Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
John F McCullagh Nov 2011
When my father was a boy,
in the County of Tyrone,
His father owned a quarry
and he worked the fields of stone.

My Dad grew lean and hard
As he excavated stone
Yielding granite for stone carvers
And gravel aggregate for roads.

His hands grew strong and powerful
He had a muscular physique
He couldn’t read or write
But no one dared to call him weak.

When my Dad was in his twenties
He was working in the mines
Excavating British coal
at Newcastle on  Tynes.

Later on in life
He was living in the “States”
Working in landscaping
on large Gold Coast estates.

When my Dad was in his fifties
He was digging graves by hand.
Once again in Fields of stone
a hard working Union man.

Each morning he’d rise early
And walk two miles to work
He never had an office
And he’d never be a clerk.

He rose to be a foreman
Working in that field of stone
And when darkness overtook him
It became his earthly home.

Now when I go visit him
I kneel and pray alone
Beside his Celtic Cross
standing in the field of stones.
Stephen E Yocum Sep 2016
It was my birthday,
Sixty Five years turned to grey hair.
My love and I, and two old school
friends on a breezy Fall day.

Over Tea and a lovely frosted
three layer cake, we cajoled
and joked about our age,
all turned senior citizens that year.
And yet in truth, we all agreed,
none of us had ever been as happy as then.

The cake was sliced onto china plates,
Each piece served flat on it's cut side.
I noticed something then as we all
took our first bites.

Our forks all started at the thinnest corner,
on the bottom layer's side, gradually
excavating the two lower levels of fluffy
cake, saving the best for last, the top layer
where all the sweet frosting remained.

It occurred to me then that indeed life
is like a three layer cake, the last top layer
can indeed contain the sweetest bites.
That rather than gobbling life hurriedly whole
it should be savored more like patiently eating
and enjoying a three layer cake.
It is not my birthday today but thanks
to those of you nice people for the good
BD wishes. It relates to everyone's aging.
More of a metaphorical assessment of
a universal theme. Actually, I'm a Taurus.
(If you know your signs, perhaps that explains
a lot about me.) :-) And sadly I'm well past
being 65.
Savio  Feb 2013
In a cafe
Savio Feb 2013
Spending Nights cheaply,
television doesn't work,
rats or moths,
have chewed the wires,
now a black square,
sits quiet,
Monk like,
Enlightened,
reflecting me,
dust layer,
my plastic texas radio,
calmly,
oozes,
discharges,
Jazz,
my final cigarette,
silently waiting,
like the television,
like the *****,
patiently watercoloring on red lipstick,
seducing not me,
but my lungs,
the ego.
And I fantasize being in an Italian cafe,
smoking,
with low eyes,
like a hill,
with a Gold hungry man
excavating for Fortune,
or bones of Glory,
and maybe a leaking pipe line,
dripping wisdom.
And a tall Italian goddess,
walks,
appears like a ****** magician,
into the cafe,
as the Italian Night,
dances ****,
the stars like beauty marks,
and quaint street lamps illuminating,
sidewalk puddles,
like jewelry,
worn by an immortal belly dancing siren singer,
who lost her voice,
seducing Gods,
now mute,
cursed to ****** Man by her body.
And she sits down,
her legs dark like mud,
but glistens like the hot Sahara Desert,
and her scent,
is not of Cacti and Lizards,
but of Roses,
but of Rust Michigan,
over comes the roasting beans,
like a house burglar,
or a spider,
creeping up on its fly prey,
enters my nose,
and my recollection of beauty,
is warped,
simply by the way she lightly,
taps,
her fingers,
against her legs,
like a light drizzle,
on a tin shack roof,
after a century of drought.
mike Feb 2013
hi again. my names mike. im scared. ive been recently diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia, i think. however, the doctor(who is not a real doctor)was inaccurate. setting me up to be his personal test dummy. well, its not gonna happen again. im looking for a team to enact a certain duty. a job for those who seem qualified.

the qualifications?: experience in violence and time travel.

the job?: to never divulge secrets of the job, which involves kidnapping said doctor and retrieving a small metal instrument from within his skull.(i have the needed information for the retrieval of this device.)

the time?: any time before the future. once we've orchestrated then enacted our team meeting, we must use our time travel facilities within the same minute of our arrival, as i have already set our return time for the mission to one minute after the last team member(gregg) arrives on location of said meeting point. we will(once gregg finally arrives, 28 minutes late!) pile into the 8-man machine and activate, sending us to our destination: february 2nd, 1989. this is the date that(we'll call him doctor octopus) doctor octopus received his supposed doctorate from stanford university. we will then obstruct the way between his home and his graduating ceremony by means of designing a car crash scenario. he will be knocked out cold, allowing us easy passage into his car, excavating his limp frame, and bringing it to a secure location(walmart)where we will then inject his brain with a bio-mechanical agent, leaving him there to wake up, confused, and minus a degree. we will then travel to april 2nd, 1999, to re-engage with doctor octopus, to kidnap him in order to extract the mechanism from within his skull, which at this time will be fully grown and functional, having been implanted by us through the injection of the bio-mechanical agent 10 years and 2 months prior. once obtaining said device, we will use it to communicate with the inter-dimentional beings doctor octopus has done the bidding of. we will pose as doctor octopus to gather intelligence as to how to travel through time, allowing the mission success, bringing us back to the original point of departure, arriving exactly one minute after original departure. leaving us with existing alibis(for i know everyone was with their families on groundhog day, 1989. and my birthday, 1999.) and no traceable evidence or witnesses, including yourselves, for i HAVE taken the liberty of going back to all of your days of birth and murdering your mothers with said team still unborn in the wombs, yet have gone back to said dates again to stop myself. allowing for success and no traceable links.

the place?: nowhere. the mission has already been completed. good job team.

the compensation?: 7.79 per hour.
jim fry Nov 2010
I am spending the day engaging my pining paths, the recurrent feelings of deep longing and prolonged unfulfilled desires, excavating these facets to surface consciousness, treating my desires as ~ G ~ E ~ M ~ S ~, not to be shunned or left buried. I am now recognizing these are soul level expressions to be celebrated, with and without abandon of permanence. These are my soul's scripts, and as they intersect interdependently with others in my relationships, they are essential components of the juice and energies that define me.

So I've engaged my angels and guides, and taken to scribe, these processes of my heart's harmonizing and soul's solstice. As a singular sun, my firespark has indeed been, furthest from the celestial equator of my own integration, playing and equating in realms of derivatives and hedged parlays. Becoming whole is feeling not to be really any core change at all, beyond embracing everything I am in each thought, emotion and deed, illuminating all that has been self concealed as the acts in the play of parlays unfold.

Through heart's laden sadness, my pining bursts through in fiery release now, fuel and fire, found festering, without need like Prometheus, to steal it from some god beyond and outside myself. Today is a celebration of acceptance, these energies and motivations based in my pining are my essence and as essential as my feline purrs. So as I embrace these buried abstractions and etch and scribe them into prose, they become more than historic and nostalgic memories, they become living remembrance of who I am and what a wide spectrum of imaginative and creative energy and intention I posses to draw upon. This is me, the soul, coming into a more robust integration and empowerment, as I accept, and then utilize each hue of my rainbow ... blending resonant ratios of each color's wavelength, leaving none excluded, nor seeking to change what is already in suffused perfection.


So when this script's scene
plays out to conclusion
tangential vectors and points
on spiral paths shall intercede

and this unmasked energy
and reclaimed consciousness
sourced in shadow's
facets illuminated
and embraced
leaves me
annealed

and, i'll be less distracted
by unrecognized emotions
and motivations unclaimed

i've never been more honest
or self understood
transparency serves me well,
dissolving the spell

and i'm enraptured,
discovering, treasures,
and my first genuine,
comfort within,
my own skin

i've grown more
in three weeks
than perceived
even possible
or imagined

so now,
beyond these
shed years
'n tears
'n fears
i etch,
these moments
i embrace,
these moments as
soul's scribe
upon foundations
of the bedrock laid
with my heart, scarified
through emotion's oceans of tears
carving new channels, for my love to flow

soulprints tamping, fertilized medium
i'm embracing too, next cycling, season of spring
embracing my passions in desire, with fire
and intentions of more consciousness
and loving from whence
i'll further
blossom,
grow
and
**glow
2008.11.21
Sam Hamilton Jan 2014
When You Should Be Doing Homework

You dig for your future inside a mirror,
Excavating pimples, drowning in your pupils,
Wondering if the road map that gathers around
The belt of your iris will make you look wise
After fifty years of blinking—or
If the folds in your skin will bookmark a chapter
Where you let them close for too long
Memorializing a missed-out stripe.

You lean closer to the better half of yourself,
The one that gets to look real
in a cold glass surface
Without enduring the social blemish
that comes with authenticity
And a lack of caked on makeup.

You count the pores on your nose.
The weight of silent opinions and swallowed up worries
Split the edges of your lips wide open like a sore.
You look inside; behind the fillings, under the flood of saliva, inside the flesh of your gums,
For the shelves where advice for your unborn children
will sit and gather dust; yellowing like old bones and tasting like coffee.
Don’t marry your mattress.
The way to a man’s heart is bacon.
Sticks and stone don’t usually look like sticks and stones.

If those children become anything like you are now,
it’s a safe bet they will have selective deafness.
You imagine your graying hair and huskied voice
spewing life lessons drilled into you
by your parents, Hallmarks cards, and people who call themselves poets—

Make sure your smile matches the color of the dry cleaned heart your wear on your sleeve.
If you want to do well in school, learn how to *******.
Never own / wear anything studded.
One day you’ll want to die your hair a rebellious color, thinking it’s cool: go for it. To hell with the people who will give a ****.
One day you’ll want a concert t-shirt with wholes and stains that spell out ‘****’: go for that too, you’ll learn the hard way those are the hardest to wash
.

You step away from the echo of your eyes in the mirror,
feeling sorry for the future responsibilities
you’ll try hard to raise into good people.
Mom and Dad don’t always know best.
Don’t look in the mirror and think about the future. You’ll only see your hair gray.
Do your homework.
Keep your socks clean.
Use protection.

You pull yourself out of your mouth
Gulp down the darkness in your pupils,
Letting your face return to normal—the road map sinking into your skin, disappearing.
That future is too close for you to conjure it in the mirror.

Even without the weight of wrinkles,
Your eyes are too tired to stay open.

— The End —