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oppositional poetry, prose, polemic
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