We keep good records.
Starting dates, endings.
Wars, plagues, starvations.
Emigratiions. Genocides.
Religious and cultural shifts
Continue in sustainable growth.

Not unlike my Magnolia,
Some of whose roots got burned
From excessive fertilizer.
The foliage suffered, not the trunk.
This year there are fewer buds.

Not unlike my grandkids
Holding up our mythology to reason,
Our White Lies.
Our magical lights, speeds of travel
That take us from our immortal Earth,
I snap back,
And slip a dollar under a child's pillow.
This will sustain.

Your drafts are always better than your poems

my hand on your hip like a golden fleece
humming jurisdiction and swaying
to the rhythm of your gate-
too proud to wallflower.
my palm-
where the heat of you
commands my grasp,
and nothing is
so keen
as the thought of our
next encounter
with a private
moment
unmoored from harbingers
of impending
isolation.
stuck to the forefront
of an absolute
ravishing.

whirling the dervish plums
of our plucky
resurrections
to stammer free of our bonds
into happier
*******.

thoroughly
in love
where out love
is In.

and no wonder.

in sheepskin and marmalade we palaver and jig our rods in the Nile
but seldom, Our sunspots blighted and the constant barrage of
darkening's become the strobe wafer-thin ramblings
of madmen with catheters for priests,
and Catholics for conniption fits
for faraway kings
to dish about in near-away
parlors of unpolished reality.
Yea! sans varnish and crickets with rickets
and a whole host of dismay, dismayed by gardens-
and a whole menagerie -
an appeal to a constant
NO!

receiving a fair bit of the Real on a stick
and a few fairies
in the wing ***** of our falderal  
Nesting in Summers, too keen on Winter
and anointed by the drizzle
of a sumptuous outsized
Joy

a dangle in the tinsel of a calm.

half annoyed.

there are no simple moons. above all there are only storms that emblazon joy upon havoc
or sorrows beyond the reckoning of angels with bittersweet tinsel
in forgotten trees… nodding off in a forest you forgot.
all tomorrows in the wrong hands is when you wake-cling to the illusion of Otherness
and come seldom to the symphonies that designed You
to spite the Shadow,
it would be wise to eat more flowers
than toadstools.., but more wise
to love on purpose.

In Bloom.

When my Karma blew a Satire, I was mocking something as naked as this.
I drank my coffee from a Flea Market mug
with all the panache of-
the happy ******
with none of the manacles
of Self Awareness.

Sleep Being a constant insomnia, where-
barns alongside the road all have faces too feral
for tranquil lamentations. postcard sceptics all.
but they rest in fields
of invisible blood
like Lincoln Logs in a microwave on a
platter of cadaverous
Parthenons.

I lay dormant in the bones of the Sun. Undetected by traditional auguries
As anonymous as an honest word..
As serpentine as right angles in a left-handed Sphere.
Ever keen to be never wicked… but unapproachable by chariot.
Only long walks off short piers need apply.
And oodles of Time
to stop on a dime
by heart.

Her eyes were like the last cactus in Alaska.
Shrines of blue honey, Always wide and diaphanous.
Glowing in the wind like round kites in Springtime,
So glorious are all the flaws of Her Symmetry
She sways the Tide on a Moon.
So my Love is in Orbit
Because.

Like a Loon.

all of my Islands have honeycombs and harsh bark
where shrubbery blubbers in too much sun
and halfwit Karma blunders in a cup
of unquenchable designs.

Wharf ******
on the plank of the following prank.
heavy like Moses.
Ordained by self-harm
and actual Pirates.

breathing Majong Cactus
Where I Temporary
Go.

Desdemona
by Michael R. Burch

Though you possessed the moon and stars,
you are bound to fate and wed to chance.
Your lips deny they crave a kiss;
your feet deny they ache to dance.
Your heart imagines wild romance.

Though you cupped fire in your hands
and molded incandescent forms,
you are barren now, and—spent of flame—
the ashes that remain are borne
toward the sun upon a storm.

You, who demanded more, have less,
your heart within its cells of sighs
held fast by chains of misery,
confined till death for peddling lies—
imprisonment your sense denies.

You, who collected hearts like leaves
and pressed each once within your book,
forgot. None—winsome, bright or rare—
not one was worth a second look.
My heart, as others, you forsook.

But I, though I loved you from afar
through silent dawns, and gathered rue
from gardens where your footsteps left
cold paths among the asters, knew—
each moonless night the nettles grew

and strangled hope, where love dies too.

Published by Penny Dreadful, Carnelian and Romantics Quarterly

Keywords/Tags: Love, romance, passion, moon, stars, fate, chance, lips, kiss, feet, dance, wild, romance, heart, chains, prisoner, imprisonment, cell, lies, death, heart, leaves, book, forsook, forsaken, betrayed, garden, gardens, rue, path, paths, nettle, nettles, hope, strangled

Let me be the reason for it please.
2/3/2020