Long Excavated Poems
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They excavated him, her youngest son,
who passed away too soon at age nineteen,
to join her second son, who had just died
at fifty-five- to the new hollowed plot.
There, side-by-side- together, brothers slept
neath velvet grass, under a graceful tree,
where she would leave her flowers and her tears;
a mother's love for them would always be.
No way would she have come to realize-
three years from when she joined her precious sons-
another excavation would take place-
where she would rest with them eternally.
One plot, three graves- a mother and two sons-
a final excavation- filled with love.
July 1, 2021
Contest: This Or That, Vol 4
Sponsor: Edward Ibeh
Unrhymed Sonnet
(true story)
A many faceted gem, the sun kissed blackberry sparkles amid prickly vine
With ebony facade denoting time to pluck it from its place
As black as coal excavated from the mine
And glistening reflections pervading its surface
This black jewel is taken from its casket
In tantalizing state that gives much pleasure
And carefully positioned in a basket
With a plethora of others to enhance a greater treasure
There they sit in brilliant array
as black as black harvested in their prime
Picked and shiny on this sunny day
Their beauty perfection at this time
The vine now bereft of all its berries
Is barren for now until next year
When black pervades again amongst the brambles
Destined to give the onlooker Summer cheer
Stone clad hotels and banks,
stone-faced facades.
Stone monuments carved by old money.
The stone-poor have no stone history,
they will leave no archeology
to be excavated and raised.
Their throw-away artifacts
go to the landfills,
If they have stone. it must be dug up
to clear the way for more hard-scabble.
Here is a celluloid picture,
I am in my prime,
a pretty woman by my side,
we walk a downtown boulevard
where solid stone is raised high.
The image engenders another image,
that same photograph
bursting into flame,
now curling to ash in a grand chimney
and hearthside,
a fireplace that speaks
of an opulent and gilt-edged wealth -
one built of an ageless and abiding
stone.
The field is given a name.
Battles are about where they disappear,
the ones that walk away
don't know where the hell they are.
There’s a cannon ball under that Yew tree,
there’s a skull under that Ash.
There’s a hank of dried up hair
over there, woven into stone and moss.
After the blood, peace continues destroying barns,
insignia and belt buckles fished out and sold.
Excavated jawbones order and counter-order.
The officers that staggered away
go quietly mad, or marry well.
Surviving hell takes
a lot of stump-footed foraging.
The maimed tell their jerrybuilt tales,
cracked rockers creek along
the slipways of generations.
Hounds bayed at coons.
in the hot afternoons;
that was before the earth gaped open,
before the gore seeped sideways
into the earths wounds.
Good Generals and bad
have had their deadly play,
this scattering and salvage
of the blue and grey that day.
I feel it, a soul-crushing weight, a sour, spreading melancholy. What is this? Is this me? I no longer recognize the shape of my own love. Everyone I held, everyone I named... dissolved. Quietly. Like they were never whole. I stand in a crowded room and the noise is simply silence in a distinct yet eerily familiar form.
I see it clearly now. Their smiles, rehearsed. Their love, transactional, a lease signed on my usefulness, not my soul. This knowing did not arrive all at once. The universe is too cruel for mercy like that, it came in doses, measured, deliberate, until one day the doses became the ground I stood on.
And now I am buried in what I finally understand.
Shall I resign? Should I end it all? Do you hear me, cold and indifferent universe? You hollow animal, you unrelenting, desolate thing... I am empty. I am of no use to you now.
You've drained what was once an oasis: rich with dream, with desire, with the burgeoning persistence of love. What remains is cracked earth. What remains is an empty oasis. I grow weary of an existence excavated without my permission.
Give me rest. Not an ending, just silence. Just one moment where existence does not demand so much of a person who has nothing left to give.
She dug a hole in the earth
& buried her heart where no one
Could find it.
Through my tongue I have dug
And excavated through a person
I thought I knew.
A region I still travel both known and unknown.
Through ancient wisdom & modern text,
A known philosopher of over 500 texts.
Though I read tirelessly, I lost sense of direction
Through hieroglyphic palpitations
Circa the first breath taken in front of you.
She dug a hole in the earth & filled it with dirt.
A language lost and undisturbed.
Her heart a eutopia, massive & hidden
From history.
Through hard dirt and torn tongue
The tip of my tongue struck something soft
& compromising.
Alas, I have journeyed to the center of your chest
& survived.
Through dirt and torn tongue, here we lay
Fossilized in the center of your chest,
Until everything rumbles
& your heart spews through your chest
Like lava.
Only then could we live again in a region
Truly meant for us
when they excavated my back yard they discovered dinosaur bones
It was an intact skeleton of a stegosaurus, and it bellowed at them.
Being men, they were afraid, and left the area, but not without screaming.
My girlfriends and I went out to investigate. One of them called her a fossil.
The skeleton cried. “I have a name,” she told us. It’s not Fossil!”
No one but me heard her, so I sent them home. I wanted her to myself.
Her name was Gladys, and she had been in the earth a long time.
I brought her into the house through the sliding door.
Taught her to cook, bake, and vacuum. We had a great life together.
I could not tell just anyone this, but you are my therapist, right?
It begins as a sordid space without definition,
with the nebulous boundaries collapsing inward,
enfolds the air thick with the dust of remote faces,
enwrapping you each time you think of freedom.
The winter of depression arrives detached
with heavy dense fog featuring as your desolation
that configures covertly your misty psyche,
shape-shiftng to self-design of vague despondency.
The somber sky falls flustered on convoluted awareness,
wrecks the crown of bejeweled night’s exuberance.
The sickle moon slices the shimmer of its fading glow,
dissolving at the brink of the pervading expanse of blue.
In the dungeon depth of opaque onyx solitude
the ground hears the feeble footfall of stillness.
Glacial sense of chilled passion congeals stealthily
the excavated exposure of lonesome inner secrecy.
Painfully curled broken wings of the petrified free bird
can’t fly in the lacerating chill of the woeful winter,
envelopes surreptitiously the frosted senses,
the fervent warmth of sanguinity freezes unfelt.
The sky of longing falls frozen through the morose mist
on the permafrost of abandon in the arctic silence,
where the icy fountain of the forlorn cold heart,
gets buried deep in the gelid blue of seclusion.
But somewhere inside of your self-devised sphere,
perceived not above, not beyond, but deep within,
the seed of patience germinates to defy desolate winter,
splits the ice, sprouts spring splendor of redeeming hope.
Charcoal art with phoenix ash sculpt with medusa eyes
My art runs kicking
My art beats alive
Pluck loose quills up out my heart and engraft my skin with metaphors,
Mold my debris upon cemented floors,
Into living imagery, vividly un-simmered! Un-timidly bewildering things livid, you got to live it,
It is art entranced in dis-seamed meaning -no strands
Like unstrung puppets klopse marched or zulu danced -no hands
God singing through the Sistine chapel ceiling
Art is alive I heard art weeping on walls -Mona Lisa cries
You see you may have tried,
but you can never kill art, Art never dies
for art takes the dab on the jaw and is immortalized
Hung merrily smiles swinging on nooses like Tarzan on great vines
un-buried alive
excavated, repeated and perpetually illustrated from your basement to the frames and the walls of exhibition stages ink off the pen on the pages to the corners of a pavement that were once vacant and inescapable escape vent for things felt unseen and ignored from heartbreak to beauty and awe
Art kicks out the coffin door and kisses you on the forehead
throwing dirt and roses at your face
sheds a tear recites creeds & eulogies for ceremonies then shape shifts and trades place
for art will never be dead
Art defies both time and space
And
you don't know art
Art is not a concept
Art is not a chord a text a sketch or a complex
You will find "art" within the composition of a heart literally figuratively grammatically reality
you may try to see art
truth is you have to be art
you just have to be true
art is when you are free to express being the real you
art is alive
art
art is a life
Chants,
voluble. Tremors from footholes of mountains
and green places . . .
From spurts of melodies they come,
chants of our land
chants of our masters
and chants of ceremony
Virgin tempo,
with reverence and arrangement of cowried ankles
and bodies that speak of soot,
eyes powdered in white . . .
Restless Chants,
preserved for the Masters
anthems and pledges, oaths
and allegiances
to those who witnessed the day
invaders scaled the city walls
without shame.
Chants,
redolent of native blood,
omu, ogirishi and nzu;
with syncopations treading heavily
on this clammy, humus ground
and sprinkled with articles of
common ancestry;
and feathers which speak of the
eagles that sired the hawks and
the kinsmen of royal birds;
and there were femurs from
baptized reptiles who have never
squelched in rancid mud for the
first time;
and elements of vegetation thrived —
animated spear grass and achara,
becoming tools that spoke in this
fiesta;
beads scattered and flung, and yet
held in place by throbs coming
from hollow grounds, excavated heaths
and re-greened holes . . .
Chants.
Spelling names and occupations of
town criers and the village folks;
tempos revealing deeds and valour
and journeys to where chameleons
have made their borders . . .
These deeds they spelled of the Masters,
whose bodies alone fell to the invaders —
sons of sophists —who wrecked our
city.
Chants,
heroes’ epic unknown,
dirges un-deciphered,
methods of assembly —principles only
of patriotic chanters,
with fire and pain in their stomachs,
chanting Chants for the Masters.