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. He is also grateful to have managed to keep various day jobs for the health insurance.

Getting Clean Hands
By Stephen Mead

Would money do?  These greens
are leaves, a flattened fistful,
crisp, fresh, & almost like paraffin
from so many grasps.
How waxy the touch, how religious, a yew,
but jaded, ready for the highest bid,
for being the bought saint.
What gold lids, what velvet depths,
what incense there to be anointed
only by prayer, the nun’s robe.
But there is no habit here, simply
thirst, an absolution, & that is earnest.
Hasn’t nature been tried, pantheism delved
from a pagan’s stream at ease with each
ripple remembering heron, musk rat flips,
the hay-sweet noses of cattle
here sipping without suspicion
of DDT?
Certainly you were clean then,
a pony of pastoral luxury & wild
in the matrix of simple needs you now realize
were not even untouched then
by what money can do
after leaving your washerwoman’s hands.