Poems about Icarus

These are poems about Icarus, flying and flights of fancy...



Southern Icarus
by Michael R. Burch

Windborne, lover of heights,
unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching embrace,
you climb, skittish kite...

What do you know of the world’s despair,
gliding in vast... solitariness... there,
so that all that remains is to
fall?

Only a little longer the wind invests its sighs;
you
stall,
spread-eagled, as the canvas snaps

and *****
its white rebellious wings,
and all

the houses watch with baffled eyes.



Flight 93
by Michael R. Burch

I held the switch in trembling fingers, asked
why existence felt so small, so purposeless,
like a minnow wriggling feebly in my grasp...

vibrations of huge engines thrummed my arms
as, glistening with sweat, I nudged the switch
to OFF... I heard the klaxon's shrill alarms

like vultures’ shriekings... earthward, in a stall...
we floated... earthward... wings outstretched, aghast
like Icarus... as through the void we fell...

till nothing was so beautiful, so blue...
so vivid as that moment... and I held
an image of your face, and dreamed I flew

into your arms. The earth rushed up. I knew
such comfort, in that moment, loving you.



I AM!
by Michael R. Burch

I am not one of ten billion―I―
sunblackened Icarus, chary fly,
staring at God with a quizzical eye.

I am not one of ten billion, I.

I am not one life has left unsquashed―
scarred as Ulysses, goddess-debauched,
pale glowworm agleam with a tale of panache.

I am not one life has left unsquashed.

I am not one without spots of disease,
laugh lines and tan lines and thick-callused knees
from begging and praying and girls sighing "Please!"

I am not one without spots of disease.

I am not one of ten billion―I―
scion of Daedalus, blackwinged fly
staring at God with a sedulous eye.

I am not one of ten billion, I
AM!



Finally to Burn
(the Fall and Resurrection of Icarus)
by Michael R. Burch

Athena takes me
sometimes by the hand

and we go levitating
through strange Dreamlands

where Apollo sleeps
in his dark forgetting

and Passion seems
like a wise bloodletting

and all I remember
, upon awaking,

is: to Love sometimes
is like forsaking

one’s Being―to glide

heroically beyond thought,

forsaking the here
for the There and the Not.



O, finally to Burn,
gravity beyond escaping!

To plummet is Bliss
when the blisters breaking

rain down red scabs
on the earth’s mudpuddle...

Feathers and wax
and the watchers huddle...

Flocculent sheep,
O, and innocent lambs!,

I will rock me to sleep
on the waves’ iambs.



To sleep's sweet relief
from Love’s exhausting Dream,

for the Night has Wings
gentler than Moonbeams―

they will flit me to Life
like a huge-eyed Phoenix

fluttering off
to quarry the Sphinx.



Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,

Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.

Quixotic, I seek Love
amid the tarnished

rusted-out steel
when to live is varnish.

To Dream―that’s the thing!

Aye, that Genie I’ll rub,

soak by the candle,
aflame in the tub.



Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,

Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.

Somewhither, somewhither
aglitter and strange,

we must moult off all knowledge
or perish caged.

*

I am reconciled to Life
somewhere beyond thought―

I’ll Live the Elsewhere,
I’ll Dream of the Naught.

Methinks it no journey;
to tarry’s a waste,

so fatten the oxen;
make a nice baste.

I’m coming, Fool Tom,
we have Somewhere to Go,

though we injure noone,
ourselves wildaglow.

This odd poem invokes and merges with the anonymous medieval poem “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song” and W. H. Auden’s modernist poem “Musee des Beaux Arts,” which in turn refers to Pieter Breughel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus.” In the first stanza Icarus levitates with the help of Athena, the goddess or wisdom, through “strange dreamlands” while Apollo, the sun god, lies sleeping. In the second stanza, Apollo predictably wakes up and Icarus plummets to earth, or back to mundane reality, as in Breughel’s painting and Auden’s poem. In the third stanza the grounded Icarus can still fly, but only in flights of imagination through dreams of love. In the fourth and fifth stanzas Icarus joins Tom Rynosseross of the Bedlam poem in embracing madness by deserting “knowledge” and its cages (ivory towers, etc.). In the final stanza Icarus agrees with Tom that it is “no journey” to wherever they’re going together and also agrees with Tom that they will injure no one along the way, no matter how intensely they glow and radiate. The poem can be taken as a metaphor for the death and rebirth of Poetry, and perhaps as a prophecy that Poetry will rise, radiate and reattain its former glory...



Free Fall (II)
by Michael R. Burch

I have no earthly remembrance of you, as if
we were never of earth, but merely white clouds adrift,
swirling together through Himalayan serene altitudes―
no more man and woman than exhaled breath―unable to fall
back to solid existence, despite the air’s sparseness: all
our being borne up, because of our lightness,
toward the sun’s unendurable brightness...

But since I touched you, fire consumes each wing!

We who are unable to fly, stall
contemplating disaster. Despair like an anchor, like an iron ball,
heavier than ballast, sinks on its thick-looped chain
toward the earth, and soon thereafter there will be sufficient pain
to recall existence, to make the coming darkness everlasting.



Fledglings
by Michael R. Burch

With her small eyes, pale and unforgiving,
she taught me―December is not for those
unweaned of love, the chirping nestlings
who bicker for worms with dramatic throats

still pinkly exposed, who have not yet learned
the first harsh lesson of survival: to devour
their weaker siblings in the high-leafed ferned
fortress and impregnable bower

from which men must fly like improbable dreams
to become poets. They have yet to learn that,
before they can soar starward, like fanciful archaic machines,
they must first assimilate the latest technology, or

lose all in the sudden realization of gravity,
following Icarus’s, sun-unwinged, singed trajectory.



The Higher Atmospheres
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever we became climbed on the thought
of Love itself; we floated on plumed wings
ten thousand miles above the breasted earth
that had vexed us to such Distance; now all things
seem small and pale, a girdle’s handsbreadth girth...

I break upon the rocks; I break; I fling
my human form about; I writhe; I writhe.
Invention is not Mastery, nor wings
Salvation. Here the Vulture cruelly chides
and plunges at my eyes, and coos and sings...

Oh, some will call the sun my doom, but Love
melts callow wax the higher atmospheres
leave brittle. I flew high: not high enough
to melt such frozen resins... thus, Her jeers.



Notes toward an Icarian philosophy of life...
by Michael R. Burch

If the mind’s and the heart’s quests were ever satisfied,
what would remain, as the goals of life?

If there was only light, with no occluding matter,
if there were only sunny mid-afternoons but no mysterious midnights,
what would become of the dreams of men?

What becomes of man’s vision, apart from terrestrial shadows?

And what of man’s character, formed
in the seething crucible of life and death,
hammered out on the anvil of Fate, by Will?

What becomes of man’s aims in the end,
when the hammer’s anthems at last are stilled?

If man should confront his terrible Creator,
capture him, hogtie him, hold his ***** feet to the fire,
roast him on the spit as yet another blasphemous heretic
whose faith is suspect, derelict...
torture a confession from him,
get him to admit, “I did it!...

what then?

Once man has taken revenge
on the Frankenstein who created him
and has justly crucified the One True Monster, the Creator...

what then?

Or, if revenge is not possible,
if the appearance of matter was merely a random accident,
or a group illusion (and thus a conspiracy, perhaps of dunces, us among them),
or if the Creator lies eternally beyond the reach of justice...

what then?

Perhaps there’s nothing left but for man to perfect his character,
to fly as high as his wings will take him toward unreachable suns,
to gamble everything on some unfathomable dream, like Icarus,
then fall to earth, to perish, undone...

or perhaps not, if the mystics are right
about the true nature of darkness and light.

Is there a source of knowledge beyond faith,
a revelation of heaven, of the Triumph of Love?

The Hebrew prophets seemed to think so,
and Paul, although he saw through a glass darkly,
and Julian of Norwich, who heard the voice of God say,
“All shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well...”

Does hope spring eternal in the human breast,
or does it just blindly *****?



Icarus Bickerous
by Michael R. Burch

for the Religious Right

Like Icarus, waxen wings melting,
white tail-feathers fall, bystanders pelting.

They look up amazed
and seem rather dazed―

was it heaven’s or hell’s furious smelting

that fashioned such vulturish wings?
And why are they singed?―

the higher you “rise,” the more halting?



Earthbound, a Vision of Crazy Horse
by Michael R. Burch

Tashunka Witko, a Lakota Sioux better known as Crazy Horse, had a vision of a red-tailed hawk at Sylvan Lake, South Dakota. In his vision he saw himself riding a spirit horse, flying through a storm, as the hawk flew above him, shrieking. When he awoke, a red-tailed hawk was perched near his horse.

Earthbound,
and yet I now fly
through the clouds that are aimlessly drifting...
so high
that no sound
echoing by
below where the mountains are lifting
the sky
can be heard.

Like a bird,
but not meek,
like a hawk from a distance regarding its prey,
I will shriek,
not a word,
but a screech,
and my terrible clamor will turn them to clay―
the sheep,
the earthbound.

Published by American Indian Pride and Boston Poetry Magazine



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

It is the nature of loveliness to vanish
as butterfly wings, batting against nothingness
seek transcendence...

Originally published by Hibiscus (India)



The Wonder Boys
by Michael R. Burch

(for Leslie Mellichamp, the late editor of The Lyric,
who was a friend and mentor to many poets, and
a fine poet in his own right)

The stars were always there, too-bright cliches:
scintillant truths the jaded world outgrew
as baffled poets winged keyed kites―amazed,
in dream of shocks that suddenly came true...

but came almost as static―background noise,
a song out of the cosmos no one hears,
or cares to hear. The poets, starstruck boys,
lay tuned in to their kite strings, saucer-eared.

They thought to feel the lightning’s brilliant sparks
electrify their nerves, their brains; the smoke
of words poured from their overheated hearts.
The kite string, knotted, made a nifty rope...

You will not find them here; they blew away―
in tumbling flight beyond nights’ stars. They clung
by fingertips to satellites. They strayed
too far to remain mortal. Elfin, young,

their words are with us still. Devout and fey,
they wink at us whenever skies are gray.

Originally published by The Lyric



American Eagle, Grounded
by Michael R. Burch

Her predatory eye,
the single feral iris,
scans.

Her raptor beak,
all jagged sharp-edged ******,
juts.

Her hard talon,
clenched in pinched expectation,
waits.

Her clipped wings,
preened against reality,
tremble.

Published as “Tremble” by The Lyric, Verses Magazine, Romantics Quarterly, Journeys, The Raintown Review, Poetic Ponderings, Poem Kingdom (All-Star Tribute), The Fabric of a Vision, NPAC―Net Poetry and Art Competition, Poet’s Haven, Listening To The Birth Of Crystals(Anthology), Poetry Renewal, Inspirational Stories, Poetry Life & Times, MahMag (Iranian/Farsi), The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



Album
by Michael R. Burch

I caress them―trapped in brittle cellophane―
and I see how young they were, and how unwise;
and I remember their first flight―an old prop plane,
their blissful arc through alien blue skies...

And I touch them here through leaves which―tattered, frayed―
are also wings, but wings that never flew:
like insects’ wings―pinned, held. Here, time delayed,
their features never merged, remaining two...

And Grief, which lurked unseen beyond the lens
or in shadows where It crept on furtive claws
as It scritched Its way into their hearts, depends
on sorrows such as theirs, and works Its jaws...

and slavers for Its meat―those young, unwise,
who naively dare to dream, yet fail to see
how, lumbering sunward, Hope, ungainly, flies,
clutching to Her ruffled breast what must not be.



Springtime Prayer
by Michael R. Burch

They’ll have to grow like crazy,
the springtime baby geese,
if they’re to fly to balmier climes
when autumn dismembers the leaves...

And so I toss them loaves of bread,
then whisper an urgent prayer:
“Watch over these, my Angels,
if there’s anyone kind, up there.”

Originally published by The HyperTexts



Learning to Fly
by Michael R. Burch

We are learning to fly
every day...

learning to fly―
away, away...

O, love is not in the ephemeral flight,
but love, Love! is our destination―

graced land of eternal sunrise, radiant beyond night!
Let us bear one another up in our vast migration.



In the Whispering Night
by Michael R. Burch

for George King

In the whispering night, when the stars bend low
till the hills ignite to a shining flame,
when a shower of meteors streaks the sky
while the lilies sigh in their beds, for shame,
we must steal our souls, as they once were stolen,
and gather our vigor, and all our intent.
We must heave our bodies to some famished ocean
and laugh as they vanish, and never repent.
We must dance in the darkness as stars dance before us,
soar, Soar! through the night on a butterfly's breeze...
blown high, upward-yearning, twin spirits returning
to the heights of awareness from which we were seized.

Published by Songs of Innocence, Romantics Quarterly, The Chained Muse and Poetry Life & Times. This is a poem I wrote for my favorite college English teacher, George King, about poetic kinship, brotherhood and romantic flights of fancy.



For a Palestinian Child, with Butterflies
by Michael R. Burch

Where does the butterfly go
when lightning rails,
when thunder howls,
when hailstones scream,
when winter scowls,
when nights compound dark frosts with snow...
Where does the butterfly go?

Where does the rose hide its bloom
when night descends oblique and chill
beyond the capacity of moonlight to fill?
When the only relief's a banked fire's glow,
where does the butterfly go?

And where shall the spirit flee
when life is harsh, too harsh to face,
and hope is lost without a trace?
Oh, when the light of life runs low,
where does the butterfly go?

Published by Tucumcari Literary Review, Romantics Quarterly, Poetry Life & Times, Victorian Violet Press (where it was nominated for a “Best of the Net”), The Contributor (a Nashville homeless newspaper), Siasat (Pakistan), and set to music as a part of the song cycle “The Children of Gaza” which has been performed in various European venues by the Palestinian soprano Dima Bawab



Sioux Vision Quest
by Crazy Horse, Oglala Lakota Sioux (circa 1840-1877)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A man must pursue his Vision
as the eagle explores
the sky's deepest blues.

Published by Better Than Starbucks, A Hundred Voices



in-flight convergence
by Michael R. Burch

serene, almost angelic,
the lights of the city ―― extend ――
over lumbering behemoths
shrilly screeching displeasure;
they say
that nothing is certain,
that nothing man dreams or ordains
long endures his command

here the streetlights that flicker
and those blazing steadfast
seem one: from a distance;
descend,
they abruptly
part ―――――― ways,

so that nothing is one
which at times does not suddenly blend
into garish insignificance
in the familiar alleyways,
in the white neon flash
and the billboards of Convenience

and man seems the afterthought of his own Brilliance
as we thunder down the enlightened runways.

Originally published by The Aurorean and subsequently nominated for the Pushcart Prize



Squall
by Michael R. Burch

There, in that sunny arbor,
in the aureate light
filtering through the waxy leaves
of a stunted banana tree,

I felt the sudden monsoon of your wrath,
the clattery implosions
and copper-bright bursts
of the bottoms of pots and pans.

I saw your swollen goddess’s belly
wobble and heave
in pregnant indignation,
turned tail, and ran.

Published by Chrysanthemum, Poetry Super Highway, Barbitos and Poetry Life & Times



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

Eagle, raven, blackbird, crow...
What you are I do not know.
Where you go I do not care.
I’m unconcerned whose meal you bear.
But as you mount the sunlit sky,
I only wish that I could fly.
I only wish that I could fly.

Robin, hawk or whippoorwill...
Should men care that you hunger still?
I do not wish to see your home.
I do not wonder where you roam.
But as you scale the sky's bright stairs,
I only wish that I were there.
I only wish that I were there.

Sparrow, lark or chickadee...
Your markings I disdain to see.
Where you fly concerns me not.
I scarcely give your flight a thought.
But as you wheel and arc and dive,
I, too, would feel so much alive.
I, too, would feel so much alive.

This is a poem that I believe I wrote as a high school sophomore. But it could have been written a bit later. I seem to remember the original poem being influenced by William Cullen Bryant's "To a Waterfowl."



Flying
by Michael R. Burch

I shall rise
and try the ****** wings of thought
ten thousand times
before I fly...

and then I'll sleep
and waste ten thousand nights
before I dream;
but when at last...

I soar the distant heights of undreamt skies
where never hawks nor eagles dared to go,
as I laugh among the meteors flashing by
somewhere beyond the bluest earth-bound seas...

if I'm not told
I’m just a man,
then I shall know
just what I am.

This is one of my early poems, written around age 16-17. According to my notes, I may have revised the poem later, in 1978, but if so the changes were minor because the poem remains very close to the original.



Stage Craft-y
by Michael R. Burch

There once was a dromedary
who befriended a crafty canary.
Budgie said, "You can’t sing,
but now, here’s the thing―
just think of the tunes you can carry!"



Clyde Lied!
by Michael R. Burch

There once was a mockingbird, Clyde,
who bragged of his prowess, but lied.
To his new wife he sighed,
"When again, gentle bride?"
"Nevermore!" bright-eyed Raven replied.



Less Heroic Couplets: ****** Most Fowl!
by Michael R. Burch

“****** most foul!”
cried the mouse to the owl.

“Friend, I’m no sinner;
you’re merely my dinner!”
the wise owl replied
as the tasty snack died.

Published by Lighten Up Online and in Potcake Chapbook #7

NOTE: In an attempt to demonstrate that not all couplets are heroic, I have created a series of poems called “Less Heroic Couplets.” I believe even poets should abide by truth-in-advertising laws! ― MRB



Lance-Lot
by Michael R. Burch

Preposterous bird!
Inelegant! Absurd!

Until the great & mighty heron
brandishes his fearsome sword.



Kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’
by Michael R. Burch

Kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’ the bees rise
in a dizzy circle of two.
Oh, when I’m with you,
I feel like kissin’ ’n’ buzzin’ too.



Delicacy
by Michael R. Burch

for all good mothers

Your love is as delicate
as a butterfly cleaning its wings,
as soft as the predicate
the hummingbird sings
to itself, gently murmuring―
“Fly! Fly! Fly!”
Your love is the string
soaring kites untie.



Lone Wild Goose
by Du Fu (712-770)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The abandoned goose refuses food and drink;
he cries querulously for his companions.

Who feels kinship for that strange wraith
as he vanishes eerily into the heavens?

You watch it as it disappears;
its plaintive calls cut through you.

The indignant crows ignore you both:
the bickering, bantering multitudes.

Du Fu (712-770) is also known as Tu Fu. The first poem is addressed to the poet's wife, who had fled war with their children. Ch'ang-an is an ironic pun because it means "Long-peace."



The Red Cockatoo
by Po Chu-I (772-846)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A marvelous gift from Annam―
a red cockatoo,
bright as peach blossom,
fluent in men's language.

So they did what they always do
to the erudite and eloquent:
they created a thick-barred cage
and shut it up.

Po Chu-I (772-846) is best known today for his ballads and satirical poems. Po Chu-I believed poetry should be accessible to commoners and is noted for his simple diction and natural style. His name has been rendered various ways in English: Po Chu-I, Po Chü-i, Bo Juyi and Bai Juyi.



The Migrant Songbird
Li Qingzhao aka Li Ching-chao (c. 1084-1155)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The migrant songbird on the nearby yew
brings tears to my eyes with her melodious trills;
this fresh downpour reminds me of similar spills:
another spring gone, and still no word from you...



Lines from Laolao Ting Pavilion
by Li Bai (701-762)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The spring breeze knows partings are bitter;
The willow twig knows it will never be green again.



The Day after the Rain
Lin Huiyin (1904-1955)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love the day after the rain
and the meadow's green expanses!
My heart endlessly rises with wind,
gusts with wind...
away the new-mown grasses and the fallen leaves...
away the clouds like smoke...
vanishing like smoke...



Untitled Translations

Cupid, if you incinerate my soul, touché!
For like you she has wings and can fly away!
―Meleager, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

As autumn deepens,
a butterfly sips
chrysanthemum dew.
―Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Come, butterfly,
it’s late
and we’ve a long way to go!
―Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Up and at ’em! The sky goes bright!
Let’***** the road again,
Companion Butterfly!
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Ah butterfly,
what dreams do you ply
with your beautiful wings?
―Chiyo-ni, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Oh, dreamlike winter butterfly:
a puff of white snow
cresting mountains
―Kakio Tomizawa, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Dry leaf flung awry:
bright butterfly,
goodbye!
―Michael R. Burch, original haiku

Will we remain parted forever?
Here at your grave:
two flowerlike butterflies
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

a soaring kite flits
into the heart of the sun?
Butterfly & Chrysanthemum
―Michael R. Burch, original haiku

The cheerful-chirping cricket
contends gray autumn's gay,
contemptuous of frost
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Whistle on, twilight whippoorwill,
solemn evangelist
of loneliness
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

The sea darkening,
the voices of the wild ducks:
my mysterious companions!
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Lightning
shatters the darkness―
the night heron's shriek
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

This snowy morning:
cries of the crow I despise
(ah, but so beautiful!)
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

A crow settles
on a leafless branch:
autumn nightfall.
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Hush, cawing crows; what rackets you make!
Heaven's indignant messengers,
you remind me of wordsmiths!
―O no Yasumaro (circa 711), loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Higher than a skylark,
resting on the breast of heaven:
this mountain pass.
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

An exciting struggle
with such a sad ending:
cormorant fishing.
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Does my soul abide in heaven, or hell?
Only the sea gull
in his high, lonely circuits, may tell.
―Glaucus, translation by Michael R. Burch

The eagle sees farther
from its greater height―
our ancestors’ wisdom
―Michael R. Burch, original haiku

A kite floats
at the same place in the sky
where yesterday it floated...
―Yosa Buson, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Critical Mass
by Michael R. Burch

I have listened to the rain all this morning
and it has a certain gravity,
as if it knows its destination,
perhaps even its particular destiny.
I do not believe mine is to be uplifted,
although I, too, may be flung precipitously
and from a great height.

"Gravity" and "particular destiny" are puns, since rain droplets are seeded by minute particles of dust adrift in the atmosphere and they fall due to gravity when they reach "critical mass." The title is also a pun, since the poem is skeptical about heaven-lauding Masses, etc.



Ultimate Sunset
by Michael R. Burch

for my father, Paul Ray Burch, Jr.

he now faces the Ultimate Sunset,
his body like the leaves that fray as they dry,
shedding their vital fluids (who knows why?)
till they’ve become even lighter than the covering sky,
ready to fly...



Free Fall
by Michael R. Burch

for my father, Paul Ray Burch, Jr.

I see the longing for departure gleam
in his still-keen eye,
and I understand his desire
to test this last wind, like those late autumn leaves
with nothing left to cling to...



Leaf Fall
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever winds encountered soon resolved
to swirling fragments, till chaotic heaps
of leaves lay pulsing by the backyard wall.
In lieu of rakes, our fingers sorted each
dry leaf into its place and built a high,
soft bastion against earth's gravitron―
a patchwork quilt, a trampoline, a bright
impediment to fling ourselves upon.

And nothing in our laughter as we fell
into those leaves was like the autumn's cry
of also falling. Nothing meant to die
could be so bright as we, so colorful―
clad in our plaids, oblivious to pain
we'd feel today, should we leaf-fall again.

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



The Folly of Wisdom
by Michael R. Burch

She is wise in the way that children are wise,
looking at me with such knowing, grave eyes
I must bend down to her to understand.
But she only smiles, and takes my hand.

We are walking somewhere that her feet know to go,
so I smile, and I follow...

And the years are dark creatures concealed in bright leaves
that flutter above us, and what she believes―
I can almost remember―goes something like this:
the prince is a horned toad, awaiting her kiss.

She wiggles and giggles, and all will be well
if only we find him! The woodpecker’s knell
as he hammers the coffin of some dying tree
that once was a fortress to someone like me

rings wildly above us. Some things that we know
we are meant to forget. Life is a bloodletting, maple-syrup-slow.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Kin
by Michael R. Burch

for Richard Moore

1.
Shrill gulls,
how like my thoughts
you, struggling, rise
to distant bliss―
the weightless blue of skies
that are not blue
in any atmosphere,
but closest here...

2.
You seek an air
so clear,
so rarified
the effort leaves you famished;
earthly tides
soon call you back―
one long, descending glide...

3.
Disgruntledly you ***** dirt shores for orts
you pull like mucous ropes
from shells’ bright forts...
You eye the teeming world
with nervous darts―
this way and that...

Contentious, shrewd, you scan―
the sky, in hope,
the earth, distrusting man.



Songstress
by Michael R. Burch

Within its starkwhite ribcage, how the heart
must flutter wildly, O, and always sing
against the pressing darkness: all it knows
until at last it feels the numbing sting
of death. Then life's brief vision swiftly passes,
imposing night on one who clearly saw.
Death held your bright heart tightly, till its maw―
envenomed, fanged―could swallow, whole, your Awe.
And yet it was not death so much as you
who sealed your doom; you could not help but sing
and not be silenced. Here, behold your tomb's
white alabaster cage: pale, wretched thing!
But you'll not be imprisoned here, wise wren!
Your words soar free; rise, sing, fly, live again.

A poet like Nadia Anjuman can be likened to a caged bird, deprived of flight, who somehow finds it within herself to sing of love and beauty. But when the world finally robs her of both flight and song, what is left for her but to leave the world, thus bereaving the world of herself and her song?



Performing Art
by Michael R. Burch

Who teaches the wren
in its drab existence
to explode into song?

What parodies of irony
does the jay espouse
with its sharp-edged tongue?

What instinctual memories
lend stunning brightness
to the strange dreams

of the dull gray slug
―spinning its chrysalis,
gluing rough seams―

abiding in darkness
its transformation,
till, waving damp wings,

it applauds its performance?
I am done with irony.
Life itself sings.



Lean Harvests
by Michael R. Burch

for T.M.

the trees are shedding their leaves again:
another summer is over.
the Christians are praising their Maker again,
but not the disconsolate plover:
i hear him berate
the fate
of his mate;
he claims God is no body’s lover.

Published by The Rotary Dial and Angle



My Forty-Ninth Year
by Michael R. Burch

My forty-ninth year
and the dew remembers
how brightly it glistened
encrusting September,...
one frozen September
when hawks ruled the sky
and death fell on wings
with a shrill, keening cry.

My forty-ninth year,
and still I recall
the weavings and windings
of childhood, of fall...
of fall enigmatic,
resplendent, yet sere,...
though vibrant the herald
of death drawing near.

My forty-ninth year
and now often I've thought on
the course of a lifetime,
the meaning of autumn,
the cycle of autumn
with winter to come,
of aging and death
and rebirth... on and on.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly as “My Twenty-Ninth Year”



Myth
by Michael R. Burch

Here the recalcitrant wind
sighs with grievance and remorse
over fields of wayward gorse
and thistle-throttled lanes.

And she is the myth of the scythed wheat
hewn and sighing, complete,
waiting, lain in a low sheaf―
full of faith, full of grief.

Here the immaculate dawn
requires belief of the leafed earth
and she is the myth of the mown grain―
golden and humble in all its weary worth.



What Works
by Michael R. Burch

for David Gosselin

What works―
hewn stone;
the blush the iris shows the sun;
the lilac’s pale-remembered bloom.

The frenzied fly: mad-lively, gay,
as seconds tick his time away,
his sentence―one brief day in May,
a period. And then decay.

A frenzied rhyme’s mad tip-toed time,
a ballad’s languid as the sea,
seek, striving―immortality.

When gloss peels off, what works will shine.
When polish fades, what works will gleam.
When intellectual prattle pales,
the dying buzzing in the hive
of tedious incessant bees,
what works will soar and wheel and dive
and milk all honey, leap and thrive,

and teach the pallid poem to seethe.



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, Romantics Quarterly, Grassroots Poetry and Poetry Life & Times



Transplant
by Michael R. Burch

You float, unearthly angel, clad in flesh
as strange to us who briefly knew your flame
as laughter to disease. And yet you laugh.
Behind your smile, the sun forfeits its claim
to earth, and floats forever now the same―
light captured at its moment of least height.

You laugh here always, welcoming the night,
and, just a photograph, still you can claim
bright rapture: like an angel, not of flesh―
but something more, made less. Your humanness
this moment of release becomes a name
and something else―a radiance, a strange
brief presence near our hearts. How can we stand
and chain you here to this nocturnal land
of burgeoning gray shadows? Fly, begone.
I give you back your soul, forfeit all claim
to radiance, and welcome grief’s dark night
that crushes all the laughter from us. Light
in someone Else’s hand, and sing at ease
some song of brightsome mirth through dawn-lit trees
to welcome morning’s sun. O daughter! these
are eyes too weak for laughter; for love’s sight,
I welcome darkness, overcome with light.



Prodigal
by Michael R. Burch

This poem is dedicated to Kevin Longinotti, who died four days short of graduation from Vanderbilt University, the victim of a tornado that struck Nashville on April 16, 1998.

You have graduated now,
to a higher plane
and your heart’s tenacity
teaches us not to go gently
though death intrudes.

For eighteen days
―jarring interludes
of respite and pain―
with life only faintly clinging,
like a cashmere snow,
testing the capacity
of the blood banks
with the unstaunched flow
of your severed veins,
in the collapsing declivity,
in the sanguine haze
where Death broods,
you struggled defiantly.

A city mourns its adopted son,
flown to the highest ranks
while each heart complains
at the harsh validity
of God’s ways.

On ponderous wings
the white clouds move
with your captured breath,
though just days before
they spawned the maelstrom’s
hellish rift.

Throw off this mortal coil,
this envelope of flesh,
this brief sheath
of inarticulate grief
and transient joy.

Forget the winds
which test belief,
which bear the parchment leaf
down life’s last sun-lit path.

We applaud your spirit, O Prodigal,
O Valiant One,
in its percussive flight into the sun,
winging on the heart’s last madrigal.



Breakings
by Michael R. Burch

I did it out of pity.
I did it out of love.
I did it not to break the heart of a tender, wounded dove.

But gods without compassion
ordained: Frail things must break!
Now what can I do for her shattered psyche’s sake?

I did it not to push.
I did it not to shove.
I did it to assist the flight of indiscriminate Love.

But gods, all mad as hatters,
who legislate in all such matters,
ordained that everything irreplaceable shatters.



An Illusion
by Michael R. Burch

The sky was as hushed as the breath of a bee
and the world was bathed in shades of palest gold
when I awoke.

She came to me with the sound of falling leaves
and the scent of new-mown grass;
I held out my arms to her and she passed

into oblivion...

This is one of my early poems, written around age 16 and published in my high school literary journal, The Lantern.



Lines for My Ascension
by Michael R. Burch

I.

If I should die,
there will come a Doom,
and the sky will darken
to the deepest Gloom.

But if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

II.

If I should die,
let no mortal say,
“Here was a man,
with feet of clay,

or a timid sparrow
God’s hand let fall.”
But watch the sky darken
to an eerie pall

and know that my Spirit,
unvanquished, broods,
and cares naught for graves,
prayers, coffins, or roods.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

III.

If I should die,
let no man adore
his incompetent Maker:
Zeus, Jehovah, or Thor.

Think of Me as One
who never died―
the unvanquished Immortal
with the unriven side.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

IV.

And if I should “die,”
though the clouds grow dark
as fierce lightnings rend
this bleak asteroid, stark...

If you look above,
you will see a bright Sign―
the sun with the moon
in its arms, Divine.

So divine, if you can,
my bright meaning, and know―
my Spirit is mine.
I will go where I go.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.



The Locker
by Michael R. Burch

All the dull hollow clamor has died
and what was contained,
removed,

reproved
adulation or sentiment,
left with the pungent darkness

as remembered as the sudden light.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



Keywords/Tags: Sports, locker, lockerroom, clamor, adulation, acclaim, applause, sentiment, darkness, light, retirement, athlete, team, trophy, award, acclamation


Keywords/Tags: Icarus, Daedalus, flight, fly, flying, wind, wings, sun, height, heights, fall, falling, ascent, descent, imagination, bird, birds, butterfly, butterflies, hawk, eagle, geese, plane, kite, kites, mrbfly, mrbflight, mrbicarus

The Roulette of Fanfare by Imaginative Glare (A Cooperation of Timeless Synquest)
Sunken fortitude is the bailiwick of interminable eupathy that sustenance embezzles by minutiae of orange spectral linearity of bypass becoming a torus of tragic reprieve in repcrevel fashions of hyjamb. Thus we float above the carcass of syrts of certitude by cadasters of nostalgic drawls of malingering strawberry staddle for the scutage of pinhoked disaster. We renege on committed opalescence because tranquil dangles of vinsky are waged by trenchcoats of bluster for vector arrays of galvanized decorum that swirks for elegant synectics by dredged grains of agrarian sanity by the pleckigger of lopsided islands of creativity that are the notarikons of aleatory finite but equidistant largesse of not just a jumboism but a jetsetting travesty of traversed time mastered by ignoble ingenuity. I limn with piracy as a freebooter cordslave plugged by demitoilet reminders of the flyndresque alloreck of tinjesk spectral ultimatums that are the stretchgraves of a retrospective infinity that is a bystander to catapulted cohesive coherence found only in piecemeal culinary seditions against the drip of a turncock of roosted clarification in muted hindsights of foresight itself. The pleonexia of abeyance is the riddle of enigmatic promulgation that flickers even with partial compartmentalized servitude to the burlesque the burrows of an ophidiodiarium scare away any jaunty sleek car from the boosterism of a farmed collision with disjointed surgery of nimble reticence that braves the seismotic macadamized plutocracy of drift without sedition in sedimentary clairvoyance with a pointed amphigory that is actually a starved clarity for ommateums without spelunked trudges that occur in dovetails for disguise by synectic optimum at the zenith of the hive synergy of singularity.  The justified jest of aleatory flexes of finitude is a shambolic gesture of the limber of divergent interpretation ingeminating the world by sapient degrees of psychometry of divergence in piecemeal asseveration of the hindsight of the festooned not tepid or butchered by the obvious to the glaring cineaste but rather a gloaming glint of refracted ingenuity roosted beyond any alienesque erratic happenstance that is itself a beatific fortuity for the geotechnics of human emergence into supersensible planes traversed in a stereodimensional covenant with a compacted compost of DIVERGENT IMAGINATION OF CADASTER rather than the regelation of the obvious. Timmynoggies of cartels are regnant because of the repugnance of loyalty to the fricative frigates of superlunary mention of ratiocination divorced from husbandry of hyjamb for giant leaps in rigged ambsace maledictions of unfair pleckigger of the wrikpond relumed by huffs of impotent flairs of flambeaus beyond ecdysiast stretchgraves of perilous paralysis for the supererogatory of the accursed destruction of stoichomety of solipsism tremulous by biocentric levity above fastened redoubled pederasty. We maraud the rabble of nostalgia of rhinoplasty of penumbras that live on rainshod territorialism beyond the jolkers of everlasting foofaraw livid by betrayal but erratic in glamour without crackjaw costermongers vitiating the vociferous because of incumbent thermodynamics that affixes the stagnant to the latticework of riddle by sturdy integral derived fliphavens of shibboleths of solitude. Education is a fliction of robust derangement of nowhere men taxed by the celerity of traversed traipses of memory beyond encaged bridewells for recanted alchemy to prerogatives of the roomy expansive facsimiles of departed stigmas of bossy clairvoyance for martian glimpses at sunken waste. The bernaggles of brittle titanium are abrasive when they are alloyed with the compost of material dynamics of capital without avenged prediction cemented in sunken graves taxing the nostalgia of histrinkage that is affixed to boschveldt traindeque for venial consanguinity to dikephobia. We elevate the endpoints of abridged turriform clockwork provincial shibboleths that are the proctor and protectorate of insular robbery of crowned trounces of gravity for the gravitas of sepulchral vanity learned from famigeration of filial tithes of duty. A dutiful sedition is countermanded by the pews of turnstiles that enamor the enamel of rollercoasters because of vague vagaries of bedazzled contrition for wanton ambition on psaphonic psychology and therefore sustain the vibronic thrombosis of nonlethal inseminations of clear aqueous transfixed filigrees of demented notions of cheerful apocrypha of liturgical pride beyond the dungeons of prejudiced inquisition. The jolkers of insolent archipelagos of spinsters that levitate by parsed peril of delaminated parsecs of glazed parturition is the orchestra of a nonlinear grove of invented abecedarian witwanton notice of maddened cattle of gluttony forestalled by the clairvoyance of otiose operations of redoubled countenance that consequently is septiferous by degrees of sanguine rapacity the qwartion of endeared endeavor to surpass the gentility of brooked temperatures frozen to sustain but not mainline the congeners of the elective agenda to bypass the thornbushes of conflagration without knavery or cutthroat embellishments of bedlam. And without the din of simplicity occluding the transcendent goal of humane synoecy of fustilugs of fumatoriums endangered but not inflammed by controversy we witness the insubordinate university of hibernation becoming a specter of grisly bromidrosis of lackluster forswinked fortitude because the majestic sinew of the overwrought is a refrained luxuriance of pity of facetious glebes ringed around orbital planes of synthetic abridgement that supposes the sultry is actually the swelter of calenture but taxed by sicarians of the grandeval it meets no fanfare among elective privilege. Amphigory is not categorized as dross by shipwreck but only by synechdocial docility of groomed barren arcades of storged complication leading to regeneration of a world leaden with the epicurean epithets of agerasia that burden the wardens of poached intermission without remission because the drapes of the greatest art are thus created by the complete transfiguration of the soul bolted to ethereal expansive heights that dwarf all pithy gnomes of the gardens of prospective desiccation of the petty gripes of the gavel of idiocy rather than the astounding artform of the newfangled tabanids to supererogatory oceans of creativity. The benchmarks of sublime illusions of supremacy are a hidebound taxidermy of the rookery of greenhorns to summit the testy secrecy of inane drawl that scrabbles the miniature embellishments of petty sportive lunacy as a figment of the feral nature of proclivity recumbent upon its own gladdened prickly renegades that align with a gallywow cacophony rather than a merely epicene convergence of attitude for equity above polity that is hardly polite. As a penitent hibernal rejoinder against the clerical critics of religiosity becoming conflated with artistic masterworks of oligomania I offer my rogation for atonement because the melismatic art I fashion leads to the vogue enchantment of the noosphere for the soteriological bedrock of fastened intellectual endeavor that traverses planes of an engorged soul without a gulf of conscience leaden by distracted discernment leading to a hypostasized apostasy from the religious scruples I rigorously uphold but that I vacillate away from because I want to entrench an irenic world for the francketor dash towards a superlative enrichment of mind above matter for the victorias of soul above the pettiness of the dim humdingers of the banal lifeless squabbles of martexts beyond the hospitable welcome of martians. For the naysayers that don’t understand the ironic irenic circularity of gainsay becoming rebarbative to this artistic flourish of supersensible equipoise with an approximated histrinkage lagged by temporal deficiency they should not abhor the talisman of an ergotall genius but rather marvel at the burlesque cineaste connotation of enamored youthful spirits becoming novel because they stride above the cascades of crestfallen apathy of plodding languor. This is a definitive new artform for the niche crowd so don’t dismiss it as gobbledygook because it serves the purpose to enchant creative spirits and test minds that might be more nimble than resourceless. Wearisome by demiurges of distraction the thorny imbroglio of industry is a whiplash of nativism belonging to the throb of pulsated penury that is neither valedictory nor penultimate but tertiary in oblong variegated menageries of perfidy for collapsed enormities of jumboism lost on inclement stoichiometry that is sejungible from crambazzles of findrouement that are squaloid enthralled raptures of humdingers of rippled hunks of parched nebbich pataphysics because the circuit of conditioned reward is a rebarbative tether to the catchpole exploitative erratum of harbingers of hungry happenstance rather than continual enchantment. The crumple of squaloid sebastomania a distant figment of adscititious schadenfreude of dilettantism of flonky smardagine streaks of whemmled anxieties unduly provoked by calamities of presstungular intorgurent toonardical deprived cartels of repcrevel pursuit with labial senses embedded in deft incondite inquiries against seismotic jostle over the rubble of scaffolded jengadangle above the rot of contranatant sleek suffrage for the chattel of elemental realism becoming a heroic temple for glory without the vetust errundle of dismal disco attuned only to the spurts rather than a startled commerstargal of alienation leads to a plumber’s irony of atomic humdingers of natural equipoise with litotes of scrawny rings of gollendary piracy. The valorous incondite bricolage of a ****** cineaste barnstorm inoculated from conflagrations of the flagitious reprisal of prevenance of ferial fastuous feats of furlongs of brittle certainty above the tentative glaze of aced pokerish promenades to summit the craggy because the salebrosity of the pitch is also the venue for the sphairistic tentpoles of a new tabernacle of spectacular ecstasy in obvious punitive damage to puritan pilgrimage to mechanized obelisks of sardanapalian betrayal of histories of seizure rather than naturism of erasure that is a totemic recall of strollows of lonesome tributaries to tribunes of steam rather than saunas of lickerish leverage because the gladiatorial is a zugzwang with the deliberate infernal shibboleths of the disinclined people dislodged by carnality that depose sicarians of science because of militarized enmity against the whangams of taghairm becoming the outmoded dupe of dopamine that is now serotinous rather than flanged with glaring hearsay. The serpentine winds of windlass sometimes are a conclave of convex itineration against the steady husbandry of docile domiciles of mannequin sedentary postures for posterized infamy rather than manufactured oneiromancy that is the staddle for every phony contraption of qwartion obviously specious but interrogated by the dubiety of perseverance of inclement curiosity. Yet again we sweep the soaring ligaments of rigid ramshackle bletonism that hawkshaws countermand by division of enumerated nadirs pivoted against the perpended weight of the prolonged zeniths of grit above substance that infatuates myopia but glares against mountebanks of apothecary leverage. We fight against the boxcar traindeque of sejungible traipses through stereodimensional rebuffs of known drogulus surpassing unknowable reticence of citadels that are owleries for the seedy cities they sprawl with incontinence for a drab raft of intertesselation rather than a refined quintessence of alchemy achieved by allotment by brackish nescience becoming a blinding ray of destitution engraved by petrified decalcified rudiments of realism. The somber timbre of delirifacient ruinous rumination malingers in humdrum salience as it scrawls the tragedians lament of distal eventful frets of declassified nomenclature that swoon with lugubrious harbingers of burglary the licentious dolts affixed to the brays of pauperized regions of future proximity too remote to paralyze the morale of any cantonment on record by litotes of profound remembrance of a backfire delope for cineaste conflation of marstion slore for educated reprisal of desiccation. We spelunk in mimicry the dingy duplicity of double-takes in regelation that owe homage to the percolated hearsay of cartels that operate parsecs beyond our congeners of germane lustration in remission by deontology for soteriology alone but not vacated of the stilts of turnverein ragged mannequins of desolate remorse for the dearth of hived and hemmed hibernation in a fitful frenzy of revision above precision. We see abundant lactose intolerance as a sidereal lovelorn lament of sematic entrenchment without the scourge of roosted war against abrasive brawn exercised in flexible limbers of the novel filigrees of truth revelatory of consideration rather than impregnated with the perfidy of amaranthine static of regaled stagnation that flickers with the marinas of congregated leaps as a signature of the artistic license of byzantine traipses of contempered primacy in the soup kitchen of a lapse in sabotaged sobriety. Immune from displaced donnism is the resurgence of bonanza from checkered propinquities affixed to a finite placard of spacetime that owes to stretchgraves a profound depth of contrition that carmelized apocrypha lapse on lissome whilded dignotions of contrarian raillery of loose nihilism rather than anchor to the eremites of fact found in eclipsed culmination for momentous harps of the Jubal for new centuries inseminating the populated presence of spectral imagination with contorted melodies that spawn an ingenuous quest to swoon abiding heavens for celestial ears. It is conspicuous that artifacts for raiders elope with circuitous routes of heated sedimentary incubations with a comatose creativity that seeds the ferial junediggle with a supercalendar of confections that are intermittently apportioned in heydays of culture to the sad lament of the obvious rather than the obviated dare of audacity above conglomerations of spirited luxuriance in tasty memorial to a pinnacle above all other notions of sentinel apostasy. The greater atrocity of rogated ambitions against the gainsay of iconoduly of the rood and rude crucifixion of resurrected clarity found in the enamel of akashic answers to questions fashioned by kneaded cosmetology of delicate ***** cotqueans of limber above precedent and license beyond the finkly limp of lolloped saccharine blitzkreigs of the jalousies of the ajar vaticination of hurdled glaikeries of epicene impediment is that we ****** ink above the gesture of the quills of rocky abrasion found in limitrophes of yachted celebration because of rabid coherence above the wherefores of gadzookerie because the gladdest scaldabanco is the demented persiflage of collateral catastrophe beyond any humane degree of schadenfreude for persecution that backbites the anteric antlers of the jesters that mock the procession of liturgical secularism jeering at grapholagnia while lagging in imaginative spurts of lament for incalculable damage to the Pandora’s box of effluvia that meet stiff tabernacles of betrayal because of the Judaic foresight rather than as an alarmed Marxism scared of an agrarian interdependence of worlds cadged more prone to moral dogma exercised with latitude rather than unscrupulous brays of fisticuffs of shambolic shams of ruin. We glance at the perfidies of voyeurism with pertinacity and recalcitrant bellipotent bedlam that evokes the illicit grandeval whangams of quixotic whartonized arraigned estrangement from legalism to warp time to its own superlative turpitude that is reckless but contingent upon the consummation of destiny only to the extent of original witness rather than the decay of perpetuity wrought by the persiflage of envious militarized mandarisms of enmity aimed to derail the elevators of the noosphere from stratospheric emergence in now perspicuous clarity above the pother of the indelible sacrilege of the stygian polymathy of the astute enemies of the proper comstockery rather than the negligent butchers of an enantiodromia of oligarchies of lewdness that are severed appendages to Anti-Semitism and by extension a marginalized Islamophobia that demands by exigency the complete erasure of all attempts at sacrilege exercised in rampant dereliction of dutiful upkeep of the upright morality against the cadge of ulterior ploys of a broader hedonism that would only piggyback because of the license of ryesolagnus rather than because of a complete signatory endorsement of the liberated agenda of free thought conquered through the conquest of God but the ultimate conquistadors of time through sennet and even negligent rebec to memorialize the triumphant pantheon of growth rather than rankled regress into prolonged hatred ingeminated by atrocious tortfeasors that belong nowhere but the ashen heap of exorcised damnation. The perdition inherent to the system that craves chattel rather than sartorial versions of syncretic chatter is the malefaction of renegades bent on tornadic vulcanization to a demoralized wragapole of docility hitched to the vandalism of pilloried tarantisms of moral lapse leading the sheep into sheepish resignation over the accordion of Original Sin that annoys because the bridewells are brideless birds of the chavish of warbled uncertainty wicked because of snuffed tabacosis of mitigations of evil by the evildoers for the rejoinder against the Republic by rendering the **** a platonic ploy of karezza if only punctuated by solitary ******* reticulated by exsibilation that is contorted when you consider the ****** act a marvel rather than a condemnation of the vicarious involvement in normative ****** creations not of any higher artform but of an evolved theology that might perpend the issue of Christianized ******* that is videographic as a sanction worthy of charter and an impending simultaneous comstockery to protect the decency of the simultagnosia of a diverse and divisive mispronunciated time bent against its greatest heroes for the malice of schadenfreude built into the system of language itself by germane consideration to flagellate the wrong country for the  greatest wrongs known to the realm of religious observance. The pederasty of enclaves is the bailiwick of mutinies of selective mutism incurred by the vilified into compulsive shrieks of kallince as a ribbacle of protean ratiocination paralyzed by the coherent vulnerability incurred by the exchequer of polluted conditions of enslavement by the stretchgraves of the chavish of too many pulpits in the throng of a decisive jaundice against the victors of history because of the obsolescence of the historical fossils of outmoded jealousy. Now to the eupathy of all generations should we better conserve situations against the encroaching wesperm of the marstions of ulterior feminism grimacing at the pleckigger of manhood and decriminalizing the taboo against the enantiodromia of miscegenation to the folly of shepherds of idiotic ploys to rear the mediocre rebec of warbled intimations of cultural impotence that should proselytize both the oligogenics beyond ecbolic atrocity and the adoptive ****** of the anglosphere through its smart and dapper monopoly threatened by the commerstargal of retromorphosis exhibited by the demassification of culled syntalities into aboriginal epigenetic kennels of subservience to a piggybacked system where if you are among the attentive scrutiny of the audience that both perceives apperception metacognitively with francketor precision you are thereby inoculated from lean herbivores of cultish occultism metaphorically in the annealed agitprop for resourcelessness that never ends in the radioglare of revisionism because of the prevenance of the vergers who manage the Manciples rather than tend to the vainglory of the potagers around the hegemunes of an unwarranted and puritan celibacy of conceptual sterility in a world fashioned by engouements for sanguine hopes for a consanguinity that might portend into dynasty but lopsided in its contrite missives of scandal will never provide a valedictory rendition on politically checkered zugzwangs of ulterior scientism against the lettered freedom of bibliognosts to aggrieve against the gloaming vacuum of sartorial damages to Dagon among the populated metropolis of corporate servitude that will thus collapse out of rebarbative backlash for its diminutive economies of scope and pretenses of largesse of scaled down collectivism into a heap of corporate rubble rather than judicious bonanza. In every considered word in this Biblbical warning against the trekleador of the amazonian paradise against the travail of junediggles of obligation among the frenzied fretful tocsins of farcical utopianism meeting the inclement reprisal of sanctioned duplicity in frikmag beneath the truculence of mobilized alacrity to syndicalism endeared to capitalism rather than the converse logical apostrophes that are imponent overhangs of an already conquered feral sphere of nomadic imagination into a checkmate of a socially validated future clinched by foresight and the wragapole nature of the insensate docility of those prone to officious naturism before the attempted monolith of the mountebanks of the quixotic towers of panopticon that are a regelation of unchecked ambitions verging or diverging too valorously against themselves but also prone to a simultagnosia that berates the robust picaresque swandamos that curtail the curglaff of malcontent with the recoil of perseverance that reneges in tiresome defeat of a demilitarized population that should always be grisly rather than denatured by the overhang of the incumbent nudism of certain futures becoming to finicky in impetuous lurid specters of abhorrent exercises in chantage waged against sardanapalians in all countries regardless of merits or demerits. The redstrall of enlightenment is not otiose operatively in recursive backlash against nominalism which sweedles the weedledge of a new acquiescence timid enough to mangle a prosodemic wave of celibacy propitiated by the succedaneum of profligate vicarious lickerish ****** appetites that diminish that natural instinct into either barbarous experiments in lechery too inconvenient to apprise honestly but looming aghast at the moral tip-toes around the Original Sin that binds us to predatory lapse and retromorphosis rather than the maintenance of a mainlined trimpoline confidence in a normative wave of galvanized interface against the overpromiscuous provisions for the lackaday resentment of alienated millennialism relishing the sennet of nostalgia but bereft of the heave from moral slumbers of an invented celibacy intermediary to demassification but attenuated by the omphalism of astute gravitas in socially engineered balks at the emergence of singularity in personalized cacotopia becoming a metaphor for the broadsided shipwreck of an inured world pasteurized into acerbic jolkers of foofaraw rather than the real-life relish against still-framed ostentation that distorts the granular artifice of the natural into supernatural fixations with gaudy swarpollock indecently exposed. To the finkly flonky puritanism of the wiseacres of those who say sacerdotal duty cannot diverge from entelechies of secular insight I behold the marvel of timespun elegance as the marvel of God’s convergence for the happenstance of the serendipity of magnified time lived completely in the plenipotentiary pangs of evanescence that catapults subliminal meaning to memorialize this indelible seminal watershed in a clear visionary establishment of history. Most belong to oligomania but I relent in the completely sardonic intortions of aspects of sebastomania in complete equipoise with the clairvoyant clarity of centralized perspective but the dragomans will interpret that last phase with underminnow because it belies the granular intent of the fin de seicle advent of a new generation that is an homage to the hallowed Judaic theory of millennialism as the return of glorified entitlement yet tentative in its overhang but never malicious in its grapnel of the fewterers of amazing convergence of clairvoyance. The tangential rebuke of the absurd oxyholotron of paradoxical puritan superstition that assumes a fustilug generation will cement a farsighted clarity that subsumes generative prowess lingers with fixations on the figments of the apocryphal version of the truer version of revelations manifesting right before our eyes for neither the sinistral or the dexterous amplivagance of God’s universal message by the superorganism of messianic purpose belittled by the agents of humbled perdition not alone of martexts that are martles but also by the shepherded fears of the ignorant rather than the insipid because the will never be outmoded only enhanced by the acceleration of proliferative technologies that pave a macadamized future of prosperity rather than the tarnish of the miscreants of Tyre. I owe all providence to God because he fastened his scrutiny on my autodidactian romance clambered into restive ontocyclic peccadillo that points to Pinocchio more than to the truest compass of an omnified salvation of the piggybacked purpose of synergies of geotechnic mastery that elevates the cause of God and liberates us from the stings of dangerously vapid pauperization of the intellectual frontiers by dangled prevarications of desultory incontinence forestalled by avoidant developments in proper fewterers of ambition. By the axiomatic Brocards of time travel the unstated ignotism of deranged circuses of stupidity congregated around the swelter of dismissal is a barnacle to the mofussil fossilization of sentiment that remarks ironically about the petty indelible moments but not the entelechies of a unified front for liberated equity and considerate tender of diverse quorums that shepherd rather than intern the noosphere into the burgeoned resurgence of a humane endeavor for the everlasting enlightenment of an ameliorated humanity and beyond that. By the bailiwick exerted by the plenipotentiary omphalism still participant to the quorum I hereby declaratively implore the abrogation of pernicious grapholagnia as the peremptory sacrilege that needs exorcism for our times and yet delegated of stature I urge hortatory and imperative action for the expurgation of all tortfeasor illegally obtained ******* of unsolicited voyeurism to be completely regarded as the ultimatum of temerity against carnal restraint and banished from the human registry to uphold the strategic interests of the United States of America. I understand that there is not fricative monolith and never will I lean for that conquest but as a humbled member of the omphalism that constitutes the sacred endeavor of sociogenesis grounded on God with collegialism upheld that a geotechnically optimized species needs to refrain from lewd perfidies against commonplace justice to restrain the fumatorium of unwarranted envy from poisoning the pervious minds of people that congregate in defensive posture but not definitive gesture. I also beseech a portentous  settlement with  I relent from avarice but it is not a superposition of authority just a suggestive glance at requited justice but my grangull chavish of circumlocution naivety will meet the most deliberate Sardonic Sc(p)orn in these times of need. These next words are paused and already fathomed by the supernal recursion of the iterative metaphysics of recumbent retrospection hinged on hindsight to proclaim without any hints of attempted subterfuge of the clarity of a Democratic Republic that my words while forceful do not constitute a breech in public conduct even while vaulted with a minor rapacity I rebuke and atone for even when many others might find recourse to expiate my jalousies to the windowed world not of vindictiveness but out of the cursory and emphasis on cursory justice needed to vouchsafe my continued security and inoculation from the pothers of obviously shortsighted pleonexia which will obviously be fleered as a slight euthymia glazed on self-interest while tone-deaf to the checkered layers of entrapment by a confederate whiplash but a native grit never to enslave but to empower humanity. I am deeply lugubrious over the specter of the trembled quaky ground the penury of spiritual loss rejoinders against my candidacy for high esteem but not peremptory decisiveness in active service to yield to a supererogatory attempt for felicity to alight in my life not out of material greed but the gratuity of serviceable missions that play a dicey gamble with a frenzied manumission attempt that is essentially that a parsed manumission for eleutherian pragmatica to chide as naive but alarmed senectitude of the old order prevaricates with the din of postured hurdles of gladiatorial outrage that weans me away from the ataraxia for my fumbled stream brooking intolerance for years on the ballast of collective endeavor. Nevertheless, lets speak more on God’s providence because in this esteemed moment of watershed emergence of the fully engorged but rarely gluttonous soul I have found an equitable peace with supernal and superlative authority in God that grants stewardship and tutelage to the audience that will eventually through proper discrimination be delegated as higher than the ignorant bystanders of fleered snide disdain for the abnormous and bletcherous dimples of an otherwise circuitous dalliance with an unconventional path towards destiny rather than some windlass of opportunism for, if it were not for my unabetted genius and the provisions of divine appointment based on a kindly generous deference to preterition axiomatic in perceived time by the strictures of the convergent past and the divergent future, I would never find a role of partial authorship of a widely heralded tome I will one day publish to either the exsibilation of the antiquarians of hidebound irrefragable ontocyclic convictions or the cloveryield of an appreciative gratitude to the God I serve and I make no notions of any hostility towards any party of petty dismissal because I expect their recumbent recoil but I apologize for hubris and extenuate the follies of the refinery of character as I ascend into a figurative ennobled step into soulhood that exceeds my former dismal limits by such staggering orders of magnitude it magnifies the questions of ontology in sentience rather than beckons the alarmism of the swarpollock of tripwires that can easily withstand the tempests of scorn. The uproar of commotion of blood sanctified by the thirsty rain for the desiccated faucet of dramaturgy in reprisal for docimasy is the integral linchpin of the biocentric rebec reasting on the primitive hymns to festoon the curtains of defenestrated primitive relics of shady attempts at officious balks of the privatized empire of the alytarchs among the earwigs that simper the culled delicacy of sensible notions into the congeners of prioritization emphasized by quantulated concerns veiled by elaborative synquests that burrow the sulcate grooves of hidden hedonism for the chic magistrates of financial swoon or swayed vestiges of a forgotten calumny of betrayal by the coming-of-age sprouts of hedged dismal dismissal of a lugubrious prospect for an otherwise revitalized dressage of emoluments to glory that lurked in penumbras by rigged enumeration but found their prominence by the gravity of sensation-seeking frissons of alterations between benighted glory and the famish of artificial tethers to the yoke of caramel and chocolates as a dainty ploy of yearning persiflage also a dranger of camouflage for flagitious percolations of the invidious rumors of imposture and the groveling contempt of the known drogulus remiss in denial of its own requited date when the powers of miscarriage become ecbolic to their own lagging languor of lisps of linguistic ramparts of a revival of hypertrophy for hyperactive foibles in inclement weather. Ok beyond the absenteeism of the presence of perceived amphigory there is great heft in the nominal notion that dogma is mobilized in serviceable goods of merchandized mirrors of glazed remission of moral tender because of stoked curiosity unhinged from the pragmatica of duty. We need forbearance in empathy that loves the lovable rather than envies the deposed despotism of clever wiseacres veiled in delicate symmetry with conscience that is the quill of a wellspring deeper than any imaginary vagary can approximate because impossible events punctuate time with literacy rather than incontinence of drivel that is ambitious but ignoble by stately coherence. To the critics of the baragnosis of limited apperception my words are blatant amphigories but they only possess enough ken to fathom an average orbit of suboptimal outcomes rather than transdimensional chances at chess outnumbered by checkers by incidental design of clever ploys of rejoinder that is by design arcane for the arcadia of the pristine arcade of future possibilities  As I am purblind by psychorrhagy I am incompetent in my radiopresence because I am a departed spectral figment above fricative hisses and whorfian glares of mediocre rebec for primitive shibboleth above prized taurine anglophonic convictions that superimpose the dignified clarity of willpower above the dragnets of supersolid conflations of puffery. Ok I admit a lapse of transmission by the vesicles of numbered murders of henpecked owleries of the senectitude of sepulchral magnetism of slumber over awakened alacrity of mobilism fashioned in portentous flipcraves of additive immobility of fixed vectors seen through parvanimity that actually just swivel in circular retorts against themselves without the elaborative potential and the belabored traipse of the rabid taradiddles of sensationalism marauding as a defalcated burglary of emotion for useless psephology that predicates nothing but a slight budge in the autarky of structuralism which is never sclerotic but stammered by articulations of the overt when the covert aligns by an alien agenda that is subservient to magnified priorities of warped swirk of telescopic prevenance and hedged boschveldts of elemental and I stress the strain of the elemental for the drogulus of sensational proclamation by executive ****** but supererogatory minutiae of fascism cloaked by earwigs of repcrevel repute beyond memorialized reputation. We need to renege the southern pacts to the Argentine mandarism of reticular vitiations of cinematography waged against creative visionaries of free speech because of the succedaneum of furtive endeavors at optimization by compromised degrees of artistic licentiousness even that is never lewd about sacred roods but boorish in blockbuster rather than kempt in collectivist brunt of the timid bronteum of agitprop that lurks in the imminent future of cinema. America needs to retain the disclosed but still-frame inertia of catapulted declassification that ennobles the fliction but also the vilified distilled truths only the keen of acumen will sensibly identify so that the magnet of earwigs gravitates to the belabored analysis of astute congeners to relevant tributaries to the ocean of adventitious swarpollock in the procedural autopsy of the auditorium for neither a chattel nor a crystallized nurture against the matriotic insistence of decorum. Essentially the succubus of prosthetic protensive docimasy of imaginative logic predicated in visionary apperception of the unseen in immediacy is the longeur of reticent endeavors to pasteurize the oculus rifts of futurity to synergize with the entelechy of proactive somnambulism that sensitizes the profoundly capable but never bereaves the inept of direct interface with communicable dominion with fantasia that is an operative artifice of a beguiled lurch without purged retrograde immaterial delusion that endangers visceral momentum toward new directives of the outmantled zugzwang in elementary exercises of swaddled posterity free by irenic idolatry never orphaned by a widowed imagination. The swirk of hypostasized probabilities in an invented swipe at wide-eyed but star-crossed turnvereins for the imaginative leaps in the performative depend on the delicate swivels of declaration independent from culinary clarity of macroscian travesty rather than pinhokes of naufragues of maudlin laudable applause by the canned nurture of speculative intimation that sadly severs the curglaff of whispered intimacy over the confidence we have in artifice to teach the wragapole both matriotism and sensitive reninjasque poker without incurred damages beyond the clarified visionary potential of graphic protheses immediately perceptible to the acumen of judicious polymathy indoctrinated by the rigor of scientific grooms for melliferous parsecs of advanced minutiae of dark horses to nomadic license beyond ravenous **** palindromes of hushed vigor to the declared by scacchic deliberation to usher in crass but crestfallen synectics. The future of God is secure in the fathomed furlongs of cubic citadels of pasteurized paradise found in corralled reluctance without remonstrance of poetic belletrist resounding with clangor rather than swerved nimble potions to avert future calamities in war by the expansive frontier of a civilized metropolis of the mobilized imagination hypostasizing newfangled naturism that is neither mofussil nor a fossilized relic of scrappy schlep. The nonchalance of parlance swims in arenaceous bunkers of drivel that congregate in the turnverein of futuristic opportunism found in the muzzled directives of orchestras of departed clarity no longer so insular in its bossy imperatives but clarified with hearsay and blushed blarney not the blench of widened divulgence of minatory malice that incurs the punitive curglaff of frenetic retchallops of winsome specters becoming opportune pragmatics of a semantic network of dirigisme that through sheer horsepower overcomes the sting of ubiquity or the hollowed headless vesicles of urbacity disenfranchised by degrees of impertinent pertinacity of deposed disclosure rudimentary in sedentary simplicity against matriotic duty to remain guarded by an ommateum that fathoms the abyss but never wages reckless adventurism. Prevenance is the key to absolution but staggered implements of dearth preempt the ecbolic corrigenda of castigation by hindered lurches of veiled errundle belonging to a central trimpoline interposition of fungible felicity for not only a regional fanfare but a global scale of competitive endeavor of cleverage beyond scopes but beneath scrutinized mutiny of embanked polymathy stranded by the redstrall of industrious slavering dogmatism to a servile ***** rather than the boomerang of pressure to asseverate limitless bounds of planned obsolescence to engorge but not intimidate checkered reticence in the sinew of the musculature of creative parlance above petty finicky demiurges of latitudes in amphibious annealed glorification. Temperatures gauged by the thrombosis of thermolysis in psychotaxis gouged by hucksters of taciturn bamboozles of teetotalism are neither scourge nor foe of the strategic advent of the fascination of prospective investment a boondoggle that offsets the bonfire of retorted whimpers of foudroyant ripples of wildfire perspicacity strung by the catchpole of ubiquity in the time-honed decorum of genteel upright raconteurs of volleyed neglect by strict mandate will uproariously profit in remission from knowledgeable exacerbation rather than tomfoolery by filial tithes to foreign wardens of conspicuous levitation above gimcracks by the syrts of percolated filigrees of belabored chantage exerted over the tide of perfidy in contained discernment will stall and extinguish the prideful jostle of profane blasphemy against tacit covenants of blackguarded justice served by platitude better than by insubordinate quivers that quake because bears bounce checkered checks rather than anoint the sigillum of protective vouchsafes of exchequers smartly dapper rather than dimpled in flagrant brays of castigation and thus secure employment of instrumental advent rather than desecrated conventicles of remission.
Now it is time to ventilate divine knowledge that transfiguration means a humane liberation rather than a sanctimony of tirade against dumose proliferations of fluminous imaginary tracts of the probable rather than the certain for the elevators of sanitized wealth to bequeath greater moral clarity found in the contrary submission of authoritative parents to shepherd guarded wealth in proper husbandry of calendrical affairs to optimize the work-life balance so the biocentric imperative for sustenance renounces the moral obesity of groundless backlash in austerity and endless cycles of remorse rather than a tender mollification of sentiments away from universal kumbayas and in favor more stridently of a system that withholds the agitprop of statist indoctrination of a mollycoddle ****** within individual mandates of variable agendas of countries beyond the borderline fluid dynamics of the foibles of moral venial folly but insensitive to the dynamism of the robust virility of a wayspayed world swaying by riddled wildfires of conflated puerile stages of ludic indoctrination to the rampant perfidy of exemplary incontinence waged by Hollywood upon unsuspecting victims of inconsiderate indoctrination that doesn’t vouchsafe the prerogatives of heteronormative values that should outshine not a parochial vehement hatred or a clorence of unconditional tolerance but a chided quarantine of variegated syntalities divorced from integration rather than fostered in communal depths of bound lettered ambition found in the allegorical power of Biblical wisdom expounded by the florilegium of the religious and secular canon.
To serve God rather than the perceived taradiddle of speculative mammon deprived of classifiable certainties but hunched proclivities we need to exhort a proper seesaw between restraint in vision and exuberance in creative license so that the pivot of the moralized world leads to an insistent trust of watchdogs that through trust revolve the gravity of morale upon the upswing of liberty rather than incidental follies of imaginative demiurges of partition but blinkered hubris in stately objectives to the demur of participant malingering naysayers and nyejays. The moral gravity of the situation requires us to rotate our hype from the fervor of panic into the resolve of fortitude that relishes family and filial duty rather than resents because of breedbate instinct the flickers of smoldering rebels that are tamed in their revelry when they follow the moral prerogative of disciplined ambition in creativity not insubordinating against insurmountable limits but reasonable adjustments to a scaffold of potential that is skyscraping more than before even if its too close to the ground for comfort and consolation. Relativism is the enemy of progress because envy seeds alienation and comparison should be eschewed because we need to burrow in compassionate embrace of the cherished loves rather than the exaggerated proximity of provincial fears becoming global juggernauts of mercy upon the merciful and I convoke a global prayer for the attenuation of the virus that spreads sadly too far for comfort today. I purge out of solidarity with suffering as the milquetoast in me identifies the disconcerted avenues of avetrols trying to find a way through the forest of rumination without gingerly superlative prerogatives outweighing the poise of balance in shields of honor rather than badges of shame. We must by moral imperative greet strangers in public places like parks rather than strangulate the percolation of affection because of regnant distractions because in this congenial way we will find a common fraternity with fellow man while soldiering on to find truth in God’s word in the proper temperature for genuflection because I admit foibles but I relent not in the chase to redintegrate myself spiritually to lead a charge without trespass of fundamental dignity over the whoppers of indignation some of us might feel because of the penury of divergence rather than the private penalty of convergence for an ulterior solidarity of purpose. I need to emerge into the humanity of compassion to showcase that virtuosity can exist without obsession over one individual because God beseeches a pantheon of observation rather than the gripes of an envied nuisance independent from normal human concerns that ripple with ecstasy because of normative human contrition over the leeway on vacillated opinions that might underwhelm those disposed by prizes of inurement. We should shelve these notions of a supersolid conscience because only in the humility of the profound simplicity of elemental postulates can we achieve complete synchrony with a syndicate that enthralls both divergent and convergent movements that partially offset on the side of convergence in some communes while otherwise countermanded in others in contrarian ways and the favor of the balance depends on the perspective of the flanged acculturation of the participant in a world that doesn’t need flayed excoriation as much as it deserves proper exercise of adoration of the admirable rather than the desecration of the abominable. I return with the greatest jubilation of a reninjasque jaunty streak that hearkens the sennet and maybe the leanings of the senate to the fanfare of adoration for life and gratitude bestowed by the stewardship of God and his divine purpose to inseminate my life with purposeful meaning and happy happenstance that is a stroke of glory. I muster the resolve to traipse in the solitude of my cavern the blessings of divinity bequeathed by the departed forefathers who never intended bossy insularity of dogma to be a stricture of rigors of iconoduly but rather a consecrated wit with the persiflage of conversant tones of labile and lissome gallantry just waiting to alight upon the affectionate dance with dalliance of a philandered hope for a purified love hopefully never profaned by the pangs of scandal (note the sardonic pun) because rejoice is the gift of Heaven upon this culmination of purpose above the dross of shipwreck elevated in folly but stranded in the throes of rumination enough to hedge the boursocrats and try to inoculate the world from further panicky divisions of hypemongers of simpered precaution becoming a financial pandemic that deserves pause and poise but should not protrude above the glistening promise of the eternal wellspring of the vineyards of salvation blooming because enhanced sapience converted the flock of shepherds to tend to those sheepish in deficiency to wield a newer curiosity to replace a saddened lament not by acquiescent abandon but by the solidarity of interfaces of love replacing cast-iron idolatries I too am guilty of for the cordslave generation of itinerant distractions that wager on modicums rather than appraise bonanzas. Safety is predicated on the idea that resources should never be glazed but always apportioned with optimism because if you examine history irrational panics have always and always rebounded because of exigent actions taken by governments to restore confidence in liquidity rather than snide dismal dismissals of economic projections based on bounded rigged betrayals of primarily a global panic that a profoundly promethean intellectual verve could capitalize on its heyday to gouge people against the insensate balkanization of the future by an alienation of formidable scarecrow of invented fatalism imploding upon itself to obviate its own existence by the insistence on free thought to domineer and tower over the doldrums of a vacant man that is now occupied by the largesse of humane endeavor for a messianic voyage that consummates time itself its own captain and is partially centripetal around the juncture of All Saints Day 2008 because of its seminal significance in ushering in a new era of liberation. This justification is a gnomic axiomatic herculean ****** that catapulted generativity in creative endeavor to coalesce around an Army of Me not because of the futilitarianism embedded in its flagrant flagitious mockery of traipsed lyricism borrowed from Bjork but rather showcases the flavork of the flavenickers of ribald coarse revolution that is no longer balderdash to Bald Eagles but the prized retribution of the inviolable scruples demolished by deracinated moral relativism balking at raltention because of persnickety and tyrannical transparency that prepossesses over the lifeless livid Potemkin  Village  of Astroturf complaint malingering in pederasty over its own depraved sinuous course of diverted restraint cemented by the scythes of Village People politics benumbed over militarized betrayals that incur and invoke the diablerist prose of anonymuncle desperado mavericks that sizzle in hibernaculum to depose the autarky of seasoned growth rather than unseasonable diatribes of vitriol poisoning the posture of gentility by decree rather than by deeds of homogenized pasteurization against Lactose Intolerant Leftism and dogged doggerel of pasty subversive paranoiac hederaceous envy spawning a vituperative summation of a beatific felicity. We need to convene upon better tranceception in this axiomatic gratuity of God

The chimney on top of hill
with tumbleweed surrounds
Wind-scarred handfired brick
red as Autumn's dress
Ballast stone adorned foundation
carted from far distant shore
Stones once stored in hold of ships
from even further lands
Stones mined by strangers
speaking many languages
except his own, the builder
of this chimney, forlorn marker
against the sky
All that remains of his home
Well balanced, builder
Well founded.

r ~ 23Mar14

-


all my mistakes in life
add weight to a scale
of self-judgement–

so far i sense
a balance—

yet it feels to me like
i've let so much ballast
get washed overboard...




s jones
2022



.

Muse of the many-twinkling feet! whose charms
Are now extended up from legs to arms;
Terpsichore!—too long misdeemed a maid—
Reproachful term—bestowed but to upbraid—
Henceforth in all the bronze of brightness shine,
The least a Vestal of the ****** Nine.
Far be from thee and thine the name of *****:
Mocked yet triumphant; sneered at, unsubdued;
Thy legs must move to conquer as they fly,
If but thy coats are reasonably high!
Thy breast—if bare enough—requires no shield;
Dance forth—sans armour thou shalt take the field
And own—impregnable to most assaults,
Thy not too lawfully begotten “Waltz.”

  Hail, nimble Nymph! to whom the young hussar,
The whiskered votary of Waltz and War,
His night devotes, despite of spur and boots;
A sight unmatched since Orpheus and his brutes:
Hail, spirit-stirring Waltz!—beneath whose banners
A modern hero fought for modish manners;
On Hounslow’s heath to rival Wellesley’s fame,
Cocked, fired, and missed his man—but gained his aim;
Hail, moving muse! to whom the fair one’s breast
Gives all it can, and bids us take the rest.
Oh! for the flow of Busby, or of Fitz,
The latter’s loyalty, the former’s wits,
To “energise the object I pursue,”
And give both Belial and his Dance their due!

  Imperial Waltz! imported from the Rhine
(Famed for the growth of pedigrees and wine),
Long be thine import from all duty free,
And Hock itself be less esteemed than thee;
In some few qualities alike—for Hock
Improves our cellar—thou our living stock.
The head to Hock belongs—thy subtler art
Intoxicates alone the heedless heart:
Through the full veins thy gentler poison swims,
And wakes to Wantonness the willing limbs.

  Oh, Germany! how much to thee we owe,
As heaven-born Pitt can testify below,
Ere cursed Confederation made thee France’s,
And only left us thy d—d debts and dances!
Of subsidies and Hanover bereft,
We bless thee still—George the Third is left!
Of kings the best—and last, not least in worth,
For graciously begetting George the Fourth.
To Germany, and Highnesses serene,
Who owe us millions—don’t we owe the Queen?
To Germany, what owe we not besides?
So oft bestowing Brunswickers and brides;
Who paid for ******, with her royal blood,
Drawn from the stem of each Teutonic stud:
Who sent us—so be pardoned all her faults—
A dozen dukes, some kings, a Queen—and Waltz.

  But peace to her—her Emperor and Diet,
Though now transferred to Buonapartè’s “fiat!”
Back to my theme—O muse of Motion! say,
How first to Albion found thy Waltz her way?

  Borne on the breath of Hyperborean gales,
From Hamburg’s port (while Hamburg yet had mails),
Ere yet unlucky Fame—compelled to creep
To snowy Gottenburg-was chilled to sleep;
Or, starting from her slumbers, deigned arise,
Heligoland! to stock thy mart with lies;
While unburnt Moscow yet had news to send,
Nor owed her fiery Exit to a friend,
She came—Waltz came—and with her certain sets
Of true despatches, and as true Gazettes;
Then flamed of Austerlitz the blest despatch,
Which Moniteur nor Morning Post can match
And—almost crushed beneath the glorious news—
Ten plays, and forty tales of Kotzebue’s;
One envoy’s letters, six composer’s airs,
And loads from Frankfort and from Leipsic fairs:
Meiners’ four volumes upon Womankind,
Like Lapland witches to ensure a wind;
Brunck’s heaviest tome for ballast, and, to back it,
Of Heynè, such as should not sink the packet.

  Fraught with this cargo—and her fairest freight,
Delightful Waltz, on tiptoe for a Mate,
The welcome vessel reached the genial strand,
And round her flocked the daughters of the land.
Not decent David, when, before the ark,
His grand Pas-seul excited some remark;
Not love-lorn Quixote, when his Sancho thought
The knight’s Fandango friskier than it ought;
Not soft Herodias, when, with winning tread,
Her nimble feet danced off another’s head;
Not Cleopatra on her Galley’s Deck,
Displayed so much of leg or more of neck,
Than Thou, ambrosial Waltz, when first the Moon
Beheld thee twirling to a Saxon tune!

  To You, ye husbands of ten years! whose brows
Ache with the annual tributes of a spouse;
To you of nine years less, who only bear
The budding sprouts of those that you shall wear,
With added ornaments around them rolled
Of native brass, or law-awarded gold;
To You, ye Matrons, ever on the watch
To mar a son’s, or make a daughter’s match;
To You, ye children of—whom chance accords—
Always the Ladies, and sometimes their Lords;
To You, ye single gentlemen, who seek
Torments for life, or pleasures for a week;
As Love or ***** your endeavours guide,
To gain your own, or ****** another’s bride;—
To one and all the lovely Stranger came,
And every Ball-room echoes with her name.

  Endearing Waltz!—to thy more melting tune
Bow Irish Jig, and ancient Rigadoon.
Scotch reels, avaunt! and Country-dance forego
Your future claims to each fantastic toe!
Waltz—Waltz alone—both legs and arms demands,
Liberal of feet, and lavish of her hands;
Hands which may freely range in public sight
Where ne’er before—but—pray “put out the light.”
Methinks the glare of yonder chandelier
Shines much too far—or I am much too near;
And true, though strange—Waltz whispers this remark,
“My slippery steps are safest in the dark!”
But here the Muse with due decorum halts,
And lends her longest petticoat to “Waltz.”

  Observant Travellers of every time!
Ye Quartos published upon every clime!
0 say, shall dull Romaika’s heavy round,
Fandango’s wriggle, or Bolero’s bound;
Can Egypt’s Almas—tantalising group—
Columbia’s caperers to the warlike Whoop—
Can aught from cold Kamschatka to Cape Horn
With Waltz compare, or after Waltz be born?
Ah, no! from Morier’s pages down to Galt’s,
Each tourist pens a paragraph for “Waltz.”

  Shades of those Belles whose reign began of yore,
With George the Third’s—and ended long before!—
Though in your daughters’ daughters yet you thrive,
Burst from your lead, and be yourselves alive!
Back to the Ball-room speed your spectred host,
Fool’s Paradise is dull to that you lost.
No treacherous powder bids Conjecture quake;
No stiff-starched stays make meddling fingers ache;
(Transferred to those ambiguous things that ape
Goats in their visage, women in their shape;)
No damsel faints when rather closely pressed,
But more caressing seems when most caressed;
Superfluous Hartshorn, and reviving Salts,
Both banished by the sovereign cordial “Waltz.”

  Seductive Waltz!—though on thy native shore
Even Werter’s self proclaimed thee half a *****;
Werter—to decent vice though much inclined,
Yet warm, not wanton; dazzled, but not blind—
Though gentle Genlis, in her strife with Staël,
Would even proscribe thee from a Paris ball;
The fashion hails—from Countesses to Queens,
And maids and valets waltz behind the scenes;
Wide and more wide thy witching circle spreads,
And turns—if nothing else—at least our heads;
With thee even clumsy cits attempt to bounce,
And cockney’s practise what they can’t pronounce.
Gods! how the glorious theme my strain exalts,
And Rhyme finds partner Rhyme in praise of “Waltz!”
Blest was the time Waltz chose for her début!
The Court, the Regent, like herself were new;
New face for friends, for foes some new rewards;
New ornaments for black-and royal Guards;
New laws to hang the rogues that roared for bread;
New coins (most new) to follow those that fled;
New victories—nor can we prize them less,
Though Jenky wonders at his own success;
New wars, because the old succeed so well,
That most survivors envy those who fell;
New mistresses—no, old—and yet ’tis true,
Though they be old, the thing is something new;
Each new, quite new—(except some ancient tricks),
New white-sticks—gold-sticks—broom-sticks—all new sticks!
With vests or ribands—decked alike in hue,
New troopers strut, new turncoats blush in blue:
So saith the Muse: my——, what say you?
Such was the time when Waltz might best maintain
Her new preferments in this novel reign;
Such was the time, nor ever yet was such;
Hoops are  more, and petticoats not much;
Morals and Minuets, Virtue and her stays,
And tell-tale powder—all have had their days.
The Ball begins—the honours of the house
First duly done by daughter or by spouse,
Some Potentate—or royal or serene—
With Kent’s gay grace, or sapient Gloster’s mien,
Leads forth the ready dame, whose rising flush
Might once have been mistaken for a blush.
From where the garb just leaves the ***** free,
That spot where hearts were once supposed to be;
Round all the confines of the yielded waist,
The strangest hand may wander undisplaced:
The lady’s in return may grasp as much
As princely paunches offer to her touch.
Pleased round the chalky floor how well they trip
One hand reposing on the royal hip!
The other to the shoulder no less royal
Ascending with affection truly loyal!
Thus front to front the partners move or stand,
The foot may rest, but none withdraw the hand;
And all in turn may follow in their rank,
The Earl of—Asterisk—and Lady—Blank;
Sir—Such-a-one—with those of fashion’s host,
For whose blest surnames—vide “Morning Post.”
(Or if for that impartial print too late,
Search Doctors’ Commons six months from my date)—
Thus all and each, in movement swift or slow,
The genial contact gently undergo;
Till some might marvel, with the modest Turk,
If “nothing follows all this palming work?”
True, honest Mirza!—you may trust my rhyme—
Something does follow at a fitter time;
The breast thus publicly resigned to man,
In private may resist him—if it can.

  O ye who loved our Grandmothers of yore,
Fitzpatrick, Sheridan, and many more!
And thou, my Prince! whose sovereign taste and will
It is to love the lovely beldames still!
Thou Ghost of Queensberry! whose judging Sprite
Satan may spare to peep a single night,
Pronounce—if ever in your days of bliss
Asmodeus struck so bright a stroke as this;
To teach the young ideas how to rise,
Flush in the cheek, and languish in the eyes;
Rush to the heart, and lighten through the frame,
With half-told wish, and ill-dissembled flame,
For prurient Nature still will storm the breast—
Who, tempted thus, can answer for the rest?

  But ye—who never felt a single thought
For what our Morals are to be, or ought;
Who wisely wish the charms you view to reap,
Say—would you make those beauties quite so cheap?
Hot from the hands promiscuously applied,
Round the slight waist, or down the glowing side,
Where were the rapture then to clasp the form
From this lewd grasp and lawless contact warm?
At once Love’s most endearing thought resign,
To press the hand so pressed by none but thine;
To gaze upon that eye which never met
Another’s ardent look without regret;
Approach the lip which all, without restraint,
Come near enough—if not to touch—to taint;
If such thou lovest—love her then no more,
Or give—like her—caresses to a score;
Her Mind with these is gone, and with it go
The little left behind it to bestow.

  Voluptuous Waltz! and dare I thus blaspheme?
Thy bard forgot thy praises were his theme.
Terpsichore forgive!—at every Ball
My wife now waltzes—and my daughters shall;
My son—(or stop—’tis needless to inquire—
These little accidents should ne’er transpire;
Some ages hence our genealogic tree
Will wear as green a bough for him as me)—
Waltzing shall rear, to make our name amends
Grandsons for me—in heirs to all his friends.

At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away:
"Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-three!"
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: "'Fore God I am no coward;
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear,
And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick.
We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty-three?"

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville: "I know you are no coward;
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again.
But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore.
I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard,
To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain."

So Lord Howard passed away with five ships of war that day,
Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;
But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land
Very carefully and slow,
Men of Bideford in Devon,
And we laid them on the ballast down below;
For we brought them all aboard,
And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain,
To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

He had only a hundred ****** to work the ship and to fight,
And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in sight,
With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow.
"Shall we fight or shall we fly?
Good Sir Richard, tell us now,
For to fight is but to die!
There'll be little of us left by the time this sun be set."
And Sir Richard said again: "We be all good English men.
Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the devil,
For I never turned my back upon Don or devil yet."

Sir Richard spoke and he laughed, and we roared a hurrah, and so
The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the foe,
With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below;
For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen,
And the little Revenge ran on through the long sea-lane between.

Thousands of their soldiers looked down from their decks and laughed,
Thousands of their ****** made mock at the mad little craft
Running on and on, till delayed
By their mountain-like San Philip that, of fifteen hundred tons,
And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns,
Took the breath from our sails, and we stayed.

And while now the great San Philip hung above us like a cloud
Whence the thunderbolt will fall
Long and loud,
Four galleons drew away
From the Spanish fleet that day,
And two upon the larboard and two upon the starboard lay,
And the battle-thunder broke from them all.

But anon the great San Philip, she bethought herself and went
Having that within her womb that had left her ill content;
And the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand to hand,
For a dozen times they came with their pikes and musqueteers,
And a dozen times we shook 'em off as a dog that shakes his ears
When he leaps from the water to the land.

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea,
But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.
Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came,
Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame.
For some were sunk and many were shattered, and so could fight us no more -
God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?

For he said "Fight on! fight on!"
Though his vessel was all but a wreck;
And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was gone,
With a grisly wound to be dressed he had left the deck,
But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly dead,
And himself he was wounded again in the side and the head,
And he said "Fight on! fight on!"

And the night went down, and the sun smiled out far over the summer sea,
And the Spanish fleet with broken sides lay round us all in a ring;
But they dared not touch us again, for they feared that we still could sting,
So they watched what the end would be.
And we had not fought them in vain,
But in perilous plight were we,
Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain,
And half of the rest of us maimed for life
In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife;
And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold,
And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent;
And the masts and the rigging were lying over the side;
But Sir Richard cried in his English pride,
"We have fought such a fight for a day and a night
As may never be fought again!
We have won great glory, my men!
And a day less or more
At sea or ashore,
We die -does it matter when?
Sink me the ship, Master Gunner -sink her, split her in twain!
Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!"

And the gunner said "Ay, ay," but the ****** made reply:
"We have children, we have wives,
And the Lord hath spared our lives.
We will make the Spaniard promise, if we yield, to let us go;
We shall live to fight again and to strike another blow."
And the lion there lay dying, and they yielded to the foe.

And the stately Spanish men to their flagship bore him then,
Where they laid him by the mast, old Sir Richard caught at last,
And they praised him to his face with their courtly foreign grace;
But he rose upon their decks, and he cried:
"I have fought for Queen and Faith like a valiant man and true;
I have only done my duty as a man is bound to do:
With a joyful spirit I Sir Richard Grenville die!"
And he fell upon their decks, and he died.

And they stared at the dead that had been so valiant and true,
And had holden the power and glory of Spain so cheap
That he dared her with one little ship and his English few;
Was he devil or man? He was devil for aught they knew,
But they sank his body with honour down into the deep,
And they manned the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew,
And away she sailed with her loss and longed for her own;
When a wind from the lands they had ruined awoke from sleep,
And the water began to heave and the weather to moan,
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,
And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake grew,
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags,
And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shattered navy of Spain,
And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags
To be lost evermore in the main.

Now here you come again to fetch me from the sea,
Ballast in my bones, this girl was born to sink;
A cautionary tale, I slip between the wood,
Limbs whittled thin and feet stained with soot.

But never-mind the waif; she waxes so pale
Drunk on dejection, I ponder the veil
Leaden and listless, for the sirens will sing:
Amaranthine is the color I bleed for the sea.

So I’ll spit out my sorrows wherever they listen,
Pumped me with pills and said that they fixed it.
The darlings have died off; the dolls are all broken,
Just left is me, thin-skinned and soft spoken.

And I’d rather lick knives than chew on love’s gristle,
Like a dog on a chain, I’d run when you whistle.
Far from it now, yet lost in the maze:
Chasing ways out for the rest of my daze.

On an apple-ripe September morning
Through the mist-chill fields I went
With a pitch-fork on my shoulder
Less for use than for devilment.

The threshing mill was set-up, I knew,
In Cassidy's haggard last night,
And we owed them a day at the threshing
Since last year. O it was delight

To be paying bills of laughter
And chaffy gossip in kind
With work thrown in to ballast
The fantasy-soaring mind.

As I crossed the wooden bridge I wondered
As I looked into the drain
If ever a summer morning should find me
Shovelling up eels again.

And I thought of the wasps' nest in the bank
And how I got chased one day
Leaving the drag and the scraw-knife behind,
How I covered my face with hay.

The wet leaves of the cocksfoot
Polished my boots as I
Went round by the glistening bog-holes
Lost in unthinking joy.

I'll be carrying bags to-day, I mused,
The best job at the mill
With plenty of time to talk of our loves
As we wait for the bags to fill.

Maybe Mary might call round...
And then I came to the haggard gate,
And I knew as I entered that I had come
Through fields that were part of no earthly estate.