YOUR HAND ON MY PAINTING
It came through at once,
Came as braille,
The canvas & that touching
Since you didn’t really reach
Out of anything but
My system analyzing
Time out of mind to be
These clearly surreal fingers,
Their sculpted span, a mass
Of presence shaping what went
Beyond letters & dreams,
The shadows of pages
Where we talked our heads off
In sleep, in exchanging silences
With strangers, in omitting
The distance which was
Our eyes calling from photos
Held in envelopes, held in
Our palms pouring
The other’s face,
The other’s mouth
Over sheets of
Private flesh
MOTE ON THE MOVE
You have the sheen of certain paintings
Even as landscapes climb, solid steel & concrete
High rises blocking sun all around you, you,
Jungle dissident planted, a misfit, in this
Beat box ghetto…
Does the undercurrent contain jazz?
Listen, orchids rustle a tropical breeze
Through hair, the tattoo of blues
Bruise-stuck to skin.
With them the city is polished
Bright as moon in clear midnight.
Your gaze pierces sky scrapers.
These apartment projects become
Some evergreen glade
When you enter, a starling.
Mote on the move, light glints
As fire off the heat breathed.
These notes instill pure nitro
Nuances, a good fever’s rhythm.
Lulled by such thrumming
The landscape becomes still.
You lend it some more potency
& resonate.
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: http://stephenmead.weebly.com/links-to/poetry-on-the-line-stephen-mead
Bindweed Magazine 