"topsoil" poems
In the divet between mountains
Resides a wooden cabin – ostensibly an amalgamation of the scape
Adroitly - I - quondam female warrior flit
Down massive (ancient) hand-laid, hand-cut carved stone steps
Bounding from contingent step onto the dense pad of turned soil
Tacit compliance between gravity and soil holds footprints bound
A compressed deflating crescendo as pace ignites with bounds
Cadences of protuberant wildflowers and grasses erupt from swollen terra
A winsome chromatic menagerie, dispersed in ecstatic fistfuls
A venerably ancient ritual
My nascent clandestine vocation
Personally meted out - a beatification for my provisional sanctuary
Along glacier-fed stream
Lissome fingers shadow inert stalks –plucking dormant beginnings from their desiccated ligaments
I am austere and unadorned save for a festoon of pyrite flecks trailing my semblance
Residual gilding from my ante-meridian swim taken after requisite gathering of wild blackberries, goose berries, and rhubarb along oft-tamped path
The sun, nestling into its requisite apex endorsed my completion
I reclined into the hassock of soil, feeling the elements settle about with an embossment of my form
Imposing verdure arched subtly as compressed soil beckoned hyperbolic flux
As I lay within the basilica of opulent living columns replete with comestible bounty
Lingering dew honed inflections of sacrosanct petrichor in unison with piquant clover
Wild purple clover buds saccharinely tinted and inundated nestled nerves in mine cribriform plate
Birds pitched and galloped through the frond tips and beyond in the lapis expanse
Frequently snatching damselfly’s and assemblages of midges from their ephemeral drift
Auspicious rays transcended stippled diaphanous gravid clouds
Light inundated ether entered humbly into the cathedral oculus
Pyrite speckled terrain beneath, and my bare gilded form above
Cast a refracted aura about my sanctuary
Precipitously the elusive vaporous embankment distended further
Ashen atmospheric correspondence inaugurated liquescent sustenance to my mountain abode
And I -
Lingered beneath the descending gobbets, curls furled in a puddle
Fresh topsoil cupping my corporal topographic contours
Pressing blackberries into my mouth between smiles
Jan 26, 2014
Jan 26, 2014 at 9:13 PM UTC
Needle in the hay stack
The spin of the weather vane
I took a drink of you
And felt heavy to the touch
With my last bit of strength
I split the seed coat
Topsoil coaxing me
*Come here, young one
Come here*
Blue
The first color I have ever known
In awe I watch as birds fly over
Like painted die-cast wind-up toys
The warmth fills me to the brim
Free among unbroken hills
Neither late nor early
But still
On time with the cosmic dance of fire color rain
Earthquake Heartache Lust and pitty
I took a drink of you and blooms sprout from my chest cavity
Sunlight flooding protons upon the hillside
Into my eyes smiling
*A nap on the grass until half-past two
As if I don't have work to do
Important things come and go
They melt away as winter snow
Drink you deeply from life's river
Not even death can make it bitter
**** Erectus
In three piece suit
Dead in a box
Maggot food
A veritable
Carrion drive thru
Just as fate would have it
Do you need
Some
Ketchup packets?*
May 15, 2013
May 15, 2013 at 3:13 PM UTC
I wish to be tossed
Onto the soft, rich topsoil
And devoured quickly
By wriggling worms and insects.
I wish I was dead.
Jan 4, 2021
Jan 4, 2021 at 9:46 PM UTC
Do you not feel the weight of infinity on your bones
That as you search for the answers this burden holds
You are merely moving topsoil
We queer little creatures try to shout when we don't even have a voice
Try to dig yet don't have the sinews nor muscles to make a choice
We try to ascend past ignorance
And in doing so truly show it in believing there is any possible recompense
For this futile attempt to define our existence
We are merely flickers
Indistinguishable in the scope
Of the infinity that swallows us whole
But in the end there is truly only one answer
That no matter how much we ****
No matter how much we sift through the sod
There will always be the reaches of the universe to account for
The infinite presence of God
Feb 20, 2015
Feb 20, 2015 at 1:30 PM UTC
No job no dignity no cry.
look again at those words,
please,
with all deliberate speed.
dig.
just a little more, a little deeper.
scrape off the foolish pride topsoil that
looks (are) rich and fertile.
god bless the child who plants themselves
roots in the ugly, hardscrabble earth.
they cannot be uprooted.
never.
you have not ever seen my picture here,
of my face,
only once I showed a single hand,
well worn from
Digging
with only fingernails.
the hands of babies are soft,
easy to kiss, easy to love.
but the hands of responsibility
are usually worn lined scarred sometimes even
nail bitten from
**** digging for dignity.
Nov 10, 2013
Nov 10, 2013 at 5:07 AM UTC
Before the Dawn Of Agriculture men like ME where slapped into the shadow of ****** shame but now who needs muscles or chiseled chins, great size or strength, a lover’s passion or a manly countenance ‘cause for ten thousandyears now I can persecute any female for infidelity towards ME and hold paternity privilege over MY biological children because we exceptional farmers invented marriage to destroy human sexuality by enslaving women with MY property for *** so I no longer need to share or compete or settle for an alpha males’ sloppy seconds within foraging groups that are forced to share what they carry with them instead of our enforced legal couplings that takes the innocent, primal pleasure and mystery out of *** by connectingshtooping to birth thanks to dirt MY dirt MY very own thousand acres of seeded soil littered with pens full of MY trapped sheep, cattle, goats and pigs which means I can pork any female I fancy and destroy any man who thwarts MY desire as simply as the bulls I castrate into submission to easily herd into MY slaughterhouses that feed all the inferior people no longerdependent on their hunting and gathering skills but on ME to stay alive so not only am I not considered a sociopath by hoarding food but am praised at harvest time like a ********* Babe Ruth hero because I have legally claimed and legally ***** those precious few life giving inches of topsoil with rotating crops and extended grasslands that exhausts and shrinks the earth, MY earth MY reign of forcing agricultural workers to bend over in the fields, stupidly exposing hairless backs to sun poisoning instead of their protective hunters’ heads of hair harvesting MY food that shrinks the testicles of everyone who is forced to feed on the cheap calories of MY industrialized plants and animals that lowers fertility, but who needs big ***** anymore when you don’t have to **** larger animals in order to survive or attract females with your superior physical attributes proving I am the social parasite Sultan of Swat who grows fat on the food I’ve seized by stealingPaleo land in the name of government protected ownership.
Feb 28, 2017
Feb 28, 2017 at 8:43 AM UTC
there's a secret place i found to keep my fear
to hide my tenderness & be vulnerable --
it's next to the smallest bones in your inner ear
the fluid skin blanket of your swooping neckline
lily-soft & somehow stiff enough to break
open my seed-pod heart
the one i thought no one could pry apart
but with rosebud ******* -- lips --
the figure of biblical magdala takes me
away from a lone satsuma tree raising its
shriveled offering from the crippled earth
on sunday strolls through duckpond parks
kicking cobbled streets of augusta block
or scooping water at me smiling in cutoffs
on a hot hometown riverbank
you came to me on barefeet out of the smoke
& rain silence where i was invisibly sobbing
where heat-lightning waltzed
sneaky-pete over the prairie
& what are you if not a rain -- a zephyr
flowing through stone temple
just as the dry-mouth dog days of summer
brought hell's fire across the southern field
so i've abandoned the hermetic existence
& buried my old dead shell with a
harp song hail glory to the contortionist god
vaulting off the balance beam in the
back of my mind beneath the
rain soaked topsoil of dawn
among the mound palaces
of ants & mourning mud hornets
while the gray shadows of the magpie
dance & writhe on the mosaic faces of
the trespassed lupine forest
& the sun still comes up on time big
gold fluttering like a delusional cicada
over the empty pink street
i'm still fidgeting because
clouds with tails like jellyfish sting
with rooted memories of azaleas but
you kiss away my all my latent
restless gypsy fears & keep the harsh
light dimmed or wrapped in heat-foil
in your front dress pocket & you only
give it back to me in brief drips --
pinches -- wet tongue kisses --
we talk with our eyes as only animals
can our butts in the damp sand
beside the breathless sea where streaked
clouds seem free to finger the horizon
but are cut by the city skyline --
a switchblade
Nov 23, 2016
Nov 23, 2016 at 11:44 AM UTC
people are friends
to the bone
—bottomliners,
no human can drown,
but they can turn
from a solid to a liquid,
whose name is written on water,
whose laying facedown
on the topsoil?
lovely thunder today,
good weather for an airstrike,
the road is a gray tape
over magnetic fields,
too fragile to walk on,
a sudden Manhattan of the mind:
all of the buildings
are time passing fragments
in spawned harbinger,
accidently reacting like
a stream with bright fish
below the waste.
Jul 20, 2022
Jul 20, 2022 at 9:01 PM UTC
Silver ribbon Assiniboine
a sash for a city--a Ceinture Fléchée
tied into the Red just off Highway 1
You leak into the topsoil
in the place you call home
and come back up a street map
with fingerprint roads
I remember the way you'd trace these out on my back
with fingertip pencils--cartographer's hands--
Bird's Hill and Lag' and Portage and Corydon
laid 'em down in my veins
just under my skin
Where are you tonight, in your smiling Great City?
Crossing the bridge and inhaling the skyline?
Or walking the river in my iced over thoughts?
Maybe walking, mid-tempo, around KP mall?
Those hipsters in Osborne Village
and Wolsely
had nothing on us, did they?
Cooler than Main
on the 1st of the year
I trickled away
and I leaked into topsoil
enjambed between rhymes in apology poems.
An Irish Goodbye; a blip on the radar
stopped flashing to fade off the map of your streets.
Our voices still echo, our spectres still haunt
Dollaramas and sidewalks, Tim Horton's and pubs
Our hands still lace up--at least so in theory
Perimeter Highway's still traced on my back.
Here's hoping our avenues
meet again soon.
Here's hoping that luck can outrun shortcomings
one more time.
Jul 15, 2014
Jul 15, 2014 at 1:59 PM UTC
Wheat fields went bust.
Millions of topsoil went to dust.
Tattered dreamers eating sand sandwiches and
breathing grit. stung to the bone by greed.
Taking what they wanted, forgetting how to need.
Hooverville.
Dec 8, 2012
Dec 8, 2012 at 1:50 AM UTC
The crops are drooping in my fields.
No rain again today.
My precious topsoil, dry as dust,
threatens to blow away.
It makes a farmer feel like Job
to be afflicted in this way.
No rain dance I can do will help.
I lack the words to pray.
We’re victims of a climate change
which makes the land too dry.
Nor is hope on the horizon
from the high blue, empty, sky.
Aug 11, 2014
Aug 11, 2014 at 2:49 PM UTC
And so, aherem, the nano, rrmpph rmphh
Of 21st century ahem thinking will be er
En, en aham eroom neurological medicine
So that topsoil tch tch avat ahem growth
Will er er ahumph outstrip human thinking
If only aratonkamaroon we learn the
Hem, haw, ar argch lessons of the past.
Jan 25, 2012
Jan 25, 2012 at 8:05 PM UTC
The old farmer hung back,
as rickety and battered as the
‘50s Allis-Chalmers tractor upon
which he leaned, hunched,
clung, as if the auctioneer's words
and the wind might carry him off
like the implements he'd treasured
much of his life, machines with
which he had toiled and sweated
and which had helped him chisel
out a meager existence in his
40 years on the farm. His wife was
dead now, his children scattered
like the clucking chickens and hissing
geese, all he had left were memories
and the old homestead, and it was
leaving him bit by bit on the backs
of creaking pickups and low boys
and stuffed into the cavities of shiny
new Cadillacs and Buicks. The cruel
wind had driven in from the southwest,
stealing a little more topsoil from the
threadbare farm, swirling and *******
at tattered curtains still hanging in
the mouths of grimy windows left ajar.
With each piece of his life leaving
down that gravel road, a draining
of his dreams and energies followed.
A few more raps of the gavel and he
too would be as dust in the wind.
--
Nov 22, 2011
Nov 22, 2011 at 9:39 PM UTC
In the darkness
The quiet void
That we avoid
Because open conversations
Are sincere explorations
That bring light to the shadows
That empower
Those who once cowered
Bringing balance
To the broken scale
We called justice
If need be we can do this
Just for us
Because when this society bleeds
It seeds pain and destruction
Erodes the topsoil we sit on
Diminishes the strong
And even we sink in this hell
So we can help ourselves
By helping everyone
Or we can help everyone
Because they are one
Part of the whole
Covering the collective
Breathing in the same
Kind of air
Feeling the same skin
Because they are kin
Pick a reason any reason to begin
And be kind from there
On till your end
Apr 15, 2016
Apr 15, 2016 at 2:09 PM UTC
<>
*“rootless in shallows of momentary mayhem
and no matter the change in horizon,
there is always some thing to be found
that could remind me
of the worst ways I have ever been.”*
from “Harlequin Days of Fecund Fervor” by Victoria
<>
rereading these your words, upset forces me to break a recent vow,
my own writing banished, now faceless in the ranks
of just another poet, busted in rank, chose my own
decommissioning but then your momentary mayhem
plea, fecund you, your third harlequin, states construct!
stay the constriction, the recalling of our worst worsts,
for there is always something to be found, recalled,
that the horizon’s only constant is constant change,
especially the worst worsts
I am colored by your treats, your word plums ripe even
out of season, and the mayhem is mine only mine,
robbed you for it is I, rootless, given up my planting, then
the cobblestones of old new york, trip me up, saying
even old things such as you, have a prime yet to come,
stones fecund seeding, predicting I am not done, just undone,
and fetuses within this dying body, may yet be carried to term,
may yet, maybe, may be, but may be caesarean stillborn
rambling this, mostly musty unclear, so summarizations a
sensible thing, a pardon requested for clarity is a sometime thing.
rare are the days that the terracotta colored soil
darkens my fingernails,
it is dried blood from my scratching deep beneath the skin’s topsoil,
but nothing grows that’s whole, warped are the word fruits.
my soup is hot water with salt, a tasty dish apropos for one
whose growths are rootless in the shallow, infertile dirt of stones
that reside in the shallows of a garden of mine own
fecund may-hem of the grey fall sky autopsy turvy
Nov 7, 2019
Nov 7, 2019 at 11:56 AM UTC
Girl No. 1 wears her jeans cuffed and hates everyone but the Jets. Her voice is honey-thick around biting words. Smiling does not come easy to her. She wears her face like a mask—big glasses, big eyes, big quiet. When I see her, she lifts her hand in a grim wave, delta creases in her brown palm. Her excuse for her silence is that she’s boring, but she’s not. She dots her eyes with tiny stars and listens to German orchestra whenever she can. She thinks she has buried herself well, but bits of her still protrude from the topsoil, aching to be known.
Girl No. 2 is grey flannel and deliberate sentences. Her hair covers her face, yet when she speaks about trees and animals and the hole torn in our atmosphere by ultraviolet, ultraviolent rays, she is thunder. I gave her lotion for her cracked hands one time. When we smiled at each other after, we knew at once we were part of the same club. Girl No. 2 never corrects people when they forget her name. They say Kaitlyn, Kaleigh, Katie…let the word drop as if it were no more important than a used napkin. I hate it. I pick her used napkin name from the floor and smooth it over my lap. I say it right and she replies, with perfect seriousness, thank you: Thank you for the correct pronunciation of my identity.
Girl No. 3 is a hard one. Look at her once and you’ll see Maybelline lashes and a glass-cutting face. Look twice and you’ll see more. The sag of her shoulders, the stinging weariness of posturing for people far beneath her. I startle her. I’m too inquisitive for her taste. She does not want the world knowing her mother drank three liters of ***** before driving off a bridge, that her favorite color is celery green, or that anorexia and anxiety stalked her through the halls of high school like a pair of vultures. She wants to stay in her castle of ice, but it has imprisoned her. You poet, she teases me. You right-brained heap of color and sensitivity. You’re too much. I don’t know what to do with you. I ask her who she is and she recites her answer. 130, 125, 2315. But this girl is more than her IQ, her weight, or her SAT score, and when I tell her so, her Maybelline lashes are ruined.
Jan 29, 2016
Jan 29, 2016 at 9:32 PM UTC
Words are the seeds of rebellion
A simple sentence may imprint a design of unrest
On the minds of the oppressed
And when watered by the unending tears
Of the motherless child
Of the widow or widower
These seeds spring eternal as weeds in the gardens of the oppressors
How quickly these starving plants grow
In the perceived beauty of the truly demented souls
Of those who used the corpses of the tormented as the topsoil
For their design of a utopia
The weeds of unrest will rise in the minds of those who have lost all
In a sacrifice for the comfort of those who walk above them
They will choke the oxygen
From the society
Who survives off of them
Those who carry the world on their backs
Words are the seeds of rebellion
And they are those who will stand
When these perverted gardens fall around them
Nov 28, 2015
Nov 28, 2015 at 4:22 PM UTC
Worm in the ground
Chewing on forest roots
Turns and grows just under the topsoil
Listen to the trees creek and moan
Dragon lore is no longer fable
Do not touch
He will bite
Do not dig
He will scream
Grow,
grow,
grow in malevolence and sting
Devour cedars from bottom up
Tear flesh down to bone delicate bone
Eager search of heart
An owl screeches
An owl cries
Flies to water
But still feels dry
Hunting with lances and spears
Dig,
pull,
and cut up
He knows ****** is best to kindle flame
So what do you think he then breathes on me
Cut the monster, spill him out
Bleeding fire
Bleeding fire
Trees sent to ash
The forest to soot
Smells so similar to death,
Or at least I think so
Fire dies down
And buds sprout out
Even angels singing
"Hallelujah! Sweet Fall Breeze"
But still, quiet in December
There are worms in the ground
Jun 21, 2010
Jun 21, 2010 at 11:03 AM UTC
I live in the desert
Where the snow doesn't fall,
Losing myself in the wanderings:
Endless, restless, hopless.
For there is no return
To the home I know not.
The wind heaves,
The dirt stirs,
And I remain.
There is no escape,
There is no alternative,
For I live in the desert
Where the snow doesn't fall.
tsk
Nov 29, 2014
Nov 29, 2014 at 7:51 PM UTC
May comes with all the showers who, like me, have slept in through April
They hurriedly empty themselves on the dry earth while flowers sit quietly beneath topsoil
My eyes are brown like the topsoil
Patiently waiting for flowers to bloom forth
All of my friends like flowers
And I sit and wonder if I have failed to appreciate the tulips and carnations and black eyed Susan's I have seen
And I wonder what May showers bring
It's quiet now
Deep into the morning and I'm still wide awake
I spent the whole day day-dreaming instead of living it
But that's a problem I have had for awhile now
I'm letting my life pass by before my eyes
Eyes that are like windows and if you look close enough you can just barely see a sign that says "out for lunch" or something along those lines
And the clock on the sign is without hands so you can't tell if I only just left for if I have been gone for 2 or 21 years
Every poem I have been writing has sounded the same
I need help
I need to get out of this purgatory
Either I can't write or I can't help but write the same circles endlessly
I need bolts of lighting
I need a John Brown fiery passion and a thousand tons of gunpowder to blast me out of this ******* rut I'm in
I need Kerouac's railroad earth
I need something I haven't had in a long time
Maybe it's love
Maybe it's hope
Maybe it's a sunflower growing somewhere
So maybe I just need to welcome a few more May showers
And then let the flowers grow
May 7, 2017
May 7, 2017 at 2:25 AM UTC
You said this place
would grind down on tired hearts
I towed my line, now I'll die on the sidewalk
the second the snow thaws.
So bury me salted, so I season the runoff.
Your hands claw, climbing
tear at skin and the topsoil,
grinding teeth down on pay dirt
then back-fill the screaming blanks
This city's swelling up
it's growing livid with stories
left untold beneath street lights,
so sharp-footed walkers
drain its veins after midnight.
And you're filled up--had enough
of the graphite sky.
but my
2 cents, flung into the Clark Fork
say I'm still zipped up
in the peppery cold and the dark
Still socked in,
write your name out in graphite
'til ink-dark clouds bruise the day through the sunlight
The swelling's going down, now
I'll die on the sidewalk
and knocked down pegs
leave the story untold and forgot.
Nov 11, 2013
Nov 11, 2013 at 5:55 PM UTC
4 day weekend Yay!
Black topsoil fertile? Yes!
Poetry planting...
Did I get the 5-7-5 right? Only have one hand and can't take my shoes off at work!
Jul 3, 2013
Jul 3, 2013 at 12:46 PM UTC
1. I came to you carrying baggage someone of my stature shouldn't be even touching; I thought here I'd get to used to my burdens and forget that the yoke on my shoulders was causing my ribs to close so tight around my heart that I'd find myself gasping for air sometimes, but I was wrong.
2. Here, I found my resting place. Here I learned to lay my head down on fields of green next to still streams and sing the song of revival with my feet wrapped in peace.
3. I thought I knew how to show love by injecting smiles into my system and lightly bandaging the broken, but it turns out that sincerity is a necessity, and what's in always comes out; and I had to learn to cut some roots, break the topsoil and allow the planting to begin. I hope you see seedlings from where you are.
4. Humble myself, humble myself, less of me, less of me. I thought that humility was pouring lies into a cup, toasting to their victory and my defeat, tasting the words on my tongue before allowing them to settle in my stomach where the poison would spread, paralyzing everything I can and could have become.
5. I've seen the way you love. You love with your eyes, with your smile, with the way you tap my shoulder, with the way you speak; your words are an overflow from a well of life, and I want to have that too, but I know the digging must take place. The digging is taking place.
6. I'm under construction undergoing renovation, but it's okay because I came here gagging on my poison, but I'm leaving with the antidote.
7. You never would have guessed by the way I took control that under that calm smile spelling "I got this", I was terrified of letting you down. I decided I wouldn't, so I tried to force flow water into my dry branches even though I knew it was time to cut them off.
8. I could smell change coming before the season began, so I braced myself and tried to direct the sun's rays elsewhere. By the time they hit, I realized that I can't choose where the sun will rise and set, or which sky the eagles will command or how bright the stars will glow. I am the tree, not the tree planter.
9. The sawing is painful, but the fruit I bear will last me a lifetime. So I watch my branches burn with hope, knowing that the seeds I drop will grow. You thought the heat would make me shrivel, but they only pushed my roots deeper into the ground.
10. Another door opened, another door closed. I hope we one day open the same one.
Apr 3, 2014
Apr 3, 2014 at 11:43 AM UTC
We are two flumes -
I dread that you will lose altitude with me,
But I can't tell you that.
I can't tell you
That your downward gaze makes my head hurt or
That your sodden tone reminds me
Of how plants must feel after it rains,
Unsure if their spines can lift up through
Layers of loosened topsoil and leaden water.
It's the uncertainty that gets me,
The splinter in the glass, the grey sliver in the sky,
The dread of a future burden that sometimes
Runs in your background or muddles your clear stream or
Shows its shadow even as your words try to astray me.
I like to believe
We are two unshakable blooms
Stretching in tandem and awakening
The same to each surely bright day as
To each overcast and crestfallen.
Apr 19, 2016
Apr 19, 2016 at 10:29 PM UTC