Broken Horned Unicorn & Caught by Myth by Stephen Mead
Broken Horned Unicorn
It was OK, the breaking more awkward than painful,
a sort of Novocain numbness. I'd never really felt
quite at home anyway, in my bones, never quite grown
into them. Instead, walking around was like being some antique
bureau suddenly come to life, the mirror-frame so rococo
it had to go through doors at a slant.
Now, though still far from grace, my gawkiness
at least seems explicable.
Remember The Glass Menagerie, that pivotal scene
where, horsing around, Laura's Gentleman Caller
accidently smashes Laura's unicorn favorite?
Well, just so, I'm almost there, Blue Rose's figurine,
or so she was nicknamed, much realer than before.
It's good, this glass preciousness falling away.
It's better, this letting go, like burning a thousand love poems,
like opening your mouth & abruptly being mute.
Really, I swear, now that I'm the silence
which follows a truck's explosion; now that I move
as an exhausted vigilance finally resting its vision,
life has never been so reconciled,
life has never meant more.
Caught by Myth
Child of time, when did the dance get this frantic?
Over volcanoes gushing, upon sea storms, ship wrecks,
through rain forest villages all hobnob with exertion,
& back again, back through alleys of shattered bottles,
how the twisting movement goes on
leaving the body tattered satin.
Why is stopping so impossible & what's to be done
with these shreds the flesh keeps peeling
as if life were a strip tease?
At first it was exercise & eventually a pleasure:
words, white horses galloping in blue surf.
We were those colts in Parnassus, its rippling pergolas,
utterly unaware such grounds were sacred
or that the solemn, the spellbound statues
housed muses of truth.
Slowly their lids lifted
& those carved features watched everything, their eyes
of green neon, faces following in attendance.
Here, have back the scrutiny. Envy nothing
& want even less for the ink's turned to fire
& the pen's red tip immolates hands.
How they flair, coal moccasins.
How they spread up & out, the pulse, a bloody
hemorrhage, the paper, an arsonist's treasure.
What snatching at air! What pirouettes!
The joy, overwritten, smolders to nothing
so just retire these red shoes, these red shoes,
take them off, kill the romanticism, our own graves
we dance upon, to be more than ballet
& breathe real at last.
“These were written sometime between the 1985 - 1990 . This was back before the Internet and I was just beginning to try and share my work, navigating the world of postage and S.A.S.E. terminology. Back then I was even more thin-skinned so if a work was rejected or not returned it would be at least a year before I tried sending something out again, if ever. Of course, the critic's voice went for the easiest self-accusations when it came to what was wrong with the work: pretentious, trite, hackneyed, cliche, especially if a poem had an ekphrastic influence. In 1990 I moved geographically but it was not a cure for any of the hypersensitivity which went into my being creative, so it was a decade before I began sending work out again even while I kept on writing in secret. Even then the work sent was not from the earlier 80s, but selections stored from manilla envelopes written in the intervening years. Three years ago or so I came across the 1980s work that was typed (not sure if originally handwritten has been chucked) scanned them as Adobe PDF and revised after converting back to Word. Enclosed are three which went through that self-laceration process.”
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)