Water Caves
This place denotes no cleansing
due to religion, sex lives or ethnicity.
Of course Jorge Santayana was right
about doom's repetition & there being no historic learning.
Those who listened & recalled were killed first
by those who early on said it could not ever happen here.
Surprising how many denying others could possibly turn beast-like.
Even the police & the armies believed those leaders
with cyanide hidden in gums, & did the bidding
holiness decreed for holocausts must have scapegoats.
When the bloodlust was spent by the fittest honoring orders
the swords to fall on were penitential but betrayed earth swallowed them
before dolorosa beneath breastbones could possibly be found.
Now their ghosts follow bubbles from rubbles of cenotaphs
which once were temples & homes. How still, how quiet,
where the everywhere sub terrestrial wells & wells.
The fathoms of that moss now discover their own light
gelatinous, jewel-like, where secret shadows deepen in jade walls.
Oh humanity, where did you go when the inhumane stripped reason
& passion from compassion, when loneliness met desire not with mercy
but combustion no angels would tread the implosive folly of,
forsaking the murderous to let the ends justify means?
If a guitar could be heard here it would be one of steel strings
on a dark search over woods, fields, roads–
but there is only these percolating depths of beryl
left like a heart too empty to howl.
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Let Us Up
Processions sweep across–
internment camps again, guns.
Who's got the bucks? Who are the players?
It's high-drama, high-production while the red bungles,
slides slow, a greasy syrup over so many memos.
Better not report this. Most anyone could be harmed.
Better not to see, hear, feel the sky's armor
of greatly financed gangs. They'll hang us
as an example; they, always they & we
whom they might otherwise bed,
& sometimes do just the same.
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STEPHEN MEAD is a resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museumhas and has been intermittently submitting work for publication going on four decades. He remains grateful to all of the editors who have given his work a good home as now, retired from his day job, he is busy trying to sell his 40-year backlog of art, Art Collection from Stephen Mead.