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Stephen Mead

Your Suicide

 

attempt never quite left us.

There are days, there are nights

when it wears nothing but insides.

That skin is a testament my eyes

keep confessing.

How many times I've wanted to be done

with it, to take the gaze and, with

comprehension, kiss each lid

towards its rest.

This is not to discount vengeance,

getting back, the wrathful tongue.

Never see you again.

That was particularly blasphemous

for you were going to marry

& I couldn't congratulate,

thinking how one month before

you were the first, you were the only,

though of course we were young

& no one understood

the country never before visited

of infatuation & hate.

 

Too late, this returning

& still in the dark about methods.

Memory. Ignorance.

Who's the more knowing ghost

with a picture of your death

superimposed on my face?

 

Still, many exist so,

with simply something that happened,

& it's over, the long ago, the rehearsal

for the other route

we both tried.

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Stephen Mead © 2022

Father & Son

 

You are the poem I never had to begin.

The words were born before me

already attached.

For the life of me I have cherished them,

an unspoken riot.

Suppose it burned like a jet trail.

There's such electricity in air,

with eternity a rip tide.

It has lightning's function.

That's how I was delivered

& shall return, an erosion of gold leaf.

No, Father, we are not Gods.

Your own silence taught that,

but how love still blazes

when confession tears it forth.

 

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Stephen Mead © 2022

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