You were willed the family homestead.
The price was that Eden drained from your eyes.
A life so weighted now
that it began cracking the mind.
Battling things real and imagined.
Praising Jesus, while keeping company with darker things.
Sanity is running on empty.
You're shaking hands with hatchets.
Making deals with death.
Your soul is in disintegration mode.
I've tossed you a line many times.
Only to be ignored many times.
Perhaps the line was too thin; I apologize.
Perhaps you were too arrogant; you'd never apologize.
Either way, I had to flee the friendship.
When your darkest color bled into mine.
Those goblins are advancing on the old homestead.
Perched upon the broken fence.
My dear dying friend,
It's too late to patch or mend when there is no cloth left.
Let's have lunch in the next life. I'll buy.
Planet in flux…it sucks
No refuge..Scrooge rules..
Stooges subterfuge deluge..
Fossil fuel fools..
Poleaxes..then relaxes…
As the earth burns..
As it turns..on its axis..
***************
Us schmucks battling....
Puzzling...prattling clucks...
Aloof to proof....daft defiance..
Shucks the sleuth of science..
**************
Glower at their ivory tower..
Cruise ship trip fillip..
Dour baby boomer power..
******
Absurd herd..cans compliance
Uncouth trampling truth..
Nip & tucks alliance..
Mottled rucks…throttled petro bucks...
Plucks for retro reliance..
*******
Muzzling…weasel hatchets meddling...
Diesel guzzling trucks..
Saluting high falutin polluting
Pander to propaganda pedaling..
Ratchets up our dander…
Open the ruddy window!
Have a bloody gander!
Red Paint
Long before my time, a group painted in red lived on the land.
They lived with the buffalo and made weapons by hand.
They used arrowheads at the end of their spears.
Their homes were in tea peas planted beside the river.
They danced at night around the fire.
They were com and collected as their hearts desire.
In a no man's land, they fought with bravery and hatchets.
In red paint on horses, they had their revenge while it lasted.
It is sad that the white man had to take it all away.
Only skin deep, our blood is all the same.
Through revenant they stood their ground.
In the dark sky they survived when no one was around.
Just reach down and touch the dirt.
They washed off the blood in the river.
The land is for all mankind.
Through principles they were well defined.
Just like a wolf, they stand alert.
As warriors they just wanted to be free like a bird.
They are all connected in red paint.
Across the water shows reflections of their pain.
No manor tribe should ever be oppressed.
Standing towards the sun, they all came back from the dead.
Wewere wrong to take away their lives.
In the shadows they stood tall in the moonlight
When I grow up I want to be a nutcracker my son said.
I thought he meant ballerina, was he right in the head?
It’s not because he’s a male but he simply can’t dance.
As his mother I hoped that someone would give him a chance.
I will hire him said grandma, all of my older squirrel friends will too.
Our teeth are worn out and rotten, it is so hard to chew!
He began his career at the age of twenty-two.
He opens all of their nuts with hatchets of yellow, red and blue.
Can we rise to the challenge
Can we truly love all
the thin and the heavy
the short and the tall
Can we accept everyone
of all different colors
none of whom look
much like each other
Can we bury the hatchets
of antipathies long past
To build and maintain
a world that lasts
She is forty-seven, but insists on being with our twenty-five-year-olds.
I have heard her in the office hallway begging to be invited to things.
I will bring a really good present if you invite me to your wedding.
I will buy a round of drinks if you let me come to your Friday night deal.
How did a person arrive at forty-seven and not have friends?
I am unsure why she is so needy, but she is in all of their social posts.
Throwing hatchets, on a sail boat, at their baby showers.
Her smile seems forced, but not as forced as the two next to her.
If they did not invite her, would she stalk them?
Wait outside their homes?
Follow their cars to the event?
Part of me says YES.
We are bouncing and prancing and living our truth.
We are the old women of Southside Acres McGuth.
We have bats and hatchets and know how to swing.
We slap them around while we dance, and we sing.
The old men at Southside Acres hid in their rooms.
They were afraid of these women who carried big brooms.
They had heard of this sort, so they hid most of the day.
The old women of Southside yelled “hip! hip! hooray!”
Angry people trigger me
I am terrified of them,
pushing myself into a tight ball
sliding into the cracks between the floorboards
I cannot get away fast enough
They might as well be carrying machine guns
and machetes and hatchets and hammers
my body shrivels up and dies
I slide into a place I do not fit
trying to get away before the blood bath
always expecting to be the first one mangled and killed
Nobody ever forgets where he buried the hatchet. ~ Kin Hubbard
You bring the hatchet
each time
and you bury it deep.
Your friend is still your friend.
Many hatchets more with them
you will bury.
But each new time
they cut you with another hatchet,
it opens up old wounds.
Some cuts -
as deep as the holes
they were buried in -
take longer and longer
to heal.
One day you realize
the cuts of many hatchets
have not been healing nicely.
The blood you bleed
has left a trail.
You follow that trail
to the many other hatchets
you thought were so
well-buried.
Maybe you will hoist up those hatchets-
every last one of them -
and raise them high
above your head,
then bring them
down
once and for all
with all your might.
WHACK!
Then you can say
“You, my friend,
are dead to me.”
Oct. 15, 2020
N/A in the Quotable Poetry Contest
The tulips and the marigolds were in a gun battle today.
Queen of Tulips was mad for her latest slave Charlie had run away.
She started the battle with hatchets, battle axes, and hammers too.
Queen of Marigolds ended it with assault rifles, painted periwinkle blue.
I like to stick my head up.
Sometimes it gets lopped off.
While the angry one glares at me.
I like to give them my views.
Especially when they are unpopular.
Even when they surround me and mob me
Yelling and screaming in a threatening way.
I like to be counted.
Even when they take swords and hatchets
And lop my head off at the neck.
Even when they do it jaggedly.
That’s on them, right?
I like to stick my head up.
Sometimes it gets lopped off.
By the angry ones.
Served to me on a Santa Claus platter.
And it laughs.
MAMA PRAY FOR ME
In your deepest chamber Mama,pray for me
To know who deserves my door and who worths not my window
For i have seen those who destroyed a man
Attend his funeral to console his widow
Pray me to understand the pain and harm
Of such sayings that mandates betrayal on life
I am but troubled when men spread their arms
For the closer the embrace the deeper the knife
Deadlier is the act when men and demons toast
I have heard tales of guests who poisoned their host
With the right hand do men bury their hatchets
And from their left hand strike with sharpened matchetes
Say a prayer for me and repeat my petition
For these days even the devil is rebirthed a saint
What better meal have i to offer my dentition
Since the teeth now bites the fingers that feeds it?
LizDiamond World Of Poetry
It took our boys,
And turned them into men.
It raped our girls,
And made them pregnant with hate.
It took away the toys from our children's hands,
And taught them to toy with each other's lives.
Weapons are no longer made for wars,
But wars are made for weapons.
Leaders watch the nation burn,
So they can bask in the ashes.
Where do we head?
With necks denied their heads?
The blood is creating a red carpet in the roads,
So that a leader's shoes escape the dust.
But hands will shake,
Once the people are weak enough to be feasted upon once more.
The people shall be given a circus,
And soon they shall forget.
They shall come together,
Like scattered grains of rice,
So that the upper class can have a mouthful.
They shall bury the past,
But hold on to their hatchets.
They shall have a different script read out to them,
And a few Hail Maries, for all leaders come from God.
(A poem for Nigeria )
Elliepoet
Burying The Hatchet
©Ben Burton 4/7/2018
When burying the hatchet, make it deep
Thus none who travels by might ever see
That designee of senseless, squandered time
Wherein the guilt lies not in any crime
Save arrogance or stubborness gone wild
Which should have been abandoned as a child
The path that leads us to maturity
Yields tolerance for those who disagree
For rancor clouds the hearts and souls of men
And festers, making enemies of friends
Much better to omit uncommon ground
Since harmony exists in huge amounts
Still, civil disagreements can be good
If hatchets are confined to chopping wood
The eyes pierces into the soul of another
Like a dagger driven deep through the heart
It drives deep into soul of thoughts
Without permission
It opens thoughts
It flips through the pages of the mind
Like an open book interesting to read
It peers into rooms and closets of the mind
Looking for hidden skeletons and buried
hatchets
The life of another at its mercy
Like a servant humbly bowed before his master
The eyes
So beautifully carved by our creator
A mirror of good and evil
Is a weapon that kills
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