2 poems

By Stephen Mead

Masks Melting

Shiny gray, such rain in my nature to observe, consider…
Feel these eyes. They traverse waves. I am unlearning myself
by shedding to the spirit. I am sketching with its antennae
to encompass tips, plumb depths, return in a new skin.

Regeneration has always been fever, pain as a breaking point
dispersion & shards re-glued.

Now what falls away has vapor-calm, the drops of shelter unlocked.

I have held your pain there, the ghost-boat of loss & other darker voyages.
Even in caverns they were the lightning of days. They were the brilliance
of experience, the motion just unseen.

Now, unmasked, how our disillusionment embarks.
I am gladder than I’ve ever been, naked faced
& without adorned hands.

I am raining my radiance as secure searchlights.
Come, I let go for whatever weather is your nature
to accept this entrance as you can.

Forest

indoors,
the house as terrarium needing only enough windows
of titanium light turning saffron.

We try to exist as glass contained with blossoming greenery
breathing a better thankful air simply for being.

Here is descending pressure, symbiosis
the bitten rosaries, the grieving broods…

These are our children’s & our own other side.
To this necessity says: sustain, graft, do not amputate,
& all the surviving send smiles of new tendrils,
weep wounds of buds that open fresh expressions
of blades flowering this wilderness on.

Stephen Mead is a retiree whom, throughout all his pretty non-glamorous jobs, still found time for writing poetry, essays, and creating art. Occasionally he even got paid of this. Currently he is trying to sell his forty-year-old backlog of unsold art before he pops his cogs.