The Seattle, Washington metroplex, where I live, has one of the largest clusters of billionaires in the country. After all, it’s the region where Amazon, Starbucks, Boeing, Microsoft, Expedia, Costco, and now Google make their home. Yet, among this titanic concentration of wealth and techno-bounty, the number of people left homeless and bereft in a cold, rainy, bleak winter is staggering in its enormity. And as the city gloats and swells its community chest with economic growth, the proportion of the disenfranchised increases accordingly, by some perverse calculus, day by day. And the other plague, a deadly virus, rages on, from one ramshackle shelter to another.

Pioneer Square
behind the fancy bistro
another body

—Reproduced here with author’s permission from Virtual Haiku (Facebook: 30 December 2020)

Mark Meyer

is a poet, contemporary visual artist, and retired educator who lives in the Seattle area and describes himself this way: “ex-scientist/ quasi-artist/ semi-poet/ pseudo-guitarist/ meta-misanthrope.” Now in his seventh decade, he was a neurobiologist in a prior lifetime long ago—and still really misses looking through microscopes.

Mark’s short-form poetry has been widely published, and he is the author of a collection of selected poetry and artwork available on Amazon (June 2020): neo-Nothyngge.

His recent paintings, drawings, and digital prints continue his interest in pattern-driven compositions, richly detailed, leaving almost no space unaddressed. As he says, “...there are no big plans or schemes in my work... it’s simply enough to find out where these individual small ‘experiments’ lead me.” His artworks are inspired by scientific, societal, psychological, and theological considerations, reflecting the complex and frenetic condition of our contemporary culture.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡Featured Works by Mark Meyer at Davidson Galleries (Seattle, Washington)

⚡Works by Mark Meyer in Issue 1.8 (29 August 2019) and Issue 1.6 (27 May 2019) of Human/Kind Journal