It’s sort of a horror —
Ashes in the mouth, fish subsisting
on mud —
hypothetical fringes, camps, camps
of cracks where real humans slip…
Homeless, here on the last frontier
there’s room enough for millions
to live out of a car, pitch a tent, grow
up in a dark the texture of thatch.
To taste the stale odor of resources drying,
to breathe that exhaust
is to suddenly find yourself another
bottle-tossed boat person
washing, washing…
I’m inside that knife
experiencing the exposed belly’s
sensations, and what pierces, and when.
It’s the heart of a photo of three women
weeping over some body shot down.
Madonna’s aren’t myths. Truly, martyrs feel:
Grief, the black garb, not a symbol simply,
but more a face wrinkled expressive with
gestures, of having stolen sights gelling
as dreams at the edges of breathing, of breath.
Is to lose them to harden, become brittle,
hollow, a shell of straw
whistling in the breeze?
Down at the bowels of featureless dots on
a chart, down past the grid to a network
of sewage tunnels, the human soul’s reduced
to the garble some loudspeaker blasts.
Each evening, on the air waves, that trouble,
a roomful of mirrors, delivers the same news.
More at http://stephenmead.weebly.com/links-to/poetry-on-the-line-stephen-mead.