Debellatio

[DiggerTractor]

Hi Larry! Thank you.That's very nice of you to say.
M-thanks and sorry...none of it is really fun...I guess you could say I've been at it for much longer bit of time--hopefully your self-actualizing time is faster than mine has been going ; )

[DiggerTractor]

I entered:

she's on the white sofa-chair, her tan a hard contrast
to her slumped right shoulder. "Turn the light off she says".

I turn the light off. I wait.

A void-breeze sucks me away from the wall leaving me
off balance. My hands feel back towards the faux ivory
switch plate. "Wait" comes at me as a too sweet whisper

and I know I won't move. When the sun wakes me, my hand
asleep next to the now useless switch: I can turn it on, I can turn

it off, but it makes no difference against the momentum
of light. And the sofa-chair radiates stainless but for the sea-weed
sparkles that fell from her hair in the void-breeze when

she exited.

[beeswax]

Hello Digger Tractor – sorry it’s taken me so long to get here. Leaving the LTR describes succinctly and musically the break-up -- how it goes from the best ever to (suddenly) -- I need to scrape you off my shoe. Least that’s what I got. Adam’s Lament -- is this evolution running backwards? Maybe with a little (hu)man-made intervention. Didn’t understand – but liked it very much. The Golfers Saw Him is sad. I sometimes don’t sleep. Today a man at the bus stop said he ‘hated the world’. I replied - it’s not the world. It’s us. It’s humans. Memories have their own sounds – synaesthesia – and how we process grief. 09. I like the line break on picture/window. It’s a spooky story! He has a Gun in his Right Hand. The line breaks create tension. The poem has a vaguely menacing quality – nice play. Cotton Flakes Swirl The sensation of something out of time and place evoked by love making (I think). I liked the detail of the lizard scared of earthquake. Magic Man – again succinct and spot on, yes. Spot on! Very much enjoyed that prayer to St Anthony. It’s a lot to ask of a saint, but quite proper. Those poems about breaking up are raw. Noble words don’t cut it. It gets dirty at some point in the process – unless it’s reached the stage of mutual indifference. She entered. . . she exited. The bit in between is? a mixture of expectation/longing/dread/? Don’t know quite. But liked again. I enjoyed your thread this afternoon.

[DiggerTractor]

Hi Bee,
Thank you very much for taking the time to read through and comment. It's very kind of you.

[DiggerTractor]

Time ghosts you. You know, I no longer search
for you or look up to see if it's you passing by or, pray
for a word or note in your hand. I no longer expect you to be

just behind the next aisle. Mostly, I no longer yearn for you
to be there. Occasionally you haunt a shadow, phantasm
in the ballet of a falling aspen leaf or step between clumps

of buffalo grass. In fifty-years kin and kith will mostly be dead.
In seventy-five we will be but memories, the threadbare ancestors
in digital machines. In one hundred we'll be lumped into a historical

demographic. "People like this, back then...": generic.
They'll be lies because particulars require boxes
and mountains of minutiae no one will want to suffer

with and so it'll be easier to say: Those people:
Ran in obstacle courses to sublimate social stress. Enjoyed
live music in huge venues. Paired in love differently.

Made everything disposable. But they won't know Turtle Park
or the drive from Mount Rushmore. The fire sweeping across
the plains keeping pace with the traffic. Kids screaming

for ice cream from the mechanical snowman. Last summer
the tiny red sun found it hard to stay suspended above
the Montana dinosaur graveyard.

[Andrea345]

beautiful. I suck at reviews. I only critique and there's no critique needed for this. Whole and Finished.

[bop]

I think 'Time Ghosts You' is beautifully written. As someone who definitely won't be here in 75 years time, the words made me aware of just how transient and brief our lives and relationships are.
Best wishes
Bop

[Blythe]

Hi DT...am loving your thread and the lights it shines on various dark corners. Especially enjoyed the ghost dancing in the picture window.

[DiggerTractor]

Andrea-you're such a nice cranky person! bop and Blythe, thank you all for reading and taking the time to comment.
I'm afraid I'm going to jump the shark soon--pushing the drama bit too much-but oh well what can one do when given the line? ; )

[DiggerTractor]

A beautiful coffin was picked. Trim and delicate
silk. Soft as skin. Sealed against my obsession
and decades of rain and seepage to come. Bugs
will gnaw at the cement-bang their helmet-heads
against the metal wall. Inside, you'll hear our assaults
as heads ping, ping, ping to get inside. Ages and fates
of many children of children will pass before your walls
collapse. For now, you're safely comfortable. Beautiful
surroundings moving forward into time-consumption.

You've put off desolation longer than I. Long before
in my smug, eco-pine box I became fodder to the torment
and you persevered. You know, time wins all and the gusts
and being of the past and future collide, new asteroids are born
and a new megasaur will rumble above. The assitant
hefts the box up and opens it: "Another beautiful one!"
he says. "Pristine. Remove the bones and mark this one
for the sale." Proclaims the head archeologist. He surveys
the field of exhumed coffins and bones: "What beautifully
vain temples they built to please their gods."

[DiggerTractor]

I-a tourist on this island-claim my space in the sun-white beach,
absorbing the rhythm of the waves in the shark-less Jamaican bay.
"A good deal!" the black man says: exchanging jerked chicken
for American dollars. I hesitate before smiling. He doesn't make eye-contact
and his lip moves to thoughts he wants to say: he's an amateur. He wants
another dollar, he knows too late, he should have up-charged more
-now I know, I got a good deal.

He says something patois. I don't catch it but the extended gnarled
non-callous hand I do understand. With a gesture performed as a sweep
of the bottom part of my right-hand, barely moving in a dipping arc, left
to right: he understands instinctively. I don't mean it to be like it means.
But it comes naturally and carelessly. The horde of Southern ancestors
in my blood rose rebelliously and too quickly to stop them. The man knows
and his obeisance betrays his dignity. I didn't mean it, I say: I look to see him
eye-to-eye he's gone. Like a reclaimed regressed life I feel the power: walking

along the plantation with a shotgun over my shoulder, my daughters playing
croquet on the lawn. With the same gesture I control Them all-just don't look
Them in the eyes. My children will learn it. I'll not see Their grief, instead
I'll see yellow-teeth and smiles hiding the stomped pride. It feels good
to control someone so easily with the sweep of a hand. But I don't like it.
I turn over and bury my face in the sand waiting for you to return to eat.

[kristalynn]

I love Time Ghosts You and a beautiful coffin! Great writing.

[Donner]

Hi, Digger,

How appropriate, a Digger writing a poem about coffins. I like when a poem not only allows me to go where the writer wants to take me, but when it also triggers memories that run parallel. "Beautiful coffin" brought up two for me - my mother picking out her own casket when my father passed away ("Why not, I'm here, might as well.") only for us to find out that that particular model was unavailable when it was her time; burying the birds my cat caught along the fence, thinking some day an archeologist might come along, dig up all the skeletons and think some sort of weird bird cult had lived there (yep, wrote a poem about it).

It also scared the crap out of me because S1 reminded me of Poe's "The Premature Burial". Heh. But I digress. What I also like is that you tackled death from a different angle and dimension. That's what a poem should do with a subject, be both relatable and thought-provoking.

Donner

[DiggerTractor]

kristalynn and Donner, thank you both for reading and taking the time to comment.

Donner, thanks. I always have found the ritual and seriousness of picking out the right coffin as just too bizarre. But yes I can remember my grandparents spending way too much time really thinking about it. And then that we have fields and fields of them buried.

[DiggerTractor]

I run along the river's edge. Gaunt and hungry
bones protrude. When I knock on familiar doors
the people who open them are not the people
I expected them to be. But they invite me in
and feed me and ask me where I've been. Acting
as if they're surprised when I tell them. I let them
believe I believe they didn't know. I must live
with them and sleep with them. My hands full
of ashes-3 pouches full of my loves-mean nothing
to them. They care not. But those I lost will good
to become of it all. So I accept their down pillows
and cotton sheets and remember my baby's
laugh: the past is my being and I'll never lose it.