I am charcoal cooking out for the summer
loading boxes into a freight truck
like coals into the furnace
powering America's materialist engine
the boxes rising like greed
until I've filled that truck's needs
exiting the trailer smoldering
like a coal in the furnace
powering corporate production
steam is all that rises as I melt into the ground
trucks leave like emissions into the air
obstructing my vision as I gaze down the street
through the haze of summer streaks
another truck approaches for repeat
a microwave set to reheat.

The bloodsuckers of the night
Invaded my abode
And with their unsterilized pipe
Draw my blood
******* the life
Out of my viens
Injecting death
Into the stream
And in my pain
I fight back
Taaah! A clap, a slap
But it ends in my pain
For the invaders escaped
Making a mockery of my counter-attack

In the dark
Upon the couch
When my head
Her rest do seek
Then came their scout
And huuuummmm goes my drum
This is worst than a bite
For insomnia do invite
Another alien to my home

So with teary eyes
And shivering bones
With lost appetite
And a sour taste in my mouth
A body feeble and frail
Went I to see a doctor
In the heat of my body
Hot like a dozen furnaces
Went I to the clinic
But my testimony was not enough
To convince the doctor
That the invaders have left a stranger
In my blood stream
A parasite feeding on my life
So the lab man I must see
For the foreigner must be identified

Home I went and back I came
To see the doctor
But I have thought what to do
To these foreigners
Both the invaders and the aliens
For my health and my rest
Are worth more than gold
And now sitting before the doctor
Wandering what they must have found
Hoping it’s not going to be grave
“Malaria parasite”
Malaria?!
“Yes malaria” the invaders left it in your blood stream

Home I went from the doctor
Armed with arthemether,  lumefatrin and paracetamol
To fight this war
Raging in my world
Still I wonder
What do I do?
To end it all
Once and for all
For the invaders
Still hide within my walls
In my wardrobe and in my clothes
Under my bed and in the closet
In water left uncovered
And the ***** pool outside my home
In the gutters and uncut lawn
They seem to be everywhere

The “wipers” could not **** them
They seem to make them strong
For everytime they bounced back
More angry and fierce
No! one more pain, one more bite
And my senses returned
I have heard of ITN
Insecticide Treated Net
Convinced I was of just one try
At last I found my warrior
To defeat these aliens and invaders of my world
Oh! How I love this net….
Gleefully I crawl under the net
To take my sweet beautiful rest
And no more of these alien care
And my war against mosquito won
And malaria defeated from the source
Prevention and better than cure.

~for Woody’s pilgrimage, his exodus to Egypt~


I’m the mother of your maidenhead.
I’m the widow engorged in Ganges flames,
seeded, raised, in the coal pit born we were,
first mined, sent cross country by red rusted freight
car to the birth sac where we came~conceived.

simple, your beginning, is our end, they could
not never cut this cord tween us with an instrument
of hardened steel, cause it was god-birthed in a
steel furnace in the three river city, where we were
molten formed, fired woman, fired man, too-blackened.

you say come worship me, but I cannot, we are too
samed; the flesh of metal, the black blood of a mountain
seam, if we were to worship in our own imagery,
a sin, of ten commandment status, not a trifling,
imagine, a golden calf, an idol of our own making,
what glorious fury’d consequential if I bent knee to
love an undulating woman, a violation of volition,
between us, there can be never, the tangential of free will.


11:18pm Sat Jul 11

by Arcassin Burnham

In a room full of sinners , there's girls , and there's boys, and there's false leaders
Planning and preying on all of the people,
People are starting to wake up and realize what's going on because of the misguided teachings,
Freeing your mind in this cruel world don't make you any less of a person , man it only gets lethal,
Banding together is the only way in this life , Maybe we should call a meeting.

Times are hard you see,
Suicidal teens , slowly increasing,
Into the furnace,
Brutal memories,
Clashing of teeth , hands out , say please,
Down into the furnace.

I never thought that we would make it far in this condition,
I never thought I could determine what this means,
I never thought that I would see the light of day again.
I never thought that I would kiss like what they did in movies,
I never thought that love would really deceive me,
I never thought that....
Everything would fall into place, at the wrong pace.

Times are hard you see,
Suicidal teens , slowly increasing,
Into the furnace,
Brutal memories,
Clashing of teeth , hands out , say please,
Down into the furnace.

Stop kindling the fire.
Wait until the embers are
Enough to forge a season;
To kiss hot skin to sleep
Or to the raggedy edge, to tease;
Not all for fun but again to feel
The glowing ashes left in the pit

Kept alight, I felt their heat
And how they dwindle --
Stifled by the chill of passing time
And the many crystalline branches
Chipped from snowflakes

"Winter must be cold for those
with no warm memories..."
The sentiment reduced to shards;
You were my winter warmth,
But it's my spring that
Carries the frost

i
no less than two hundred souls lie
        clustered along the shoreline
        lowland they call a town.
there where the hilltops look
        below, where salty waves
        in unending sequence
        lap the rocks.
the foam floating still is fading
        and the icy gloom of night is gone.
the tug-tug of the diesel engine
        interrupts the balmy silence
        of the sleeping town.
perchance,
        here is a variant
        (or is it?)
        on new island soil
        tread one another foot.

       ii
away now from the busy hum of
        factory, from the hurrying trucks,
        daredevil drivers, the unwelcomed
        whistle of the morning train,
        from the strained scream of the
        lumpia vendor, from the sophisticated
        melody of nightclub music, from the
        alms-begging cries in crowded sidewalks,
        from pretending graded glasses seeking
        sheep-skin, high-pressured ticket seller.
        away form the honk-honk of waiting
        limousines, the haste of presses
        accommodating headlines, the cackle
        of the radio announcer.
        it takes a sea to part the two,
                and many others more, yet the
                watery distance do mend the broken
                piece-part of the broken whole.

      iii
broken by the water barrier, part of
        the broken scheme – a stray mass
        the grown untamed.
blame it on the ills of war, a frenzied
        sickness, a cancer-growth.
        a callousness undisguised
the city’s pleasure is a farmlife’s
        leisure and these
        in different garbs exist.
not even mindful of the worms
        that eat up the human heart,
        like a rotting fruit.
with colored goggles
        the hue is blood-red and shady black.

  iv
o city of pain,
vineyard of desire
o burial ground
        where lay bedfellows
        they who came, stayed, gone,
where stumps and leafless trunks
        are bare to the sun,
        breathless and devoid.
while fingers are busy
        counting metallic coins.

  v
no, not a flood shall cleanse
        this wild and wanton fleshliness,
        nor upturn the barren farrows,
        not the rise of the tides
        nor the fury of the winds
        not even the whiplash of a strong hand.
the deluge in every clayey figure
        in the farm and furnace.
the going up beyond the worldly
        watermark of the passing tide
        that is man.
the man
        the self
                is the starting point
                from which the line
                        of the circle revolves.
                        and in our chambered brief hours
                                of aloneness, shall speak
                                a shrill deep-seated voice
                                to which we shall be all ears
                                        and shall tremble.