Precautionary
By Stephen Mead
Keep headlights off in case of snipers
while hopefully the engine's hum blends with the summer cicada drone.
Those groves under moon could be the gothic beauty of vineyards still
mixed with bushes of sumac and other vegetable fields
of any Romania which could even be in Vermont now
that authoritarianism has gone global
where all-so-right religions claim that to be against Fascism
is traitorous every here where they said
the dystopian could not possibly ever happen.
Yes, it is Lyssa's time even in the rural - Lyssa, spirit of madness & frenzy
with her maniae sisters in the all-over night, the myth of Nyx
which bore them for such petrichor sulfurous as rain on the wind
coming wicked to this day's darkening showing most
have become stowaways looking over our shoulders
and staying closest to walls until open waves may take us
to places which name us human enough still
where there's less sanctuaries for multitudes.
Oh great tall strident Woman of Liberty with a crown
may your lamp be lifted yet beyond such rubble
where we are steles, modern-day, created to be tales
encrusted with crystal and fossils micro-plastics seal in,
our bodies, leather sandbags, flesh textured to become coves, rocks
topographical as the tactile Paper Mache maps in old school rooms, ancestral,
those mountainous reliefs of borders engraved with names like poems
more weather erases the authors of
in this vast cylindrically-spinning post climate-change world.
Stephen Mead is an Outsider multi-media artist and writer. Since the 1990s he’s been grateful to many editors for publishing his work in print zines and eventually online. Recently his work has appeared in CROW NAME, WORDPEACE and DuckuckMongoose. Currently he is resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI historical figures, organizations and allies predominantly before Stonewall, The Chroma Museum - The Chroma Museum (weebly.com)