the pits.

neighbors,
i've got three weird concrete pits.
no.
i mean,
i've got a surprise cache of them in my yard,
at the Folk Life & Liberty Fortress.
where i make things, bake things, break things,
and take things to be tossed, turned and transformed....
there,
in the previously woodsly swath i recently had a mulchy monster truck
come and grind up and spit out as ripped roots and mouldy messiness,
there are three separate concrete pits.
...and i'm pretty sure at least one of them has water welling up inside it.
or,
if that's not ground water,
it could very well be some sort of leachy sh!t-soup from genuine human buttholes.
ummmm, yeah.
what.
the.
F*?!
so now, before any continuing efforts to improve my lands and holding can be resumed,
i've gotta go dig down, and fiddle around with a shovel,
to try to upturn the leafy, sap-smeared, moss-covered, spiderfull soil,
and unearth the answers to this muddy, root-covered, concrete-lidded riddle
moonlighting as a crap-cavern in my yard.
damn.
i just wanted to put up a fresh, folksly, vine-covered (eventually),
fence-type enclosure, to create a proper and appropriate site-specific
safe romping realm for my impending dog situation.
simple enough, right?
sure.
if you're someone else.
twenty feet in the wrong direction to start,
with exposed roots from ancient trees as a chaser,
and now,
vaults, or dry-wells, or wet wells, and i'm unwell with wearied worry
about whatever has to happen next.
naturally,
it is going to be a doom-and-gloom domino-effect of cascading catches,
glitches, hiccups, stumbling blocks, and of course, money.
neighbors, what do we call this?

money pits.
yuuuuuuuup.
literally, without any winky stink-eye glibness,
money pits are presently what i'm spelunking.
it was to be expected, although still hoped against...
old and busted is the name of the game with an aged manor in the mountains.
this isn't anything new.
it's just another 'nother wrench in the works,
which is, of course, to say it was predictably the only choice, really...
after all,
this is warrior poetry,
and that's not indicative of mortal peril and physical combat-
it's an all-out battle, daily, against the elements that compose the easy way:
the well-traveled properly-marked well-maintained path;
the smooth-sailing and/or calm seas...we simply don't DO that sort of thing.
i'm just sayin'-
the rosy prose and taxi-metered standard stanzas of sunny-sides-up and upbeat outlooks
aren't what we write about over here.
don't misunderstand me, though-
i'm not hopeless, helpless, heartless, or even hapless.
nope.
i'm just better equipped to persevere and endure through prolonged exposure
to hard styles and long nights, heavy days and tough times.
quitting isn't how i get busy with my business.
when the secret universal plan has more strength-training exercises
to work out on my force of will with an opposing force of worsening weighty waiting,
what can i do?
i gotta do the things i'm designed to.
like,
dig in, figuratively,
and dig in, with a real shovel,
to get to the bottom of the mystery of what the F* is really really wrong here.
i mean,
it's SOMEthin', that's for sure.
deeper, and maybe a little darker,
and every bit as dirty as the buried doo-doo butterholes i'm excavating.
nothing stays buried forever,
and not much of what surfaces is treasure...
*
i'm getting much better at shouldering the load.
i guess you can't keep carrying it all by yourself
and not get at least a little bit stronger.
to whatever plots and twists and parcels of problems happen to heap up
and hunch my back with straw after straw after straw.
baleful bales, stacks on stacks on haystacks of time-taking day-draining blocks
of interwoven needful needlings,
with that last straw never ever really quite landing on my shoulders.
so,
i don't get crushed by it.
i just stay kinda tired.
no breaks, no brakes,
just bad breaks and full-throttle progression into whatever future comes from carrying on.
is that weird?
the thing is-
there's never not work to do somewhere,
and doing nothing costs a whole lot more than spending money or wasting time.
i can't hang out with standing still,
even when i'm spinning myself into a dervish tornado just to gain an inch or two.
it's all really happening.
we're moving even when we think we aren't getting anywhere;
never quiet, never soft.....