"Excavation" and "Runaway"
Excavation
Digging poems out of a 4-foot high stack
of drafts
to try and revive ones
that almost made it,
close but no cigar:
digging down seven years
to my triple bypass
the bloody remnants
of that trip under lights
the doc and other spacemen
and women in blue scrubs, masks
wheeled me into the
cold operating room,
administered the anesthetic;
I woke in the
dark,
a death crypt of some kind
it seemed—
in bed with a tube
stuck in my chest,
an iron-curtain ahead
moved back & forth
like fate…
Two nurses told me
get up
out of bed
I said, “I can’t”
one said “yes you can”
they made me stand
and walk
to a chair
in a corner
where I sat
and stared out at
the strange world,
a taste of blood
in my mouth,
and wondering
when my next pill was due.
Runaway
I ran away from home
seven years old
walked out of the house and
down the road
along cracked and gouged sidewalk
a quarter-mile to the lime kiln
loud waterfall-roar of machinery
white dust in the air and
smoky white buildings,
trucks banging along the highway
over railroad tracks…
I came to a hill where the
road dropped to a dark canyon,
a long channel of shadow
between rows of brown brick blocks—
a German Shepard, chained to a rail
atop a cement landing
barked and slobbered at me
and I got scared,
turned around and
walked back to the
home I had run away from…
Nobody there knew I had been gone.
![Wayne F. Burke Wayne F. Burke](https://www.unlikelystories.org/sites/default/files/wayne%20f%20burke.jpg)
Wayne F Burke's poetry, short stories, and non-fiction, has been widely published online and in print. He is the author of eight published full-length poetry collections and one published collection of short stories. He lives in the Green Mountain State, Vermont (USA).