Consumption
The sound of munched popcorn echoing in theater after theater
is the same as locusts decimating crops.
Oh dear Children of the Corn what is the harvest
now that you've taken cues from Shirley Jackson's The Lottery
for blood in the soil from traditional sacrifice?
Tip your hat to the garroting of bog people,
to the Aztecs stain-soaked stones.
Is this not metaphoric?
Is this not now the script-treatment produced by cults
to the Celebrities fallen from the favor of grace,
their wings, tarnished ink, in gossips skirmishing
through the dropping of rating polls?
Once, pan-flashes in microsecond fame, what demigods they were,
all-answering for every need on fantasized shrines
burnished by soul-hungry lives excited desperation.
Was the fatal flaw of proving themselves human the velvet glove's
waited-for-push seeing them thorn-crowned
on disillusionment’s altar?
How dare they do that, be caught, alcoholic, in predatory binge-scandals
or festering, blackmailed, as cringing pox, sycophantic then,
in the webbed net of the puppet master's blood thirst?
Control, jealously, envy, power, got them where at last they were wanted,
under the thumb, learning to crawl, burned legs wiggling beneath
magnifying glass glare.
Let us cast off empathy, understanding.
Let us perish the thought of forgiveness when,
seeing red, compressed tears of stuffed-down memories,
make vengeance seem necessary, at least to the victimized
and those cashing in on what damage was wrought.
God, finally, how the suffocated can again breathe, casting off chains,
no longer fool to the role model's pedestal
built by every projected wish.
Roll the drums now for the triumphant firing squad,
bring in the lions for the court crowd's coliseum delight
since the betrayer must pay just like every Anne Boleyn,
every Marie Antoinette.
Will remorse ever come,
later aging to some stabbed portrait
of Dorian Gray?
Come on now, that's just weakness.
Ignore the scarlet phlegm
just coughed in your hankie.
Forget human reason; attempts at untangling.
Intelligent in-depth exposés do not sell like yellow journalism,
and who has the time?
Post the bowel movement of your every reaction,
re-tweet, tally your likes over at Facebook and their ilk.
Vent your venom in every comment section.
Show the world with your brave made-up
usernames all the technological advances in listening skills,
the improvements in communication, the godsend of social media
to mirror and sustain our humane social fabric.
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On Guard
Pacts are sealed in foxholes & some art
is surreptitiously managed – yes – even from work camps.
To perceive, look hard: some paper
Mache model hinting of the grisly details
only survival digests.
Is this the muse keeping vigil or
sister/brotherhood fastening on a will
never before realized?
Tapping in after the major dreams were snatched:
family members to squabble with, a career of labor
hoisted towards painstaking hope, all of that––
Now, any future banked upon must strip
disillusionment and become an antenna
keen with instinct's white clarity, must
take children over boulder after boulder,
the trunks of rivers, like ants chiseling a mountain
into a network of resistance.
Here, to consider trusting a kid
to the universe following the dangerous daze
of such smuggling is a luxury fraught
with caution.
Is it hard?
We gaze, register, sense upon & around, then,
sometimes find ourselves even capable
of joking.
That helps a lot.
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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.