe in where you live, a pure breath with every one of our passed ones gigantically buoyant there. No pain. No worry, The balloons left in your room, helium rainbows on trusted ribbons above the pitcher of flowers, the guardian angel at her porcelain watch, are guideposts waving, waving as your going waves in return For David P.
Bio: A resident of NY, Stephen Mead is a published artist, writer, maker of short-collage films and sound-collage downloads. His latest P.O.D. amazon release is an art-text hybrid, "According to the Order of Nature (We too are Cosmos Made)", a work which takes to task the words which have been used against LGBT folks from time immemorial. 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 place: Poetry on the Line, Stephen Mead
Author Central Page: http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Mead/e/B002P5TVQC/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0/178-9316259-8711759