Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
I was in the cemetery again, this noon
Dandelion graves and lost stones
Dwelling atop a hidden hill
Deep within the pines
Not my cemetery
Not ancient
I laid
Upon a certain grave
It had my name
Amanda
One of only two stones with
Still visible words
Unwashed by
Time
She was only 17, passing
Married, buried
With child
Baby
A long lost to time
Child bride
Of the
1800's
For her to be in that particular cemetery
She had to be a soldiers wife
Confederate, rebel
I mourned her
The stone residing next to hers
was worn by wind and time
A dandelion grave
~A
Cemeteries are a morbid habit of mine. The particular cemetary I speak of here, is called Boot Hill. A civil war cemetery. Amanda's grave was one of very few female graves I've found in war graveyards. Her stone said,"With her child." And indeed, as early as it is in this season, that cemetery was covered with dandelions.
just
ordinary friends
or
both of us
only
bookends
nor
we
want to live apart
but
be
together again
 Mar 2017 Betsy Garris Segui
ryn
This is my bargain.
Day for night
and night for day.

There isn't a time where I hadn't wished
that the day would end to make way for night.

Nights offer a bleak sense of comfort.
Almost as if they'd grant a temporary cloak which
you could huddle under and think or...
Overthink in the dark.

You could bargain shamelessly with tears running streams down your face and no one could see.
You could negotiate with reality for the slight perchance that things would turn out alright come daylight.
You could voice out your barter in hushed tones and still be somewhat assured that no one would know.
All of this...
In the cover of night.

Then when sleep eludes, you can't help but beg for day to come.
For with the light comes the day's responsibilities; all eager and raring to go.
Much like runners at the start line, anticipating the shot to be fired at the crack of dawn.
Shot fired and they'd come swooping down on you...
Sweeping you off your feet and carries you off to where you need to be, doing what you're paid to do for the next 8 to 10 hours.

That is your break from the dark.
That is your retreat from all the thinking.
That is your escape from... yourself.

And then...
4 hours into the day, you're wishing for night again.
Our love is
like a polaroid
picture. We let

Time and Chemicals
do their work. Yet

my love,
the picture was
taken long
ago.
It’s hard to speak healing and salvation to someone
If there body and minds are in chains
It’s hard to tell someone that God loves them when agony runs through their veins


See it’s hard to speak a message of spiritual salvation
When a person’s body is in need of physical liberation
When a person’s mind is in a state of starvation
When a person can’t feel connected to the land on which they stand cause it was once a plantation see….

It’s hard to teach somebody to be free
I hope that you can see, cause it’s true all the way from the America’s to the Caribbean sea.
People are in chains mentally and emotionally, broken physically
How can we stand behind the walls of a church and only intend to feed them spiritually ?

We are physical representation of God to the earth
How can we preach that our God is a God of liberation
And yet don’t go out there and fight to help set people free?
Don’t hold our oppressors to the door and tell them to turn the key
Tell our oppressors that we won’t just shut up and be see

The church has always been a major part of who we are as a people
But it seems that some shepherds were sleeping as the wolves grab our sheep
Night after night as the church continues to sleep
Now we look around and they’ve taken our black men, 1 out of 15, in jail or at the end, of their lives, and who survives? a black mother with two kids and tears running down her eyes?

Where is the church? The people who will fight for the right to be free
They fight and they march, and they shout like it’s the year of jubilee
It’s souls that need to be won, it’s shackles that need to be undone,
We should not stop until every black man, woman or child is free from the slave masters gun
I'm sitting on my bed
feeling the ghost of the soft skin of your wrist on my fingertips,
breathing in the memory of your soap smell,
your clean shirt
and your home house,
and I'm thinking
how did I get here?
How did I get you?
Missing you
to the sound of Sara Bareilles
streaming from the speakers of my car
that you sat in two days ago.

Feeling you
in the wind that plays with my hair,
aching for your touch
rather than wishing to be alone.

For the first time I miss you.
Not the aching I-need-you that I've felt before,
just the I-can-hear-you-on-the-wind,
the absence of your presence enunciated

By the trace of your airy fingertips in my hair
and the melody of your voice on the horizon
calling to me in the breeze,
singing to me in this song.

Your wispy presence brings me peace.
Your howling voice gives me rest,
and you're far right now,
but I can hear you in this car. In this song.
In the wind.
Waiting for me,
Just as you've always done.
you make me want to listen to Alkaline Trio
ironically,
for their morosity
is no longer my own. and maybe

they'd be happy for me. happily
singing their songs
with a different
lung.
Vast, empty, midnight hour,
hunchbacked lampposts glaring over parasitic black earth
choking its host.

A parking lot,
an ecosystem’s blemish—
hot tar seeping into the pores of the earth
like a stubborn blackhead in a lip line.

When no cars burrow into the blackened hide
like lice
the great absence of life
is an atrocity.

I imagine myself skateboarding across the tier
as the small town cops
watch languidly with vague interest—

A skateboarder’s paradise
where wheels and accomplice minds roll across celestial barriers
blasting infinite pulses
into the microcosm.

What greasy punks have their mother’s van parked here,
huddling by the heat vents
and jerking off into a Pringle’s can?

Empty parking lot
looks like a cemetery
filled to the brim
where headstones meld
over a mass grave—

delineated by white lines,
the apparitions of vehicles and their hosts
haunt the frozen space.

Another horrible excuse
to waste land,
a wasteland in and of itself
where Tom Eliot saunters aimlessly
and buries the dead.

The saddest sight to behold,
this vacuous parking lot
littered with stray shopping carts,
phantasmal plastic bags,
gum splotches,
***** stains,
candy wrappers,
cigarette butts,
used condoms,
lonely cops
and patient drug dealers,
ambulant skaters,
tired punks,
bored teenagers,
somnambulists,
stumbling drunks,
hunchbacked ***** lights
prying for life beneath its sallow gaze—

The air encapsulated within the perdition
stifling,
the pavement below stifling,
a constriction only visible
when emptied of its contents.

A cop wakes from their choking nightmare gasping
to find themselves trapped,
****** in this parking lot
where the walkie-talkie buzzes
with the weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The warehouse store
looming above the waiting room
lifeless, silent, dark countenance—
Big Brother sees all in the gaping maw.

Cascading before me,
stretching towards the highway passing by,
waiting for the panorama to finish scrolling,
the treadmill to cease its cycle—
all the while lamenting life’s absence
and reveling in the potentiality it possesses.
Next page