Write At The Park with Purple Mark ---William James

 

Souls of the dead

The souls of the dead rise up to bang against the lids of their coffins. In the dark they scream for justice. But nobody can hear. Nobody who live topside or who breathes swiftly moving air can hear. Maybe they don't even care that the soul of their loved one was buried with the body.

At the stone planted in the ground, a child cries out thinking that the soul of their loved one is someplace else. But the soul is not. It’s not even right there beside them, comforting them in their grief. The soul of the loved one is not there, frustrated trying to hold a corporal hand as the grief stricken imagines.

Instead the soul screams and they scream and they scream, "It's not fair!" That some souls get light while others get suffocating black.

Dead white people wish they were buried against their own societal laws. They wish they were laid to rest in open spaces like in limbs of the great trees stretching up to stars in prayer. That they rested as the indigenous peoples once were before white displaced from the lands they conquered. At least then they'd get to see sunlight at least half the year. When their bones had decayed completely and were churned into dirt, they would mist away like a whiff of steam in the morning rising off a blade of grass.

After an eternity of screaming a soul starts to pray for a geological upheaval or an earth changing quake or a new building project or something to turn over the soil and release a symphony of prayers to the winds that sweep the earth clean. But no, that doesn't happen.

I lay. Trapped. Suffocating. In the dark. Waiting. Swimming in a river of tears that never rain up to the stars.

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. I will be publishing literary works, explicit language pieces, and eventually a journal a relative wrote in the late 1800's detailing their journey to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. And when I gather enough submitted works from other people, I will be cobbling together an e-anthology called Randomly Accessed Poetics.