Tag Archives: Don Arterburn

Back Against This Wall

Back against this wall…

This alley in remission from evening’s shallow light that casts the neon’s echo ‘cross the puddled rain here left in flight. The creeping of the city’s poise, stagnant, yet repelling the every moment stood before, captured melancholy, telling of the brick so stacked behind my back, its story never told, of tears in lonely crying dealt amidst the thieves, amidst the throes of life, of death, of every moment painted black… I lean against this wall succumbed by all the world, by all the lack.

Into my very soul it pours, every bottle, every poor soul that claimed a moment’s home between the puddles, against the loam of what the city so disgusts, but bends to truth and hides in trust that such is never seen. I lean against this wall, now mean. I feel the bullet holes here left, where souls caught glimpses of their death. I smell the acrid bloom of fear and echoed running footsteps hear… to justice? to ends? to whatever’s left of soul’s lost friends…?

Behind the madness of my mind I feel the thrum and so go blind to all the hopes here swimming round, adrift within this dying ground… this dying ground, is it? I write it lest I should forget. My shadow crosses fast before the falling neon lights in roar glanced across the puddles’ rent where only living’s death is spent, and so I to my own.
Back against this wall, alone.

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Filed under Dreams, Perspective, Poetry, Universal Soul

From the Bottom of the Ladder

For company, for policy, for rule and regulation,
for managers and presidents, and once a year vacations.

Hey! Listen!
You and I cannot be friends
for where your social antics start
is where my patience ends!
Yes, you were made my master
by the men for whom you slave,
and you think if you work faster
and make your men behave,
that you will one day be rewarded
by promotion up the ladder,
and the fools who did the work for you
will stay, they do not matter.

Oh yes, it’s very possible
and even what you need,
and you know with every rung you climb,
the more you’ll have to bleed.

For company, for policy, for rule and regulation,
for managers and presidents, and once a year vacations.

But remember this each time you kiss
the ass of your employer,
and he allows you to step further
form this common labor toilet,
that you should listen closely
for a thunder from below,
for it’s the laughter of this little man
who works down here, you know.

You wonder why I’m laughing?
All you climbing doesn’t matter.
I’m laughing ‘cause I’m watching you,
and it’s I that hold your ladder!

posted for
Don Arterburn
(aka D. A-Bone)
somewhere in the 1970s

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Filed under Family, Perspective, Poetry