Career Archaeologist
Flew out here with a bindle full of dreams
and a backpack stacked with clean underwear.
I put my past of office wood and four walls
In the backdraught of a cheap fare
Aeroplane flight with transfer and a small
pouch of peanuts. Stripped of the past,
I sit in a dark, naked room in the backend of nowhere
With a group of randoms I have to grow up with fast.
My future is to pan for gold, in a coastless beach of gold.
It is sand. I could have found an old boot or a twig
Back home where I knew that I wasn’t one of the players.
They tell me that I won’t pluck a pearl from the dust,
whilst the breeze melts like butter through my skin
and my trowels rake through the dirt, the unfussed
fingernails that claw at the sinfully deep layers.
There was a good time.
I was piecing a clay pot together, pieces of some old glory
fitting the fragments into some sort of imagined
pattern, the type that other artists effortlessly
ply in paintings or stories. I tell my own story
through a silent trudge through an old farm.
When it goes well, the feeling of catching a spade into
your find rings true. It jars like a gong, a pheromone in the air
that they upstart at like rabbits. Then you can shake off
any feeling that you are a historical thief
or that the rest of the world uses a toothbrush to brush teeth.
But the sparkle on the stone fades quickly once you have rubbed
it a few times, the varnish cracks and it is a fragile clump of sands.
Often, I have strained and squeezed and grubbed
Light from rocks and had them taken out of my hands
for someone else to let the luckless teardrops
of a thousand colours drip from an opal.
One of the men that I work with, Gary, is his name,
wears his jewel on a ring that sparkles with a pain that never stops.
You need a few side-projects to stay sane, some patch of land in the park
You dig like a dog with a bone to bury away from the world.
These days, the daily grind is too much, I no longer think
of it as all in a day’s work. You rough through a patch of ground
and before you can blink
someone has parachuted in like I once did, before i found
the cold heat of despair and they have scooped up your big break.
But mostly I sleep in the same dark room that I lit with my wide eyes once
and hope that I will never wake up. For fucks sake.
The morning sun came too soon and you knew today was cursed
Because the people working through the night would have already
claimed the big haul first.
