Confessions of an Excavator

Part. I

From rubble to rubble

And dust to a lost cause

Prongs drive to the core

But unsharpened they dully tickle their loss

Relentlessly digging 

The machine does its job

Without reason, reflection, 

And without pause

Under the midday hot sun 

Steel shines piercingly bright

But the light from sweat drops on working faces 

(Steaming hot, red, and wet on construction workplaces)

Can never match the beauty of the machine’s glaring light

So bright it’s even distracting

Onlookers shudder in sight of the reflecting chrome crane

Robbed, no—saved from seeing the charm of the inhumane digger 

Upon catching a glint of the biggest star’s flame

The sun is the sparkle’s source it seems

And beauty can’t come from machines

Lifeless and dead, means never ends 

Scheming to steal the sun’s beams

The sturdy frames 

Feign the sun’s shocking gleams

Signing their signature with greed  

By intensifying the original light streams

Forever light years away, 

They can never truly be 

The object of their awe, the sun,

What truly to eyes and skin maims

Aside from being a faker and fraud

The scamming devise has its perks 

It goes on without stopping, brainlessly chopping

Destroying what lurks 

Under the shadow of its falling alloy forks

And sometimes the lurkers are alive

And are the beloved to the driver sitting inside

Who ferociously screams 

“I swear I love you beyond my desire’s drive!”

While his lowering hand aligns with the button causing his beloved’s demise

But can you blame? 

Are you shocked? 

A digger knows not when to stop, what it looks for beneath crops, beneath chops, what it loves, where’s its brain, what’s dirt and what’s humane, where its going, what’s too far, what it forages with the hands of its metallic digging car

It just digs, it does its job

And doesn’t stop for twigs, dirt,

Plastic bottles, old shirts

Unfettered by the face recoiling

Below because it just digs, it doesn’t notice as it robs 

From the only thing that christened life meaning, desire doing backflips, and passion singing

Its claws draw down

They rhythmically swing 

Turning the beloved’s pierced body 

Into a porous plasmic hot spring

Before the consummation is over

As the gas tank depletes

The excavator looks down at its feet  

With the horrifying sight, it nauseously retreats

Decorated in manmade introitus 

Her frame is littered with holes

Topped with a face stained sheer terror 

And complete when the machine reaches its goals

Part. II

But what if it didn’t choose its own goals?

“My dear beloved, how did this happen?!”

What if it lost itself to their control?

“My dear beloved, that noise, was that your bones cracking, 

my passion snapping?!

“My dear, I call you beloved 

but I am no lover it seems. 

A mechanic behemoth has no soul, 

no sleep, and therefore no dreams

“You can’t say there were no signs—

When we spooned you bled and bruised

As you cried I tried to hide 

that I was perplexingly amused

“When we kissed

You expected lips 

But instead got black eyes

From the loving blows of cement fists

“By your side 

I stood unmoved,

Petrified,

Unaffected by fever, by you

“And now you look up

Because you crave the exalted 

And I, down 

Because I am exalted 

“Blanketed by my shadow,

Rubble and refuse surrounds,

It’s child darkness says, ‘Take these for your well, evanescence for your wop.’ 

You swallow, looking puny staring up from the ground.

“All the noise, 

the snapping, clapping, chatting, laughing, existential thrashing, present wrapping, google mapping, reckless shagging, disease having, knuckle cracking, deceptive acting, craigslist flagging, plastic bagging, capping and recapping, building collapsing, nerve-racking, batting practicing, drum tapping, sunrise rapping, midnight snacking, gasping, alleyway and middle school locker room harassing, run-makeup dabbing, anxiety stabbing, banging and clacking, justified smacking, 

“and the noise of all noises, 

That final symphony, 

drumroll tapping, 

tapping, 

tapping...

“You wish for eternal napping

Lagging at work, dragging

Your body back to bed 

at the end, collapsing

“But at the finale 

you no longer have to pretend 

The noise is sufferable

To silence all eventually ends

“It’s all the same thing! I now know why I 

Can’t tell between musical rings, screeching clinks, running sinks, or the agonizing cries of human beings!”

Part. III

In the garbage pit still there remains a lone climber

Going higher to magnify her voice’s sound

As she scales a pink 1950s refrigerator

Plastic trash that will never break down 

‘Life is a gift!’ 

The squealer of paroxysms cries,

Grappling at rusted bits to climb

Living for an expired cause, 

Out of breathe and running out of time

But still higher and higher to rise

Finally swinging over the fridge’s side 

A single leg, fingers still grasping no ledge

She says, ‘I’d rather remain a suffering porcine being,

Call me insane, atleast my blood flows vital blood, wine red!’

Fueled by her last dose of passion 

(existential madness run rampant)

Her body is cast out to sea

A buoy hook on a tangled fishing rod

With only words to bait her addressees 

No feathers, no colors, she spills in the air:

‘Don’t trade flesh for metal disks

Or make a home in that shadows abyss

Protect your eyes from glass,

goggles will do, gas masks too, 

and helmets for your fragile heads’

Her falling body and rolling eyes

Synchronize backwards to her life-boat capsize

Empty hands thrashing like gasping shored fish  

One more cry, please god, one more wish

Dizzy from the gasoline, she intoxicatedly shrieks

‘To be an automated false godhead,

A conscious-less machine, 

You’re better off dead, a blank slate, wiped clean!’

I’m not sure what followed the scene

That frail wailer crashed without a sound—

My diagnosis? Too many dreams,

An overfed ego, pampered hopes, iPhone screens, religion and its pope (he creeps in any crack that won’t catch his pious cloak), bad habits, toxic food, and those trendy tinted glasses meant to protect eyes from poison and light and vulgarity 

But used instead to guarantee her exclusion from society

Stealing her vision

Condemning her to death’s waiting room 

Where everyone sits patiently and quietly

As if his favorite soap opera was over 

And on TV there was nothing left to see

Excavator no longer digging, he pensively

Listens to the jingle of ejecting keys

Thinking ‘Her pleads, desperate cheeks cherry red 

Ignorantly romantic, charmingly naive 

She clearly had never been lead 

On the wheels of an iron machine’

The sun milks it’s fear of anarchy

Running punctually home to bed

The moon follows closely behind laughing 

Dirtying and erasing the clean path the sun had tread 

Distant howling drags chains through the sand

As Excavator momentarily sinks from loss

His beloved was murdered at his own hand

While into his mouth buttered popcorn he tossed

Sad to see her go I guess 

And perplexed at her will to fight 

but the intensity grows less and less 

As he pictures her futile dumpyard flight

How silly she looked flailing 

A cooked noodle in the wind

Trying to avoid the inevitable flaying 

As if, pressing a knife to his fresh caught wiggling fish’s skin,

a hungry fisherman would willfully rescind 

The digger laughed at the absurdity

And pardoned his impish voyeurism

Great entertainment is guilt free

Wrongful shame makes sick, laugher cures him

You’ll choose life as a machine if you’re smart

And if not, you ought to learn:

“For dust thou art 

And unto dust shalt thou return”--

06/04/18