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Shamans, in an attempt to find a word that all cultures could understand, to represent, universally, the subject; married the languages by root.

Each attribute or thing that the beast is said to do, have or have power to do or over is found as a definition in a language of the individual roots.

Take Sanskrit for instance. "Dra," is "water and combine it with Sumerian, "Gun, Gon," and you get a "water-born," beast who "writhes, twists or wraps around," which is the Ouroboros Serpent as shown in ancient images.

The secret to all ancient myth or religion is in interpretation of language into foreign languages over time.

And, yes, it is very creative, appears complex due to time but is just humans trying to describe observable nature.

None of it is meant to be taken literally unless you literally live six thousand years ago and speak in an ancient tongue.

Addendum

Keltic, "Con, Kon," makes the Dragon, "All-knowing." *

And we know from Plato that Greeks
stole their root words from the Celts.
Plato's own words in,

'The Cratylus.'
All mythology is born from the language of trade and existed as a pre-science.
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2020
why did i ever go out on a friday night?
drinks with "friends" and hitting the essex
club "scene" -
well - no much of a scene -
there was never the music you'd want to listen
to: come friday or saturday -
even mid-week when all the rock kids
were "hanging out" -
what would be chances of being your own d.j. -
catching something really new...
POIZON - church is poizon -
cool mom - something between a crossbreed
of cage the elephants and nirvana on blew -
3rd view - moi -
but i used to: and i remember that gehenna of
a sobering walk - alone after a night out -
like some furious son of sam -
when youth still had the adrenaline with it
and a sense of anger ******* around with
disillusionment -

those were the friday nights: bon jovi highlights
and long hair and milking a somewhat androgynous
look - sometimes the mascara would come out...
those were the days of having milk skin
and a proper shave -
the long hair and the waistcoast and cravat: semi-,

the lonesome story before i met my beard:
fwyday mordaithceirch -
i actually have a name for it...
i forgot what's already the designated
whittle pecker mr. pritchard of the down down:
below...

oh, oh so what...
rough friday nights in my youth -
on the clubbing "scene" -
and always that moral hangover when it came
to drinking with others -
ever since i started drinking by myself:
i forgot the mirror and that bucket
of warm water beside my bed to put my hand
in before going to sleep...
once or twice the company was worth the drink -
but most of the time you only kept
such company: because you were drinking -
drinking was never an afterthought -

now... i like drinking alone -
at least i can keep fact-checking the company
and the odd vocab peacock taking to the catwalk
of a ruminating free-fall tongue waggle
and rummage - the needle in the haystack
adventure - or... the ******* bucket
of deshelled oysters...

there have been some awful friday nights -
but: seeing how i started to give my beard
a welsh name borrowed from a willem dafoe
novel - and how it simply became pointless
to wake the dead with the angry tantrums
of youth: and how i seem to have
forgotten where my 20s "went" -
somehow rooted in: da-sein and how
i "wasted" 2 years on one book by kant -
2 years on one book by heidegger -
and: how i didn't have the time to "catch-up"
on the greek classics -

oh these island dwelling people -
i try to imagine them not being a seafaring:
and their messiah / superiority complex -
with their breakfast that could hardly
be digested come the hour of noon -
or no messiah / superiority complex -
the traffic: indeed - works like clockword...
from left to right...
sidenote: what of fahrenheit and
the feet and inches - stones and pounds?
ounces?
the metric of: baseline 0 here,
baseline 00 over there...

no... Michele Campanella piano solo take
on wagner's das rheingelt: entry of the gods into
valhalla - it's hardly anemic -
it's... the last leaf of autumn falling -
because the crescendo has already happened...
a befitting closure...

the superior island folk and their...
hyphens and germanic loan words -
how almost all names in chemistry are still
in their germanic: intact form of: no hyphen:
broken leg or broken arm...

woodwinds... perhaps... the violins providing
the humming of birds:
chirp chirp: no chirping -
and of course the horn - but the horns never
as prominent as those drank from...

something has happened today -
but i am... left without having any english
sensibility / egalitarianism -
somehow i always equate egalitarianism with
the english - the islanders -
a firework went off in the background -
mr. sloth awoke mrs. slouch after 3 years
for a firecracker celebration...

because who would want to be ruled
over by unelected: chocolatiers...
esp. after their trial run in the Congo -
but i have certainly had worse friday nights...

it can't exactly get much worse than...
say... listening to the siegfried idyll...
multitasking: drinking a cider, smoking a cigarette,
balancing act of folded leg sat on
perched on a windowsill solving a no. 11,289
sudoku from the 27th jan. 2020...
otherwise prior to:
imagine my disbelief at the pleasure -

with numbers to somehow escape thinking in words:
no grand arithmetic linear gymnastics -
of the end result -
certainly no logical statements -
just a whirlwind of numbers complimenting
these few words...
and what a fine friday night it has become:

the pizza was made - god save me from the perfume
of yeast... or checking on the rising dough
from time to time -
the leftover yeast gave me the opportunity
to bake an imitation sourdough crust pretty-as-a-picture
loaf that: would make any mushroom blush
and shy away from unfolding into an umbrella pose...
or a Y... curling outward-inward into an upsilon Υ...

because how could i forget the pleasure of
sifting through numbers?
by the time i attempted puzzle no. 11,290
i had to write a "map"

           a             b             c
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x  
1)   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
2)   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
3)   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x

come to think of it... where's a subscript?
if i'm going to use 1, 2, 3...
to tier the allocation of squares...
tennis and sudoku...
tennis: a game of 7 rectangles -
and how many judges and ball boys / girls?
sudoku - a puzzle of 10 squares - perhaps...
if i'll use tiers 1, 2, 3: a1, b2, c3...
what if... sudoku invoked letters rather than
numbers?

much later... oh believe me...
this is the antithesis of knausgård
writing about using googlemaps...
        
           a             b             c
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x  
1)   x   x   x   3   x   x   6   x   4
      x   x   x   2   x   4   x   8   9
      x   1   9   x   4   x   x   6   2
2)   x   x   x   7   x   x   x   5   x
      x   x   2   x   x   8   x   4   x
      x   2   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
3)   x   x   6   1   9   5   x   x   3
      x   3   8   4   x   x   x   7   x

it's still a schematic - the narrative is yet
to begin... otherwise...
there's nothing smart about this...
i have tired eyes sometimes:
i succumb and have to allow myself
to no acid-bath these eyes in words...

esp. since i speak so rarely -
imagine... in england and i spear
the bare minimum of english -
i can: i have to: i will - when being prompted -
but i can't remember the last time
i had an honest: informal exchange
of letters... lapped up by the glutton
tongue... i looked and looked
and with my silence i can attest:
there's a speech-impediment -
a stutter that's not born from nervousness...
but... an allusion to a "stoic" through
my lack of conversation...

at least on paper i can exfoliate -
enough cider and enoug whiskey and i'm all
sparrow McDermott!
ugh... the devolved scots and the likewise
welsh... devolved nations...
only this aspect of Brexit is... well...
imagine the "evolved" status of post-Yugoslavia...
Kosovo...
this is the only aspect of an otherwise:
fair enough that's... well...
if you lived for 3 years among the scots...
you'd get to appreciate them...
this is the only aspect of this whole affair
i will ever appreciate...
i would pour blood and **** into
the Welsh continuing their...
preservation of the iaith...
forever and the more - i would love to see
scotland start to dig trenches and
forget trainspotting gaelic -
parading like ponces and humpty dumpteys
with "harkccents"... glasgewian bull-runnings...
cousins aye and wee -

a thing of beauty: a thing of union...
but this... they were bullied in brussels...
they came back and started to bully the scots...
if you have lived -
the betas of cardiff - but they tongue: remains!
look far back and wales would encompass
cornwall -
ignorant i of a 26 year "servitude" on these isles...
quiz me on outside of London:
no point...
perhaps i too would wish for the lost
theta in Dublin - towing: to t'ink...
as any sanskrit H-surd does matter...

           a             b             c
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x  
1)   x   x   x   3   x   x   6   x   4
      x   x   x   2   x   4   x   8   9
      x   1   9   x   4   x   x   6   2
2)   x   x   x   7   x   x   x   5   x
      x   x   2   x   x   8   x   4   x
      x   2   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
3)   x   x   6   1   9   5   x   x   3
      x   3   8   4   x   x   x   7   x

but if i will replace... the side tiers of numbers...
the numbers in the puzzle will have to become
letters - greek... probably iota, epsilon and upper-case
gamma...

the bullied have returned from the palance
of the chocalatiers and: back to their old ways
of bullying the rest of these island folk...
because: it's infantile for me imagine
a resurrection of the crown (poland)
and the grand duchy of lithuania -
the commonwealth -
but somehow the united kingdom is not
fated to become the next yugoslavia -

i can confirm - up in edinburgh i was
confirmed by having the hat of Knox having
scalped me -
never is always metaphor: vaguely -
as in literally - in these quasi-paragraphs...
so it's not... infantile to even "think" that
the british empire can be revived?
zee window-licker spezials of
cross-breed h'americana postcards sent?
i nibble to attempt a joke...

oh i can bulldozer this whole narrative...
turn into a berserker -
i've saved enough money to deal
with the label loser...
all it will take is me having drunk enough -
sightseeing the slums of london's east end
and then hitting the brothel:
like an iron-head... to the pillow
and the ***** of a *******...

because i have had worse friday nights...
terrible company...
if i were not a michel de montaigne or a knausgård:
me me me, me me, me me me me,
write enough of that and:
to meme to grafitti... or to...
why are there no diacritical markers in
the english language worthy of recognition?
why would i...
rhoi fy **** y Cymraeg enw?
give my beard a welsh name?
and why is that not a cedilla C but a ******* K?
why not... Çumraeg?

on foreign shores i have made it adamant that...
this sense of foreigness does not
peppermint my presence with hopes to:
add to - an integration -
just borrow what the local have made: left-overs...
and work with that...

(insert snigger) - the neu-vikings of
northumberland...

           a             b             c
      x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x   x  
1)   x   x   x   3   x   x   6   x   4
      x   x   x   2   x   4   x   8   9
      x   1   9   x   4   x   x   6   2
2)   x   x   x   7   x   x   x   5   x
      x   x   2   x   x   8   x   4   x
      x   2   x   x   x   x   x   x   x
3)   x   x   6   1   9   5   x   x   3
      x   3   8   4   x   x   x   7   x

this really does have a linear narrative...
here goes...
3(c1), 9(c3), 1(c1), 2(c3), 2(c1), 2(a1), 9(a3), 8(c3),
4(c3), 8(c2), 8(a2), 5(b2), 7(c2), 3(b2), 3(b3), 8(b3),
7(c1), 5(c1), 7(b3), 5(c3), 1(c3), 6(c3), 1(c2), 3(c2),
9(c2), 9(b2), 6(b1), 6(b2), 6(b3), 2(b3), 2(b2), 1(b2),
1(b1), 9(b1), 9(a1), 8(b1), 8(a1), 5(b1), 7(b1), 7(a1)...

and then a "gamble" in the narrative...
the (7a2 and the 5a2 - interchange)....
it's a pleasure - not a chore -
5  9  4
2  8  7
3  6  1
8  1  9
6  4  3
7  5  2 - this line... what if it was 5  7  2?
1  2  5
4  7  6
9  3  8
if i want to solve this puzzle - i will solve it
and not read a tabloid article /
whatever the hell has become of youtube...
my diamond jukebox...

otherwise the "narrative" continued from
7a2 and the 5a2 interchange:
7(3a), 4(a3), 4(a2), 6(a1), 4(a1), 5(a1), 5(a3),
1(a3), 1(a1), 3(a1), 3(a2), 6(a2)... end result?

           a             b             c
      5   9   4   6   8   1   2   3   7  
1)   2   8   7   3   5   9   6   1   4
      3   6   1   2   7   4   5   8   9
      8   1   9   5   4   3   7   6   2
2)   6   4   3   7   1   2   9   5   8
      7   5   2   9   6   8   3   4   1
      1   2   5   8   3   7   4   9   6
3)   4   7   6   1   9   5   8   2   3
      9   3   8   4   2   6   1   7   5

because i can imagine this not being:
the most difficult Finnish sudoku...
i can almost imagine this puzzle
to be in greek...
where: 1ι, 2ζ, 3ε, 4χ, 5Σ, 6δ, 7Γ, 8β, 9ρ...

in the background all i hear is:
corvus corax' la i mbealtaine...
the greek version of the japanese puzzle...

           a             b             c
      Σ   9   χ   6   8   ι   ζ   ε   7  
1)   ζ   8   7   ε   Σ   9   6   ι   χ
      ε   6   ι   ζ   7   χ   Σ   8   9
      8   ι   9   Σ   χ   ε   7   6   ζ
2)   6   χ   ε   7   ι   ζ   9   Σ   8
      7   Σ   ζ   9   6   8   ε   χ   ι
      ι   ζ   Σ   8   ε   7   χ   9   6
3)   χ   7   6   ι   9   Σ   8   ζ   ε
      9   ε   8   χ   ζ   6   ι   7   Σ

half-way... i just wanted to "selfie" what
will become of this... i no longer write: i paint...

            a             b             c
      Σ   9   χ   δ   8   ι   ζ   ε   Γ  
1)   ζ   8   Γ   ε   Σ   9   δ   ι   χ
      ε   δ   ι   ζ   Γ   χ   Σ   8   9
      8   ι   9   Σ   χ   ε   Γ   δ   ζ
2)   δ   χ   ε   Γ   ι   ζ   9   Σ   8
      Γ   Σ   ζ   9   δ   8   ε   χ   ι
      ι   ζ   Σ   8   ε   Γ   χ   9   δ
3)   χ   Γ   δ   ι   9   Σ   8   ζ   ε
      9   ε   8   χ   ζ   δ   ι   Γ   Σ

going... going... gone...

            a             b             c
      Σ   ρ   χ   δ   β   ι   ζ   ε   Γ  
1)   ζ   β   Γ   ε   Σ   ρ   δ   ι   χ
      ε   δ   ι   ζ   Γ   χ   Σ   β   ρ
      β   ι   ρ   Σ   χ   ε   Γ   δ   ζ
2)   δ   χ   ε   Γ   ι   ζ   ρ   Σ   β
      Γ   Σ   ζ   ρ   δ   β   ε   χ   ι
      ι   ζ   Σ   β   ε   Γ   χ   ρ   δ
3)   χ   Γ   δ   ι   ρ   Σ   β   ζ   ε
      ρ   ε   β   χ   ζ   δ   ι   Γ   Σ

i don't mind a people being right...
but the overt-gloating...
without having to work around the sort
of paranoia associated with:
how the russians are not allowed to glutton
themselves on gloating -
because they are always made
to feel suspcious - the russians can't gloat
like most of the anglo- speaking world...
always suspect: russophobia evil genuises...
tip-toeing goliaths - less the blundering
fudge-packers of "global ****"...
and i kissed a boy and i liked it...
my genitals started shrinking
and my *** started to exfoliate with:
welcome all! welcome all hard and on!
and that tongue in my mouth always helps...
but imagine my surprise when
i started to navigate my hands
but the reply came:
timbuktu and mt. kilimanjaro will not be found
attached to this sort of torso...
wrong dog, wrong tree...

some things really do require numbers...
i once had a mathematics teacher in high school
bemoan the origin of modern numbers
and how we once: upon a time used these letters...
but did our arithmetic with visual aids
akin to the abacus... because...
you'd have to "read braille" when counting...
to differentiate the already: lettered numbers
and the letters being letters -
and all arithmetic functions
were "spoken of" but never depicted...
i.e. there was no VII + III = X...
there was no XV - XI = IV...
eh?! arithmetic was cat-intuitive...
not spoken of - done by either the visual
aid of fingers when haggling
in a market place -
or by the abacus aid in a bureucratic office!

i said this was the most perfect friday night...
what did i have to offer?
no clickbait title - some gems of wording
in between?
the patient reader - as ever - most rewarded -

but... oh my god... the sensation of
changing the bed sheets...
it's friday night and you're... changing your bed sheets...
and they are more crisp and clean
than any political event that the journalist leeches
are milking -
and you do it with a saving private ryan precision -
you will sleep in this bed: well into
11am of a today to come...
believe me: that you will...

- in that i am still walking among the germanic people -
if the germans will sing a: bretonisher marsch...
then the two peoples are alligned by
their sentiment for the crow as their godhead:
alles menschen totem...
what could possibly make me feel welcome?
french grammar is polish grammar...
matin de printemps - poranek wiosny -
spring morning in reverse in germanic...
how many more examples would i ever wish
to give?

there was a moment in my life where...
i realised my faults... i should have read
the Pickwick Papers... anything by C. Dickens to be sure...
instead came Stendhal, Voltaire, Balzac...
because if you said to me...
BBC radio 4... the archers...
and... thomas hardy: madding crowd?
you'd accuse me of being ignorant of:
London is a bustling cosmopolitan in-waiting
from the busy-body industrial proto-Beijing
it was of 100 years ago?    
the French had cosmopolitan intellectualism
100 years prior to the english...
100 years later and it's still not much...
is anyone about to cite me william hazlitt?!

the trouble with the english is that they hold dear
to that one old 19th century idea -
this waiting for: awaiting a revival of darwinism...
the "blatantly" obvious needs a resurgence!
because a michael faraday must most surely
be forgotten!
how many times will this already painful reality
need to be emphasised once more:
intellectually - via a darwinism?
no one stresses the copernican "upside-down"...
or what is copernican "west" up in space?
how does acknowledging the sphere
of the earth - ease you reading a flat map -
moving from point A to point B?

earlier this week - for once in my life i was
ashamed of what i wrote -
so i wrote for scribli per se: scribbles for
scribbles themselves -
the darwinian germanic folk who say:
alles von afrika...
how the hebrews debased themselves
in both aushwitz and breaking their bones
on the emoji hieroglyphs -
alles von afrika: ja... so sicher... so wahr!

ask any slavic person among the germanic
peoples...
where from? wir (ar) sind lesen und schreiben
"afrika": i.e. Indu...
if the african challenged the hebrews
with... "the best they had": egyptian emojis...
why would i not stress my birth
with pseudo cedilla Ş / इ... ☦ -
this indo-european is not... at home with
these african-germanoids...
pseudos and quasi -
these chocolate frenzied busy-buddies!

from the caucasian and further still from
that whittle sub-corinthian quote: continent...
somehow, "somehow" this part of this story
is read: south to north... always a grand
marker missing when the people went
east, squinted... learned skeleton existence,
atoms... and the frenzy of letters:
owls and ******* **** flinging beetles
back in the north eastern tip of
africa: in that egyptian haemorrhage of "idea"...

i assure myself... perhaps the form came from
africa... but sure as **** the tongue only arrived
in the lap of the Dalai Lama...
as did the "thinking" and the music
across prior to the Mongol's curiosity
over the tundra of Siberia...
something had to be placed on a loan...
and coming back to the cradle and the crux
had to happen like so...
not this current: ergo: so...
quickened and: what news from Damascus?!

first impressions count...
i made my bed... it's newly washed...
as crisp as falling onto a bed a prawn crackers...
without the crumbs' itch...
like listening to some german:
juggernaut... this will do... i can fall asleep
with this: grab hören zu der winderhall...
mehr flöte - weniger violinekratzen!
schlechtdeutsche? alle deutsche ist gut deutsche...
erwarten etwas isländisch zu sein
gesprochen insel von insel: auf diese inseln?!

to make a crisp bed of freshly washed sheets...
to sleep in them alone...
given the grammar is not that far removed...
are the french even remotely translated
as a germanic "sort of" people?
"they" or "we" share the same grammar...
and there are celtic freedoms that would
never be allowed to exfoliate under
strict anglo-ßaß obligations...

oh sure! great people! steam engine: choo-choo!
newton et al...
shakespeare: when they taught us shakespeare
they should have taught us bernard shaw...
when they forced jane eyre down our throats
we should have been reading
the pickwick papers...
the music will remain german -
because as much as vaughan williams...
holst and händel were "were" english...
esp. latter with his umlaut that spread over
toward i-and-j...

why wouldn't you **** at the pillar of the empire:
a past most assured - dust, books and moths...
like hell will i come to correct my ways
to state the: pish-poor Elgar... this poo'em too...
himmel... sky...
leerenhimmel - empty sky -
nein sonne während der tag:
das englischnebel: bedeckthimmel...
nein mond während der nacht...
nur so...

i of the lesser men of this world duly bow
my presence before the altar of the higher men
of these isles...
and hope and pray that their wisdom
will not bestow upon them any major calamity...
with not irony or ridicule i wish upon
these peoples... the right sort of oars
to turn this rooted island
into the people's imagined langboot...

there are only one british people a people
who will pursue to gloat having been
conquered by the romans...
being raided by the vikings...
integrating the anglo-ßaß...
a second viking coming via the Normans...
the push-over remains of the celts...
that somehow translated itself into
the: empire...
ideal: to compensate...
the islamic fervor for the... resurrected
caliphate...
jokes about the dritte ***** and the vierte *****...
that's pretty much the precursor jokes
surrounding: ein zweite ***** -
auf welche die sonne nimmer setzt -
ever wonder how that translates with the increased
cases of insomnia?!

again: bad german is better than
no german.
Michael R Burch  Sep 2020
Sonnets
Michael R Burch Sep 2020
Sonnets

For this collection I have used the original definition of "sonnet" as a "little song" rather than sticking to rigid formulas. The sonnets here include traditional sonnets, tetrameter sonnets, hexameter sonnets, curtal sonnets, 15-line sonnets, and some that probably defy categorization, which I call free verse sonnets for want of a better term. Most of these sonnets employ meter, rhyme and form and tend to be Romantic in the spirit of the Romanticism of Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas.




Auschwitz Rose
by Michael R. Burch

There is a Rose at Auschwitz, in the briar,
a rose like Sharon's, lovely as her name.
The world forgot her, and is not the same.
I still love her and enlist this sacred fire
to keep her memory exalted flame
unmolested by the thistles and the nettles.

On Auschwitz now the reddening sunset settles;
they sleep alike―diminutive and tall,
the innocent, the "surgeons." Sleeping, all.

Red oxides of her blood, bright crimson petals,
if accidents of coloration, gall my heart no less.
Amid thick weeds and muck
there lies a rose man's crackling lightning struck:
the only Rose I ever longed to pluck.
Soon I'll bed there and bid the world "Good Luck."

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



In Praise of Meter
by Michael R. Burch

The earth is full of rhythms so precise
the octave of the crystal can produce
a trillion oscillations, yet not lose
a second's beat. The ear needs no device
to hear the unsprung rhythms of the couch
drown out the mouth's; the lips can be debauched
by kisses, should the heart put back its watch
and find the pulse of love, and sing, devout.

If moons and tides in interlocking dance
obey their numbers, what's been left to chance?
Should poets be more lax―their circumstance
as humble as it is?―or readers wince
to see their ragged numbers thin, to hear
the moans of drones drown out the Chanticleer?

Originally published by The Eclectic Muse and in The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003



Discrimination
by Michael R. Burch

The meter I had sought to find, perplexed,
was ripped from books of "verse" that read like prose.
I found it in sheet music, in long rows
of hologramic CDs, in sad wrecks
of long-forgotten volumes undisturbed
half-centuries by archivists, unscanned.
I read their fading numbers, frowned, perturbed―
why should such tattered artistry be banned?

I heard the sleigh bells’ jingles, vampish ads,
the supermodels’ babble, Seuss’s books
extolled in major movies, blurbs for abs ...
A few poor thinnish journals crammed in nooks
are all I’ve found this late to sell to those
who’d classify free verse "expensive prose."

Originally published by The Chariton Review



The Forge
by Michael R. Burch

To at last be indestructible, a poem
must first glow, almost flammable, upon
a thing inert, as gray, as dull as stone,

then bend this way and that, and slowly cool
at arms-length, something irreducible
drawn out with caution, toughened in a pool

of water so contrary just a hiss
escapes it―water instantly a mist.
It writhes, a thing of senseless shapelessness ...

And then the driven hammer falls and falls.
The horses ***** their ears in nearby stalls.
A soldier on his cot leans back and smiles.

A sound of ancient import, with the ring
of honest labor, sings of fashioning.

Originally published by The Chariton Review



For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought.
I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair
that fell across her face, the apricot
clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed
so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan.

The memory of her gathers like a flood
and bears me to that night, that only night,
when she and I were one, and if I could ...
I'd reach to her this time and, smiling, brush
the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact
each feature, each impression. Love is such
a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone
before we recognize it. I would crush
my lips to hers to hold their memory,
if not more tightly, less elusively.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



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



Isolde's Song
by Michael R. Burch

Through our long years of dreaming to be one
we grew toward an enigmatic light
that gently warmed our tendrils. Was it sun?
We had no eyes to tell; we loved despite
the lack of all sensation―all but one:
we felt the night's deep chill, the air so bright
at dawn we quivered limply, overcome.

To touch was all we knew, and how to bask.
We knew to touch; we grew to touch; we felt
spring's urgency, midsummer's heat, fall's lash,
wild winter's ice and thaw and fervent melt.
We felt returning light and could not ask
its meaning, or if something was withheld
more glorious. To touch seemed life's great task.

At last the petal of me learned: unfold.
And you were there, surrounding me. We touched.
The curious golden pollens! Ah, we touched,
and learned to cling and, finally, to hold.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



See
by Michael R. Burch

See how her hair has thinned: it doesn't seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there and burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are―that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows, elegant and rare.

For loveliness remains in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book's.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.

Originally published by Writer's Digest's: The Year's Best Writing 2003



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,
and 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 violent ocean
and laugh as they shatter, 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 world of resplendence from which we were seized.

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



The Toast
by Michael R. Burch

For longings warmed by tepid suns
(brief lusts that animated clay),
for passions wilted at the bud
and skies grown desolate and gray,
for stars that fell from tinseled heights
and mountains bleak and scarred and lone,
for seas reflecting distant suns
and weeds that thrive where seeds were sown,
for waltzes ending in a hush,
for rhymes that fade as pages close,
for flames' exhausted, drifting ash,
and petals falling from the rose, ...
I raise my cup before I drink,
saluting ghosts of loves long dead,
and silently propose a toast―
to joys set free, and those I fled.



Second Sight (II)
by Michael R. Burch

(Newborns see best at a distance of 8 to 14 inches.)

Wiser than we know, the newborn screams,
red-faced from breath, and wonders what life means
this close to death, amid the arctic glare
of warmthless lights above.
Beware! Beware!―
encrypted signals, codes? Or ciphers, noughts?

Interpretless, almost, as his own thoughts―
the brilliant lights, the brilliant lights exist.
Intruding faces ogle, gape, insist―
this madness, this soft-hissing breath, makes sense.
Why can he not float on, in dark suspense,
and dream of life? Why did they rip him out?

He frowns at them―small gnomish frowns, all doubt―
and with an ancient mien, O sorrowful!,
re-closes eyes that saw in darkness null
ecstatic sights, exceeding beautiful.



Archaischer Torso Apollos (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We cannot know the beheaded god
nor his eyes' forfeited visions. But still
the figure's trunk glows with the strange vitality
of a lamp lit from within, while his composed will
emanates dynamism. Otherwise
the firmly muscled abdomen could not beguile us,
nor the centering ***** make us smile
at the thought of their generative animus.
Otherwise the stone might seem deficient,
unworthy of the broad shoulders, of the groin
projecting procreation's triangular spearhead upwards,
unworthy of the living impulse blazing wildly within
like an inchoate star―demanding our belief.
You must change your life.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: This is a Rilke sonnet about a major resolution: changing the very nature of one's life. While it is only my personal interpretation of the poem above, I believe Rilke was saying to himself: "I must change my life." Why? Perhaps because he wanted to be a real artist, and when confronted with real, dynamic, living and breathing art of Rodin, he realized that he had to inject similar vitality, energy and muscularity into his poetry. Michelangelo said that he saw the angel in a block of marble, then freed it. Perhaps Rilke had to find the dynamic image of Apollo, the God of Poetry, in his materials, which were paper, ink and his imagination.―Michael R. Burch



Komm, Du (“Come, You”)
by Ranier Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This was Rilke’s last poem, written ten days before his death. He died open-eyed in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium, of leukemia and its complications. I had a friend who died of leukemia and he was burning up with fever in the end. I believe that is what Rilke was describing here: he was literally burning alive.

Come, you―the last one I acknowledge; return―
incurable pain searing this physical mesh.
As I burned in the spirit once, so now I burn
with you; meanwhile, you consume my flesh.

This wood that long resisted your embrace
now nourishes you; I surrender to your fury
as my gentleness mutates to hellish rage―
uncaged, wild, primal, mindless, outré.

Completely free, no longer future’s pawn,
I clambered up this crazy pyre of pain,
certain I’d never return―my heart’s reserves gone―
to become death’s nameless victim, purged by flame.

Now all I ever was must be denied.
I left my memories of my past elsewhere.
That life―my former life―remains outside.
Inside, I’m lost. Nobody knows me here.



Der Panther ("The Panther")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

His weary vision's so overwhelmed by iron bars,
his exhausted eyes see only blank Oblivion.
His world is not our world. It has no stars.
No light. Ten thousand bars. Nothing beyond.
Lithe, swinging with a rhythmic easy stride,
he circles, his small orbit tightening,
an electron losing power. Paralyzed,
soon regal Will stands stunned, an abject thing.
Only at times the pupils' curtains rise
silently, and then an image enters,
descends through arrested shoulders, plunges, centers
somewhere within his empty heart, and dies.



Liebes-Lied (“Love Song”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

How can I withhold my soul so that it doesn’t touch yours?
How can I lift mine gently to higher things, alone?
Oh, I would gladly find something lost in the dark
in that inert space that fails to resonate until you vibrate.
There everything that moves us, draws us together like a bow
enticing two taut strings to sing together with a simultaneous voice.
Whose instrument are we becoming together?
Whose, the hands that excite us?
Ah, sweet song!



Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar [1460-1525]
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue that is held most dear―
except only that you are merciless.

Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I saw flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet everywhere, no odor but bitter rue.

I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair rose of pallid and gentle cast,
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that, if I could, I would compose her roots again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been.



Ebb Tide
by Michael R. Burch

Massive, gray, these leaden waves
bear their unchanging burden―
the sameness of each day to day

while the wind seems to struggle to say
something half-submerged planks at the mouth of the bay
might nuzzle limp seaweed to understand.

Now collapsing dull waves drain away
from the unenticing land;
shrieking gulls shadow fish through salt spray―
whitish streaks on a fogged silver mirror.

Sizzling lightning impresses its brand.
Unseen fingers scribble something in the wet sand.

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by Southwest Review.



Water and Gold
by Michael R. Burch

You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower springs to life at once,
but joy's a wan illusion to the expert:
the Bedouin has learned how not to want.

You came to me as riches to a miser
when all is gold, or so his heart believes,
until he dies much thinner and much wiser,
his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves.

You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly;
I could not take it in; it was too much.
I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly.
I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch.

I dreamed you gave me water of your lips,
then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs.

Originally published by The Lyric



The City Is a Garment
by Michael R. Burch

A rhinestone skein, a jeweled brocade of light,―
the city is a garment stretched so thin
her festive colors bleed into the night,
and everywhere bright seams, unraveling,

cascade their brilliant contents out like coins
on motorways and esplanades; bead cars
come tumbling down long highways; at her groin
a railtrack like a zipper flashes sparks;

her hills are haired with brush like cashmere wool
and from their cleavage winking lights enlarge
and travel, slender fingers ... softly pull
themselves into the semblance of a barge.

When night becomes too chill, she softly dons
great overcoats of warmest-colored dawn.

Originally published by The Lyric



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.

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by Romantics Quarterly.



The Communion of Sighs
by Michael R. Burch

There was a moment
without the sound of trumpets or a shining light,
but with only silence and darkness and a cool mist
felt more than seen.
I was eighteen,
my heart pounding wildly within me like a fist.
Expectation hung like a cry in the night,
and your eyes shone like the corona of a comet.

There was an instant . . .
without words, but with a deeper communion,
as clothing first, then inhibitions fell;
liquidly our lips met
―feverish, wet―
forgotten, the tales of heaven and hell,
in the immediacy of our fumbling union . . .
when the rest of the world became distant.

Then the only light was the moon on the rise,
and the only sound, the communion of sighs.

This is one of my early free verse sonnets but I can’t remember exactly when I wrote it. Due to the romantic style, I believe it was probably written during my first two years in college, making me 18 or 19 at the time.



Abide
by Michael R. Burch

after Philip Larkin's "Aubade"

It is hard to understand or accept mortality―
such an alien concept: not to be.
Perhaps unsettling enough to spawn religion,
or to scare mutant fish out of a primordial sea

boiling like goopy green tea in a kettle.
Perhaps a man should exhibit more mettle
than to admit such fear, denying Nirvana exists
simply because we are stuck here in such a fine fettle.

And so we abide . . .
even in life, staring out across that dark brink.
And if the thought of death makes your questioning heart sink,
it is best not to drink
(or, drinking, certainly not to think).

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by Light Quarterly.



Free Fall
by Michael R. Burch

These cloudless nights, the sky becomes a wheel
where suns revolve around an axle star ...
Look there, and choose. Decide which moon is yours.
Sink Lethe-ward, held only by a heel.

Advantage. Disadvantage. Who can tell?
To see is not to know, but you can feel
the tug sometimes―the gravity, the shell
as lustrous as damp pearl. You sink, you reel

toward some draining revelation. Air―
too thin to grasp, to breath. Such pressure. Gasp.
The stars invert, electric, everywhere.
And so we fall, down-tumbling through night’s fissure ...

two beings pale, intent to fall forever
around each other―fumbling at love’s tether ...
now separate, now distant, now together.

This is a 15-line free verse sonnet originally published by Sonnet Scroll.



Once
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Once when her kisses were fire incarnate
and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame,
when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes,
leaving me listlessly sighing her name . . .

Once when her ******* were as pale, as beguiling,
as wan rivers of sand shedding heat like a mist,
when her words would at times softly, mildly rebuke me
all the while as her lips did more wildly insist . . .

Once when the thought of her echoed and whispered
through vast wastelands of need like a Bedouin chant,
I ached for the touch of her lips with such longing
that I vowed all my former vows to recant . . .

Once, only once, something bloomed, of a desiccate seed―
this implausible blossom her wild rains of kisses decreed.

Originally published by The Lyric



At Once
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Though she was fair,
though she sent me the epistle of her love at once
and inscribed therein love’s antique prayer,
I did not love her at once.

Though she would dare
pain’s pale, clinging shadows, to approach me at once,
the dark, haggard keeper of the lair,
I did not love her at once.

Though she would share
the all of her being, to heal me at once,
yet more than her touch I was unable bear.
I did not love her at once.

And yet she would care,
and pour out her essence ...
and yet―there was more!

I awoke from long darkness,
and yet―she was there.

I loved her the longer;
I loved her the more
because I did not love her at once.

Originally published by The Lyric



Twice
by Michael R. Burch

Now twice she has left me
and twice I have listened
and taken her back, remembering days

when love lay upon us
and sparkled and glistened
with the brightness of dew through a gathering haze.

But twice she has left me
to start my life over,
and twice I have gathered up embers, to learn:

rekindle a fire
from ash, soot and cinder
and softly it sputters, refusing to burn.

Originally published by The Lyric



Moments
by Michael R. Burch

There were moments full of promise,
like the petal-scented rainfall of early spring,
when to hold you in my arms and to kiss your willing lips
seemed everything.

There are moments strangely empty
full of pale unearthly twilight―how the cold stars stare!―
when to be without you is a dark enchantment
the night and I share.



The Harvest of Roses
by Michael R. Burch

I have not come for the harvest of roses―
the poets' mad visions,
their railing at rhyme ...
for I have discerned what their writing discloses:
weak words wanting meaning,
beat torsioning time.

Nor have I come for the reaping of gossamer―
images weak,
too forced not to fail;
gathered by poets who worship their luster,
they shimmer, impendent,
resplendently pale.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



Distances
by Michael R. Burch

Moonbeams on water―
the reflected light
of a halcyon star
now drowning in night ...
So your memories are.

Footprints on beaches
now flooding with water;
the small, broken ribcage
of some primitive slaughter ...
So near, yet so far.

NOTE: In the first stanza the "halcyon star" is the sun, which has dropped below the horizon and is thus "drowning in night." But its light strikes the moon, creating moonbeams which are reflected by the water. Sometimes memories seem that distant, that faint, that elusive. Footprints are being washed away, a heart is missing from its ribcage, and even things close at hand can seem infinitely beyond our reach.



A Surfeit of Light
by Michael R. Burch

There was always a surfeit of light in your presence.
You stood distinctly apart, not of the humdrum world―
a chariot of gold in a procession of plywood.

We were all pioneers of the modern expedient race,
raising the ante: Home Depot to Lowe’s.
Yours was an antique grace―Thrace’s or Mesopotamia’s.

We were never quite sure of your silver allure,
of your trillium-and-platinum diadem,
of your utter lack of flatware-like utility.

You told us that night―your wound would not scar.

The black moment passed, then you were no more.
The darker the sky, how much brighter the Star!

The day of your funeral, I ripped out the crown mold.
You were this fool’s gold.



Songstress
by Michael R. Burch

for Nadia Anjuman

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?



Come Down
by Michael R. Burch

for Harold Bloom

Come down, O, come down
from your high mountain tower.
How coldly the wind blows,
how late this chill hour ...

and I cannot wait
for a meteor shower
to show you the time
must be now, or not ever.

Come down, O, come down
from the high mountain heather
now brittle and brown
as fierce northern gales sever.

Come down, or your heart
will grow cold as the weather
when winter devours
and spring returns never.

NOTE: I dedicated this poem to Harold Bloom after reading his introduction to the Best American Poetry anthology he edited. Bloom seemed intent on claiming poetry as the province of the uber-reader (i.e., himself), but I remember reading poems by Blake, Burns, cummings, Dickinson, Frost, Housman, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Whitman, Yeats, et al, and grokking them as a boy, without any “advanced” instruction from anyone.



Such Tenderness
by Michael R. Burch

for the mothers of Gaza and loving, compassionate mothers everywhere

There was, in your touch, such tenderness―as
only the dove on her mildest day has,
when she shelters downed fledglings beneath a warm wing
and coos to them softly, unable to sing.

What songs long forgotten occur to you now―
a babe at each breast? What terrible vow
ripped from your throat like the thunder that day
can never hold severing lightnings at bay?

Time taught you tenderness―time, oh, and love.
But love in the end is seldom enough ...
and time?―insufficient to life’s brief task.
I can only admire, unable to ask―

what is the source, whence comes the desire
of a woman to love as no God may require?



In this Ordinary Swoon
by Michael R. Burch

In this ordinary swoon
as I pass from life to death,
I feel no heat from the cold, pale moon;
I feel no sympathy for breath.

Who I am and why I came,
I do not know; nor does it matter.
The end of every man’s the same
and every god’s as mad as a hatter.

I do not fear the letting go;
I only fear the clinging on
to hope when there’s no hope, although
I lift my face to the blazing sun

and feel the greater intensity
of the wilder inferno within me.

This is a mostly tetrameter sonnet with shorter and longer lines.



Mare Clausum
by Michael R. Burch

These are the narrows of my soul―
dark waters pierced by eerie, haunting screams.
And these uncharted islands bleakly home
wild nightmares and deep, strange, forbidding dreams.

Please don’t think to find pearls’ pale, unearthly glow
within its shoals, nor corals in its reefs.
For, though you seek to salvage Love, I know
that vessel lists, and night brings no relief.

Pause here, and look, and know that all is lost;
then turn, and go; let salt consume, and rust.
This sea is not for sailors, but the ******
who lingered long past morning, till they learned

why it is named:
Mare Clausum.

This is a free verse sonnet with shorter and longer lines, originally published by Penny Dreadful. Mare Clausum is Latin for "Closed Sea." I wrote the first version of this poem as a teenager.



Redolence
by Michael R. Burch

Now darkness ponds upon the violet hills;
cicadas sing; the tall elms gently sway;
and night bends near, a deepening shade of gray;
the bass concerto of a bullfrog fills
what silence there once was; globed searchlights play.

Green hanging ferns adorn dark window sills,
all drooping fronds, awaiting morning’s flares;
mosquitoes whine; the lissome moth again
flits like a veiled oud-dancer, and endures
the fumblings of night’s enervate gray rain.

And now the pact of night is made complete;
the air is fresh and cool, washed of the grime
of the city’s ashen breath; and, for a time,
the fragrance of her clings, obscure and sweet.

Published by The Eclectic Muse and The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003



Fountainhead
by Michael R. Burch

I did not delight in love so much
as in a kiss like linnets' wings,
the flutterings of a pulse so soft
the heart remembers, as it sings:
to bathe there was its transport, brushed
by marble lips, or porcelain,―
one liquid kiss, one cool outburst
from pale rosettes. What did it mean ...

to float awhirl on minute tides
within the compass of your eyes,
to feel your alabaster bust
grow cold within? Ecstatic sighs
seem hisses now; your eyes, serene,
reflect the sun's pale tourmaline.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Pan
by Michael R. Burch

... Among the shadows of the groaning elms,
amid the darkening oaks, we fled ourselves ...

... Once there were paths that led to coracles
that clung to piers like loosening barnacles ...

... where we cannot return, because we lost
the pebbles and the playthings, and the moss ...

... hangs weeping gently downward, maidens’ hair
who never were enchanted, and the stairs ...

... that led up to the Fortress in the trees
will not support our weight, but on our knees ...

... we still might fit inside those splendid hours
of damsels in distress, of rustic towers ...

... of voices of the wolves’ tormented howls
that died, and live in dreams’ soft, windy vowels ...

Originally published by Sonnet Scroll



The Endeavors of Lips
by Michael R. Burch

How sweet the endeavors of lips: to speak
of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak
in love’s strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak:
for there is no illusion like love ...

Grown childlike, we wish for those storied days,
for those bright sprays of flowers, those primrosed ways
that curled to the towers of Yesterdays
where She braided illusions of love ...

"O, let down your hair!"―we might call and call,
to the dark-slatted window, the moonlit wall ...
but our love is a shadow; we watch it crawl
like a spidery illusion. For love ...

was never as real as that first kiss seemed
when we read by the flashlight and dreamed.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly (USA) and The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



Loose Knit
by Michael R. Burch

She blesses the needle,
fetches fine red stitches,
criss-crossing, embroidering dreams
in the delicate fabric.

And if her hand jerks and twitches in puppet-like fits,
she tells herself
reality is not as threadbare as it seems ...

that a little more darning may gather loose seams.

She weaves an unraveling tapestry
of fatigue and remorse and pain; ...
only the nervously pecking needle
****** her to motion, again and again.

This is a free verse sonnet published by The Chariton Review as “The Knitter,” then by Penumbra, Black Bear Review and Triplopia.



If You Come to San Miguel
by Michael R. Burch

If you come to San Miguel
before the orchids fall,
we might stroll through lengthening shadows
those deserted streets
where love first bloomed ...

You might buy the same cheap musk
from that mud-spattered stall
where with furtive eyes the vendor
watched his fragrant wares
perfume your ******* ...

Where lean men mend tattered nets,
disgruntled sea gulls chide;
we might find that cafetucho
where through grimy panes
sunset implodes ...

Where tall cranes spin canvassed loads,
the strange anhingas glide.
Green brine laps splintered moorings,
rusted iron chains grind,
weighed and anchored in the past,

held fast by luminescent tides ...
Should you come to San Miguel?
Let love decide.



A Vain Word
by Michael R. Burch

Oleanders at dawn preen extravagant whorls
as I read in leaves’ Sanskrit brief moments remaining
till sunset implodes, till the moon strands grey pearls
under moss-stubbled oaks, full of whispers, complaining
to the minions of autumn, how swiftly life goes
as I fled before love ... Now, through leaves trodden black,
shivering, I wander as winter’s first throes
of cool listless snow drench my cheeks, back and neck.

I discerned in one season all eternities of grief,
the specter of death sprawled out under the rose,
the last consequence of faith in the flight of one leaf,
the incontinence of age, as life’s bright torrent slows.

O, where are you now?―I was timid, absurd.
I would find comfort again in a vain word.

Published by Chrysanthemum and Tucumcari Literary Review



Chloe
by Michael R. Burch

There were skies onyx at night ... moons by day ...
lakes pale as her eyes ... breathless winds
******* tall elms; ... she would say
that we loved, but I figured we’d sinned.

Soon impatiens too fiery to stay
sagged; the crocus bells drooped, golden-limned;
things of brightness, rinsed out, ran to gray ...
all the light of that world softly dimmed.

Where our feet were inclined, we would stray;
there were paths where dead weeds stood untrimmed,
distant mountains that loomed in our way,
thunder booming down valleys dark-hymned.

What I found, I found lost in her face
while yielding all my virtue to her grace.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly as “A Dying Fall”



Aflutter
by Michael R. Burch

This rainbow is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh.―Yahweh

You are gentle now, and in your failing hour
how like the child you were, you seem again,
and smile as sadly as the girl (age ten?)
who held the sparrow with the mangled wing
close to her heart. It marveled at your power
but would not mend. And so the world renews
old vows it seemed to make: false promises
spring whispers, as if nothing perishes
that does not resurrect to wilder hues
like rainbows’ eerie pacts we apprehend
but cannot fail to keep. Now in your eyes
I see the end of life that only dies
and does not care for bright, translucent lies.
Are tears so precious? These few, let us spend
together, as before, then lay to rest
these sparrows’ hearts aflutter at each breast.

This is a poem about a couple committing suicide together. The “eerie pact” refers to a Bible verse about the rainbow being a “covenant,” when the only covenant human beings can depend on is the original one that condemned us to suffer and die. That covenant is always kept perfectly.



To Flower
by Michael R. Burch

When Pentheus ["grief'] went into the mountains in the garb of the baccae, his mother [Agave] and the other maenads, possessed by Dionysus, tore him apart (Euripides, Bacchae; Apollodorus 3.5.2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.511-733; Hyginus, Fabulae 184). The agave dies as soon as it blooms; the moonflower, or night-blooming cereus, is a desert plant of similar fate.

We are not long for this earth, I know―
you and I, all our petals incurled,
till a night of pale brilliance, moonflower aglow.
Is there love anywhere in this strange world?
The Agave knows best when it's time to die
and rages to life with such rapturous leaves
her name means Illustrious. Each hour more high,
she claws toward heaven, for, if she believes
in love at all, she has left it behind
to flower, to flower. When darkness falls
she wilts down to meet it, where something crawls:
beheaded, bewildered. And since love is blind,
she never adored it, nor watches it go.
Can we be as she is, moonflower aglow?

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



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-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.

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by The Lyric.



Oasis
by Michael R. Burch

I want tears to form again
in the shriveled glands of these eyes
dried all these long years
by too much heated knowing.

I want tears to course down
these parched cheeks,
to star these cracked lips
like an improbable dew

in the heart of a desert.

I want words to burble up
like happiness, like the thought of love,
like the overwhelming, shimmering thought of you

to a nomad who
has only known drought.

This is a mostly hexameter sonnet with shorter and longer lines.



Melting
by Michael R. Burch

Entirely, as spring consumes the snow,
the thought of you consumes me: I am found
in rivulets, dissolved to what I know
of former winters’ passions. Underground,
perhaps one slender icicle remains
of what I was before, in some dark cave―
a stalactite, long calcified, now drains
to sodden pools, whose milky liquid laves
the colder rock, thus washing something clean
that never saw the light, that never knew
the crust could break above, that light could stream:
so luminous, so bright, so beautiful ...
I lie revealed, and so I stand transformed,
and all because you smiled on me, and warmed.



Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

The night is full of stars. Which still exist?
Before time ends, perhaps one day we’ll know.
For now I hold your fingers to my lips
and feel their pulse ... warm, palpable and slow ...

once slow to match this reckless spark in me,
this moon in ceaseless orbit I became,
compelled by wilder gravity to flee
night’s universe of suns, for one pale flame ...

for one pale flame that seemed to signify
the Zodiac of all, the meaning of
love’s wandering flight past Neptune. Now to lie
in dawning recognition is enough ...

enough each night to bask in you, to know
the face of love ... eyes closed ... its afterglow.



All Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

Something remarkable, perhaps ...
the color of her eyes ... though I forget
the color of her eyes ... perhaps her hair
the way it blew about ... I do not know
just what it was about her that has kept
her thought lodged deep in mine ... unmelted snow
that lasted till July would be less rare,
clasped in some frozen cavern where the wind
sculpts bright grotesqueries, ignoring springs’
and summers’ higher laws ... there thawing slow
and strange by strange degrees, one tick beyond
the freezing point which keeps all things the same
... till what remains is fragile and unlike
the world above, where melted snows and rains
form rivulets that, inundate with sun,
evaporate, and in life’s cyclic stream
remake the world again ... I do not know
that we can be remade―all afterglow.



These Hallowed Halls
by Michael R. Burch

a young Romantic Poet mourns the passing of an age . . .

A final stereo fades into silence
and now there is seldom a murmur
to trouble the slumber of these ancient halls.
I stand by a window where others have watched
the passage of time alone, not untouched,
and I am as they were―unsure, for the days
stretch out ahead, a bewildering maze.
Ah, faithless lover―that I had never touched your breast,
nor felt the stirrings of my heart,
which until that moment had peacefully slept.
For now I have known the exhilaration
of a heart that has leapt every pinnacle of Love,
and the result of all such infatuations―
the long freefall to earth, as the moon glides above.



Come!
by Michael R. Burch

Will you come to visit my grave, I wonder,
in the season of lightning, the season of thunder,
when I have lain so long in the indifferent earth
that I have no girth?

When my womb has conformed to the chastity
your anemic Messiah envisioned for me,
will you finally be pleased that my *** was thus rendered
unpalatable, disengendered?

And when those strange loathsome organs that troubled you so
have been eaten by worms, will the heavens still glow
with the approval of God that I ended a maid―
thanks to a *****?

And will you come to visit my grave, I wonder,
in the season of lightning, the season of thunder?



Erin
by Michael R. Burch

All that’s left of Ireland is her hair―
bright carrot―and her milkmaid-pallid skin,

her brilliant air of cavalier despair,
her train of children―some conceived in sin,

the others to avoid it. For nowhere
is evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin,
gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair!

How can men look upon her and not spin
like wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air?
They buy. They ***** to pat her nyloned shin,
to share her elevated, pale Despair ...
to find at last two spirits ease no one’s.

All that’s left of Ireland is the Care,
her impish grin, green eyes like leprechauns’.



The Composition of Shadows
by Michael R. Burch

“I made it out of a mouthful of air.”―W. B. Yeats

We breathe and so we write; the night
hums softly its accompaniment.
Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.

And what we mean we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’
strange golden weight, each plosive’s shape―
curved like the heart. Here, resonant,

sounds’ shadows mass beneath bright glass
like singing voles curled in a maze
of blank white space. We touch a face―
long-frozen words trapped in a glaze

that insulates our hearts. Nowhere
can love be found. Just shrieking air.



The Composition of Shadows (II)
by Michael R. Burch

We breathe and so we write;
the night
hums softly its accompaniment.

Pale phosphors burn;
the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.

And what we mean
we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’

strange golden weight,
the blood’s debate
within the heart. Here, resonant,

sounds’ shadows mass
against bright glass,
within the white Labyrinthian maze.

Through simple grace,
I touch your face,
ah words! And I would gaze

the night’s dark length
in waning strength
to find the words to feel

such light again.
O, for a pen
to spell love so ethereal.



To Please The Poet
by Michael R. Burch

To please the poet, words must dance―
staccato, brisk, a two-step:
so!
Or waltz in elegance to time
of music mild,
adagio.

To please the poet, words must chance
emotion in catharsis―
flame.
Or splash into salt seas, descend
in sheets of silver-shining
rain.

To please the poet, words must prance
and gallop, gambol, revel,
rail.
Or muse upon a moment, mute,
obscure, unsure, imperfect,
pale.

To please the poet, words must sing,
or croak, wart-tongued, imagining.



The First Christmas
by Michael R. Burch

’Twas in a land so long ago . . .
the lambs lay blanketed in snow
and little children everywhere
sat and watched warm embers glow
and dreamed (of what, we do not know).

And THEN―a star appeared on high,
The brightest man had ever seen!
It made the children whisper low
in puzzled awe (what did it mean?).
It made the wooly lambkins cry.

For far away a new-born lay,
warm-blanketed in straw and hay,
a lowly manger for his crib.
The cattle mooed, distraught and low,
to see the child. They did not know

it now was Christmas day!

This is a poem in which I tried to capture the mystery and magic of the first Christmas day. If you like my poem, you are welcome to share it, but please cite me as the author, which you can do by including the title and subheading.



The Lingering and the Unconsoled Heart
by Michael R. Burch

There is a silence―
the last unspoken moment
before death,

when the moon,
cratered and broken,
is all madness and light,

when the breath comes low and complaining,
and the heart is a ruin
of emptiness and night.

There is a grief―
the grief of a lover's embrace
while faith still shimmers in a mother’s tears ...

There is no emptier time, nor place,
while the faint glimmer of life is ours
that the lingering and the unconsoled heart fears

beyond this: seeing its own stricken face
in eyes that drift toward some incomprehensible place.



Lozenge
by Michael R. Burch

When I was closest to love, it did not seem
real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness
it might dissolve in my mouth
like a lozenge of sugar.

When I held you in my arms, I did not feel
our lack of completeness,
knowing how easy it was
for us to cling to each other.

And there were nights when the clouds
sped across the moon’s face,
exposing such rarified brightness
we did not witness

so much as embrace
love’s human appearance.

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by The HyperTexts.



The Princess and the Pauper
by Michael R. Burch

for Norman Kraeft in memory of his beloved wife June Kysilko Kraeft

Here was a woman bright, intent on life,
who did not flinch from Death, but caught his eye
and drew him, powerless, into her spell
of wanting her himself, so much the lie
that she was meant for him―obscene illusion!―

made him seem a monarch throned like God on high,
when he was less than nothing; when to die
meant many stultifying, pained embraces.

She shed her gown, undid the tangled laces
that tied her to the earth: then she was his.
Now all her erstwhile beauty he defaces
and yet she grows in hallowed loveliness―
her ghost beyond perfection―for to die
was to ascend. Now he begs, penniless.



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 changed, remaining two ...

And Grief, which lurked unseen beyond the lens
or in shadows where It crept on feral claws
as It scratched 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.



Because You Came to Me
by Michael R. Burch

Because you came to me with sweet compassion
and kissed my furrowed brow and smoothed my hair,
I do not love you after any fashion,
but wildly, in despair.

Because you came to me in my black torment
and kissed me fiercely, blazing like the sun
upon parched desert dunes, till in dawn’s foment
they melt, I am undone.

Because I am undone, you have remade me
as suns bring life, as brilliant rains endow
the earth below with leaves, where you now shade me
and bower me, somehow.



Break Time
by Michael R. Burch

for those who lost loved ones on 9-11

Intrude upon my grief; sit; take a spot
of milk to cloud the blackness that you feel;
add artificial sweeteners to conceal
the bitter aftertaste of loss. You’ll heal
if I do not. The coffee’s hot. You speak:
of bundt cakes, polls, the price of eggs. You glance
twice at your watch, cough, look at me askance.
The TV drones oeuvres of high romance
in syncopated lip-synch. Should I feel
the underbelly of Love’s warm Ideal,
its fuzzy-wuzzy tummy, and not reel
toward some dark conclusion? Disappear
to pale, dissolving atoms. Were you here?
I brush you off: like saccharine, like a tear.



911 Carousel
by Michael R. Burch

“And what rough beast ... slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”―W. B. Yeats

They laugh and do not comprehend, nor ask
which way the wind is blowing, no, nor why
the reeling azure fixture of the sky
grows pale with ash, and whispers “Holocaust.”

They think to seize the ring, life’s tinfoil prize,
and, breathless with endeavor, shriek aloud.
The voice of terror thunders from a cloud
that darkens over children adult-wise,

far less inclined to error, when a step
in any wrong direction is to fall
a JDAM short of heaven. Decoys call,
their voices plangent, honking to be shot . . .

Here, childish dreams and nightmares whirl, collide,
as East and West, on slouching beasts, they ride.



At Cædmon’s Grave
by Michael R. Burch

“Cædmon’s Hymn,” composed at the Monastery of Whitby (a North Yorkshire fishing village), is one of the oldest known poems written in the English language, dating back to around 680 A.D. According to legend, Cædmon, an illiterate Anglo-Saxon cowherd, received the gift of poetic composition from an angel; he subsequently founded a school of Christian poets. Unfortunately, only nine lines of Cædmon’s verse survive, in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Whitby, tiny as it is, reappears later in the history of English literature, having been visited, in diametric contrast, by Lewis Carroll and Bram Stoker’s ghoulish yet evocative Dracula.


At the monastery of Whitby,
on a day when the sun sank through the sea,
and the gulls shrieked wildly, jubilant, free,

while the wind and time blew all around,
I paced those dusk-enamored grounds
and thought I heard the steps resound

of Carroll, Stoker and good Bede
who walked there, too, their spirits freed
―perhaps by God, perhaps by need―

to write, and with each line, remember
the glorious light of Cædmon’s ember,
scorched tongues of flame words still engender.

Here, as darkness falls, at last we meet.
I lay this pale garland of words at his feet.

Originally published by The Lyric



Radiance
by Michael R. Burch

for Dylan Thomas

The poet delves earth’s detritus―hard toil―
for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet;
each syllable his pen excretes―dense soil,
dark images impacted, rooted clay.

The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning―
the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame
that leashes and excites its turgid surface ...
then squanders years imagining love’s the same.

Belatedly he turns to what lies broken―
the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts,
among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking
one element that scorches and uplifts.



Downdraft
by Michael R. Burch

for Dylan Thomas

We feel rather than understand what he meant
as he reveals a shattered firmament
which before him never existed.

Here, there are no images gnarled and twisted
out of too many words,
but only flocks of white birds

wheeling and flying.

Here, as Time spins, reeling and dying,
the voice of a last gull
or perhaps some spirit no longer whole,

echoes its lonely madrigal
and we feel its strange pull
on the astonished soul.

O My Prodigal!

The vents of the sky, ripped asunder,
echo this wild, primal thunder—
now dying into undulations of vanishing wings . . .

and this voice which in haggard bleak rapture still somehow downward sings.



Huntress
by Michael R. Burch

after Baudelaire

Lynx-eyed, cat-like and cruel, you creep
across a crevice dropping deep
into a dark and doomed domain.
Your claws are sheathed. You smile, insane.
Rain falls upon your path, and pain
pours down. Your paws are pierced. You pause
and heed the oft-lamented laws
which bid you not begin again
till night returns. You wail like wind,
the sighing of a soul for sin,
and give up hunting for a heart.
Till sunset falls again, depart,
though hate and hunger urge you―"On!"

Heed, hearts, your hope―the break of dawn.

Published by The HyperTexts, Dracula and His Kin and Sonnetto Poesia (Canada)



Happily Never After (the Second Curse of the ***** Toad)
by Michael R. Burch

He did not think of love of Her at all
frog-plangent nights, as moons engoldened roads
through crumbling stonewalled provinces, where toads
(nee princes) ruled in chinks and grew so small
at last to be invisible. He smiled
(the fables erred so curiously), and thought
bemusedly of being reconciled
to human flesh, because his heart was not
incapable of love, but, being cursed
a second time, could only love a toad’s . . .
and listened as inflated frogs rehearsed
cheekbulging tales of anguish from green moats . . .
and thought of her soft croak, her skin fine-warted,
his anemic flesh, and how true love was thwarted.



Because She Craved the Very Best
by Michael R. Burch

Because she craved the very best,
he took her East, he took her West;
he took her where there were no wars
and brought her bright bouquets of stars,
the blush and fragrances of roses,
the hush an evening sky imposes,
moonbeams pale and garlands rare,
and golden combs to match her hair,
a nightingale to sing all night,
white wings, to let her soul take flight ...

She stabbed him with a poisoned sting
and as he lay there dying,
she screamed, "I wanted everything!"
and started crying.



Caveat
by Michael R. Burch

If only we were not so eloquent,
we might sing, and only sing, not to impress,
but only to enjoy, to be enjoyed.

We might inundate the earth with thankfulness
for light, although it dies, and make a song
of night descending on the earth like bliss,

with other lights beyond―not to be known―
but only to be welcomed and enjoyed,
before all worlds and stars are overthrown ...

as a lover’s hands embrace a sleeping face
and find it beautiful for emptiness
of all but joy. There is no thought to love

but love itself. How senseless to redress,
in darkness, such becoming nakedness . . .

Originally published by Clementine Unbound



To the Post-Modern Muse, Floundering
by Michael R. Burch


The anachronism in your poetry
is that it lacks a future history.
The line that rings, the forward-sounding bell,
tolls death for you, for drowning victims tell
of insignificance, of eerie shoals,
of voices underwater. Lichen grows
to mute the lips of those men paid no heed,
and though you cling by fingertips, and bleed,
there is no lifeline now, for what has slipped
lies far beyond your grasp. Iron fittings, stripped,
have left the hull unsound, bright cargo lost.
The argosy of all your toil is rust.

The anchor that you flung did not take hold
in any harbor where repair is sold.

Originally published by Ironwood



Wonderland
by Michael R. Burch

We stood, kids of the Lamb, to put to test
the beatific anthems of the blessed,
the sentence of the martyr, and the pen’s
sincere religion. Magnified, the lens
shot back absurd reflections of each face―
a carnival-like mirror. In the space
between the silver backing and the glass,
we caught a glimpse of Joan, a frumpy lass
who never brushed her hair or teeth, and failed
to pass on GO, and frequently was jailed
for awe’s beliefs. Like Alice, she grew wee
to fit the door, then couldn’t lift the key.
We failed the test, and so the jury’s hung.
In Oz, “The Witch is Dead” ranks number one.



Day, and Night
by Michael R. Burch

The moon exposes pockmarked scars of craters;
her visage, veiled by willows, palely looms.
And we who rise each day to grind a living,
dream each scented night of such perfumes
as drew us to the window, to the moonlight,
when all the earth was steeped in cobalt blue―
an eerie vase of achromatic flowers
bled silver by pale starlight, losing hue.

The night begins her waltz to waiting sunrise―
adagio, the music she now hears;
and we who in the sunlight slave for succor,
dreaming, seek communion with the spheres.
And all around the night is in crescendo,
and everywhere the stars’ bright legions form,
and here we hear the sweet incriminations
of lovers we had once to keep us warm.

And also here we find, like bled carnations,
red lips that whitened, kisses drawn to lies,
that touched us once with fierce incantations
and taught us love was prettier than wise.



130 Refuted
by Michael R. Burch

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
―Shakespeare, Sonnet 130

Seas that sparkle in the sun
without its light would have no beauty;
but the light within your eyes
is theirs alone; it owes no duty.
And their kindled flame, not half as bright,
is meant for me, and brings delight.

Coral formed beneath the sea,
though scarlet-tendriled, cannot warm me;
while your lips, not half so red,
just touching mine, at once inflame me.
And the searing flames your lips arouse
fathomless oceans fail to douse.

Bright roses’ brief affairs, declared
when winter comes, will wither quickly.
Your cheeks, though paler when compared
with them?―more lasting, never prickly.

And your cheeks, though wan, so dear and warm,
far vaster treasures, need no thorns.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Love Sonnet LXVI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates between ice and fire.

I love you only because you’re the one I love;
I hate you deeply, but hatred makes me implore you all the more
so that in my inconstancy
I do not see you, but love you blindly.

Perhaps January’s frigid light
will consume my heart with its cruel rays,
robbing me of the key to contentment.

In this tragic plot, I ****** myself
and I will die loveless because I love you,
because I love you, my Love, in fire and in blood.



Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.

I long for your liquid laughter,
for your sunburned hands like savage harvests.
I lust for your fingernails' pale marbles.
I want to devour your ******* like almonds, whole.

I want to ingest the sunbeams singed by your beauty,
to eat the aquiline nose from your aloof face,
to lick your eyelashes' flickering shade.

I pursue you, snuffing the shadows,
seeking your heart's scorching heat
like a puma prowling the heights of Quitratue.



Love Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I do not love you like coral or topaz,
or the blazing hearth’s incandescent white flame;
I love you as obscure things are embraced in the dark ...
secretly, in shadows, unguessed & unnamed.

I love you like shrubs that refuse to blossom
while pregnant with the radiance of mysterious flowers;
now, thanks to your love, an earthy fragrance
lives dimly in my body’s odors.

I love you without knowing―how, when, why or where;
I love you forthrightly, without complications or care;
I love you this way because I know no other.

Here, where “I” no longer exists ... so it seems ...
so close that your hand on my chest is my own,
so close that your eyes close gently on my dreams.



Sonnet XLV
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don't wander far away, not even for a day, because―
how can I explain? A day is too long ...
and I’ll be waiting for you, like a man in an empty station
where the trains all stand motionless.

Don't leave me, my dear, not even for an hour, because―
then despair’s raindrops will all run blurrily together,
and the smoke that drifts lazily in search of a home
will descend hazily on me, suffocating my heart.

Darling, may your lovely silhouette never dissolve in the surf;
may your lashes never flutter at an indecipherable distance.
Please don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because then you'll have gone far too far
and I'll wander aimlessly, amazed, asking all the earth:
Will she ever return? Will she spurn me, dying?



Imperfect Sonnet
by Michael R. Burch

A word before the light is doused: the night
is something wriggling through an unclean mind,
as rats creep through a tenement. And loss
is written cheaply with the moon’s cracked gloss
like lipstick through the infinite, to show
love’s pale yet sordid imprint on us. Go.

We have not learned love yet, except to cleave.
I saw the moon rise once ... but to believe ...
was of another century ... and now ...
I have the urge to love, but not the strength.

Despair, once stretched out to its utmost length,
lies couched in squalor, watching as the screen
reveals "love's" damaged images: its dreams ...
and ******* limply, screams and screams.

Originally published by Sonnet Scroll



Mayflies
by Michael R. Burch

These standing stones have stood the test of time
but who are you
and what are you
and why?

As brief as mist, as transient, as pale ...
Inconsequential mayfly!

Perhaps the thought of love inspired hope?
Do midges love? Do stars bend down to see?
Do gods commend the kindnesses of ants
to aphids? Does one eel impress the sea?

Are mayflies missed by mountains? Do the stars
regret the glowworm’s stellar mimicry
the day it dies? Does not the world grind on
as if it’s no great matter, not to be?

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose.
And yet somehow you’re everything to me.

Originally published by Clementine Unbound



Artificial Smile
by Michael R. Burch

I’m waiting for my artificial teeth
to stretch belief, to hollow out the cob
of zealous righteousness, to grasp life’s stub
between clenched molars, and yank out the grief.

Mine must be art-official―zenlike Art―
a disembodied, white-enameled grin
of Cheshire manufacture. Part by part,
the human smile becomes mock porcelain.

Till in the end, the smile alone remains:
titanium-based alloys undestroyed
with graves’ worm-eaten contents, all the pains
of bridgework unrecalled, and what annoyed

us most about the corpses rectified
to quaintest dust. The Smile winks, deified.



Modern Appetite
by Michael R. Burch

It grumbled low, insisting it would feast
on blood and flesh, etcetera, at least
three times a day. With soft lubricious grease

and pale salacious oils, it would ease
its way through life. Each day―an aperitif.
Each night―a frothy bromide, for relief.

It lived on TV fare, wore pinafores,
slurped sugar-coated gumballs, gobbled S’mores.
When gas ensued, it burped and farted. ’Course,

it thought aloud, my wife will leave me. ******
are not so **** particular. Divorce
is certainly a settlement, toujours!

A Tums a day will keep the shrink away,
recalcify old bones, keep gas at bay.
If Simon says, etcetera, Mother, may
I have my hit of calcium today?


Mother of Cowards
by Michael R. Burch aka "The Loyal Opposition"

So unlike the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Spread-eagled, showering gold, a strumpet stands:
A much-used trollop with a torch, whose flame
Has long since been extinguished. And her name?
"Mother of Cowards!" From her enervate hand
Soft ash descends. Her furtive eyes demand
Allegiance to her ****'s repulsive game.

"Keep, ancient lands, your wretched poor!" cries she
With scarlet lips. "Give me your hale, your whole,
Your huddled tycoons, yearning to be pleased!
The wretched refuse of your toilet hole?
Oh, never send one unwashed child to me!
I await Trump's pleasure by the gilded bowl!"

Originally published by Light



Premonition
by Michael R. Burch

Now the evening has come to a close and the party is over ...
we stand in the doorway and watch as they go―
each stranger, each acquaintance, each unembraceable lover.

They walk to their cars and they laugh as they go,
though we know their warm laughter’s the wine ...
then they pause at the road where the dark asphalt flows
endlessly on toward Zion ...

and they kiss one another as though they were friends,
and they promise to meet again “soon” ...
but the rivers of Jordan roll on without end,
and the mockingbird calls to the moon ...

and the katydids climb up the cropped hanging vines,
and the crickets chirp on out of tune ...
and their shadows, defined by the cryptic starlight,
seem spirits torn loose from their tombs.

And I know their brief lives are just eddies in time,
that their hearts are unreadable runes
to be wiped clean, like slate, by the dark hand of fate
when their corpses lie ravaged and ruined ...

You take my clenched fist and you give it a kiss
as though it were something you loved,
and the tears fill your eyes, brimming with the soft light
of the stars winking gently above ...

Then you whisper, "It's time that we went back inside;
if you'd like, we can sit and just talk for a while."
And the hope in your eyes burns too deep, so I lie
and I say, "Yes, I would," to your small, troubled smile.

I rather vividly remember writing this poem after an office party the year I co-oped with AT&T (at that time the largest company in the world, with presumably a lot of office parties). This would have been after my sophomore year in college, making me around 20 years old. The poem is “true” except that I was not the host because the party was at the house of one of the upper-level managers. Nor was I dating anyone seriously at the time.



Your e-Verse
by Michael R. Burch

for the posters and posers on www.fillintheblank.com

I cannot understand a word you’ve said
(and this despite an adequate I.Q.);
it must be some exotic new haiku
combined with Latin suddenly undead.

It must be hieroglyphics mixed with Greek.
Have Pound and T. S. Eliot been cloned?
Perhaps you wrote it on the ***, so ******
you spelled it backwards, just to be oblique.

I think you’re very funny, so, “Yuk! Yuk!”
I know you must be kidding; didn’t we
write crap like this and call it “poetry,”
a form of verbal exercise, P.E.,
in kindergarten, when we ran “amuck?”

Oh, sorry, I forgot to “make it new.”
Perhaps I still can learn a thing or two
from someone tres original, like you.



http://www.firesermon.com
by Michael R. Burch

your gods have become e-vegetation;
your saints―pale thumbnail icons; to enlarge
their images, right-click; it isn’t hard
to populate your web-site; not to mention
cool sound effects are nice; Sound Blaster cards
can liven up dull sermons, [zing some fire];
your drives need added Zip; you must discard
your balky paternosters: ***!!! Desire!!!
these are the watchwords, catholic; you must
as Yahoo! did, employ a little lust :)
if you want great e-commerce; hire a bard
to spruce up ancient language, shed the dust
of centuries of sameness; lameness *****;
your gods grew blurred; go 3D; scale; adjust.

Published by: Ironwood, Triplopia and Nisqually Delta Review

This poem pokes fun at various stages of religion, all tied however elliptically to T. S. Eliot's "Fire Sermon: (1) The Celts believed that the health of the land was tied to the health of its king. The Fisher King's land was in peril because he had a physical infirmity. One bad harvest and it was the king's fault for displeasing the gods. A religious icon (the Grail) could somehow rescue him. Strange logic! (2) The next stage brings us the saints, the Catholic church, etc. Millions are slaughtered, tortured and enslaved in the name of religion. Strange logic! (3) The next stage brings us to Darwin, modernism and "The Waste Land.” Religion is dead. God is dead. Man is a glorified fungus! We'll evolve into something better adapted to life on Earth, someday, if we don’t destroy it. But billions continue to believe in and worship ancient “gods.” Strange logic! (4) The current stage of religion is summed up by this e-mail: the only way religion can compete today is as a form of flashy entertainment. ***** a website before it's too late. Hire some **** supermodels and put the evangelists on the Internet!



The State of the Art (?)
by Michael R. Burch

Has rhyme lost all its reason
and rhythm, renascence?
Are sonnets out of season
and poems but poor pretense?

Are poets lacking fire,
their words too trite and forced?
What happened to desire?
Has passion been coerced?

Shall poetry fade slowly,
like Latin, to past tense?
Are the bards too high and holy,
or their readers merely dense?



Plastic Art or Night Stand
by Michael R. Burch

Disclaimer: This is a poem about artificial poetry, not love dolls! The victim is the Muse.

We never questioned why “love” seemed less real
the more we touched her, and forgot her face.
Absorbed in molestation’s sticky feel,
we failed to see her staring into space,
her doll-like features frozen in a smile.
She held us in her marionette’s embrace,
her plastic flesh grown wet and slick and vile.
We groaned to feel our urgent fingers trace
her undemanding body. All the while,
she lay and gaily bore her brief disgrace.
We loved her echoed passion’s squeaky air,
her tongueless kisses’ artificial taste,
the way she matched, then raised our reckless pace,
the heart that seemed to pound, but was not there.



“Whoso List to Hunt” is a famous early English sonnet written by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) in the mid-16th century.

Whoever Longs to Hunt
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
loose translation/interpretation/modernization by Michael R. Burch

Whoever longs to hunt, I know the deer;
but as for me, alas!, I may no more.
This vain pursuit has left me so bone-sore
I'm one of those who falters, at the rear.
Yet friend, how can I draw my anguished mind
away from the doe?
                                   Thus, as she flees before
me, fainting I follow.
                                     I must leave off, therefore,
since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Whoever seeks her out,
                                         I relieve of any doubt,
that he, like me, must spend his time in vain.
For graven with diamonds, set in letters plain,
these words appear, her fair neck ringed about:
Touch me not, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame.



Alien Nation
by Michael R. Burch

for J. S. S., a "Christian" poet who believes in “hell”

On a lonely outpost on Mars
the astronaut practices “speech”
as alien to primates below
as mute stars winking high, out of reach.

And his words fall as bright and as chill
as ice crystals on Kilimanjaro―
far colder than Jesus’s words
over the “fortunate” sparrow.

And I understand how gentle Emily
felt, when all comfort had flown,
gazing into those inhuman eyes,
feeling zero at the bone.

Oh, how can I grok his arctic thought?
For if he is human, I am not.



Keywords/Tags: sonnet, sonnets, meter, rhythm, music, musical, rhyme, form, formal verse, formalist, tradition, traditional, romantic, romanticism, rose, fire, passion, desire, love, heart, number, numbers, mrbson
Nico Julleza Mar 2018
The seraph sky on ebony night,
A white marble of placid light.
Casting to the living glass,
Haunting, the feeling's elapse.

A time of gardenia drapes,
Hanging the mourning wall.
Scent of ambrosia fogging,
The pavement covered in moss.

Portraits of Celts amidst,
Drifting upon moonlight mist.
Eyes delving, ears opt to hear,
Voices whisper of ancient fear.

An oracle muses the unguided,
As trees speaks the truth.
Humanity strives to be the art,
Yet only remembers by a few.
#MoonBright #Humanity #Haunting #WeAreOne #Nature #LoveInOne

(NCJ)POETRYProductions. ©2018
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2015
once rastafarianism entered language ploys with wittgenstein's language games in mind it misplaced pronouns, existentialists just dittoed the signifying moral singular with the un-signifying immoral plural; like i was partly holocaust bound, ha ha (example); cherub and a scotch bonnet of my opinion tingling a contest of: chilli v. pepper v. horseradish. let's just say i'm a plasterer rather than i.q. me as a drinker. slaps in chequers on a bench to sober up momentarily.*

trust the saxon, trust the saxon to speak worse german
than the bavarian, and entrust german to the turk
above the saxon; trust the audacious saxon to leave the alphabet's
diacritic out, to spell like a roman would, from the celtic netherlands of gloom
in scotch egg on a couch, the potato of them all,
trust them with audacity and vocabulary  to conquer the world:  
relieving us norse with ****** never mind
the geese of brazil; exact roman care for all dwindles and fibrous excesses,
conquer the world what have you,
at least you have black skin and opera sunsets
while i have white skin and grey clots of 7pm in september,
or as the censors announced:
rather my vanity than the proof of god,
rather me than you in the minotaur's prison of winding zigzag vocabulary;
you're left politico correct i have three thousand
longboats waiting, you're right i have the same number
awaiting wind and sail. trust the saxons among bavarians to do the following:
but you have the caribbean and that's worth more than kenya
in a 100m sprint. you have the caribbean and i'm african,
nuance the scandinavian proust waging war with
a burnt toothpick not giving enough warmth. each me of the lost tribe walks asking:
blondish in the sea i dare you to walk and reason
the heraclitean suburbia of the river of emptied housed-in arsons worth a life.
come alaskan winters come!
trust the saxons to conquer the world without a holy implied for empires
and lost tracts in order that the romans might utilise proper a and proper o
while the saxons in **** with normans and celts said:
we'll roman-speak about the amazon girlies while our girls party out
a craft of whitened cotton for champagne ship-sailed virginity!
trust the saxons to speak worse german thank turks in order to bind by migration
an island as a ship, and sail away sail away wondering
why the roots of other european nations used the goggles to speak
as much microscope as microphone when accenting
and, in so doing accepted dialectics rather than a pompous excess of fibrous ginger plastic
known as dialects: in england dialectics is known as dialects - caged owls elsewhere
didn't coo coo but mooed with gags in nostrils sneezing when snorkelling:
we say error in sussex and say wok cumin seed sizzle in essex;
close enough to be a cockney in hackney rhymes up a mango.
MdAsadullah Dec 2014
Amongst Orientals and Blacks I smothered.
Presence amidst Mestizos was absurd.

Amongst the Arabs stranger I felt.
Choked amongst Whites and Celts.

Amongst the Eurasian lonely I was.
Feeling of an alien 'tween Desis 'twas.

Standing amongst stones I was pleased.
Felt comfortable, felt relieved and eased.
Ben Jones Jun 2014
The news will say we're suffering from excess immigration
That a rampant hoard of foreigners has fallen on our nation
But truthfully, there hasn't been a native Briton here
Since people dressed in mammoth skin and hunted with a spear

Our language is a mixture of a dozen different tongues
We munch our way through poppadoms, fajitas and fu-yungs
When cheering at a football match, we're infamously vocal
Our teams may be the finest but the players won’t be local

Genetically, a Briton is a multi-cultured stew
With Romans, Saxons, Vikings and the Celts, to name a few
Our national drink is Indian, the Germans make our beer
The TV comes from China and the table from IKEA

Potatoes from America and onions grown in Spain
A multitude of British things arrive by boat and plane
The rain that falls upon our hills has blown from over seas
And with it come migrating birds to nest in British trees

The Royal Windsor family have Greek and German genes
So think about just what it is that being British means
We're stronger with our differences, the best of humankind
Our nation, not an island but a common state of mind
Jeff Stier Aug 2016
Druid is Derwydd
in our tongue
the Welsh of my fathers

Our land is called Cymru
and we have thrived here
since ancient times

We live by our cattle
first
our hearts and families
second
and our crops a poor third

We are taught that
a mist descended on our land
in the before times
and cleansed the earth of life

And that a new people came
our people
and brought with them
cattle
all of the trades
and a gift for song

We were called Celts
but now we are proudly
Welsh
the dragon is our badge
and red war our way of life

The Derwydd
are our guides
they follow the stars
know the mystic tides
teach our young
and ease our old
into the afterworld

Never cross a Druid
they say
or feel your tongue
curl into burnt leather
in your mouth

Please a Druid
and luck will
lay by your side

I am called Caedmon
wise warrior
son of Lhur
born in the shade
of a great oak

I was taught all of the high arts
poetry
music
and war

If ever you travel
through our fortress-locked land
you will be welcome
at my hearth

Come
bring your sweet pipes
and play
bare your sword arm
and raid with us

When we return
cattle rich
then the feast will begin
then the bards will sing
and poetry will open your mind
to the harmonies of heaven.
For my Welsh forbears.
Mateuš Conrad Dec 2019
i can clearly hear how english mutates...
a book review by a channel... better than food...
the book he's reviewing is goETHE's captain faust:
and the non-avengers...
but no...

i don't hear: stick an umlaut anywhere you please...
i, "for some reason"... do not hear
a: Θ... a göethe... or a goëthe (ladin alphabet -
the germans know about this)...
there is this... goe-ether association...
it's sometimes a riddle of goë, göe...
or quiet simply...
the remains of the ancient latin grapheme (œ)?

educated people make this distinction -
and they'll catch "you" out on it...
since... they represent the Hyacinth Bucket brigade...
gynocentrism doing a snail-trail:
one step forward... two steps back...
it's beside what the linguist "says":
a bucket is a bucket a ***** is a *****...
otherwise? glorifying such a harsh reality
of a surname like: bucket... but not beckett?
no... "samuel"? well then...
it's not a bucket if it's somehow
translated via chernobyll as: bouquet...
is it?! is it?
because even in french: they self-cannibalise...
i.e. they "eat" some letters...
they write one language: but speak another...
what isn't bucket what is nonetheless
bouquet? well... isn't it: bouque-?
it's not even that... boo-k for the ones that
still hear... and can write grafitti schlang...
in some variation of a german...

becuase educated people can get away
with treating GOETHE...
as?  '/ˈɡɜːrtə, ˈɡeɪtə'...
or in simple-me-and-you being bilingual...
fiddling around we arrive at:
Göerte... which is "said"...
but this "lunatic asylum" exception has
to be written: with a clarity of a *******
Greek THETA... a fin! the end!
which always makes lying easier...
when you can: say (a)... but... but...
imply (b)... like some "metaphor"...
some forever useful tool of nuance...
some "spectacle"...
it's easier to lie when... you say (a)
but are "implying" (b)...
then you can blame it on...
not allow the literacy of the masses:
quite as much... you require... exceptions
to the rule... to **** out the lesser educated
"people"...

don't get me started...
born? Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski...
perhaps i should have never left...
3 years in Edinburgh...
over a month in St. Petersburg...
somewhere in Paris, Stochholm, Venice...
Athens... Belgrade from a distance...
Amsterdam... two weeks in Kenya...
and a nonchalant attitude surrounding
London... a strong distaste for Warsaw...
a myth of Cracow...

and no, i haven't been everywhere...
but... after a while... does it really matter
where you go, if you're bringing
expectations with you?
expectations and postcards?
clichés? clichés expectations and postcards?
and... a whole lot of strangers
you haven't met?
tourism and: feeding the ghost town
mentality... perhaps a ghost town would be
something to behold... instead of this...
atypical metropolitan casualness of avoiding
each other... busier busier: and no more
busy than once pronounced dead...
but wait for it: you're at least given a "scene"...

but no... i know one language that
makes pedantic orthographical observations...
but i also know a language that...
write one way... speaks another...
whichever way, best, to suit it...

and you "know" it would only be Fa-Ber'g -
no... borrow the j- from je suis...
if that last E was not an acute É...
but an grave È (grave... or? gráve...
grrrr'av... not a hey hey grave...
GRA-Vity)...

hence? my point exactly..
if the diacritical markers are respected
in fwench... with an acute É and a grave È...
why do "we" need... I(i) and J(j)?
why not... I(ı) and J(ȷ)?

besides... ever imagine writing an autobiography
like a Knausgård... defender of the runes
for a sentence in volume 1...
major google-maps ****** *** volume 2...
i write that with a "glee"...
i mean... you can be immediately be put off
writing an autobiography...
just to avoid the mediocre descriptive elements
of using something more complicated
than a hammer...
for an otherwise... less than a hammer's worth
of banality: evaluation of modern banality /
procrastination...
no one we have been given these complicated
tools... and to the best of our abilities we
best procrastinate, using them...
i hardly think a hammer would be used
to... pretend to play the drums...
but yes: Knausgård... the defender of runes...
irony... but the mr. google-earth guy to turn to...

yes... and before i discovered a past...
there were the runes... and there was
forever this latin morph of the barbarians
"thieving"... but there was also the glagolitic script...
apparently! and before that there was the greek!
and... somehow... i did arrive at having
to master some vague understanding of
mother cyrillic!

- but prior to... did you know what
slavs love cabbage? all the pakistani point this
out: slav love cabbage!
today? i watched the film Layer Cake
and made some cabbage soup...
Layer Cake being? the pre-to-a-bond-film
taster for the actor Daniel Craig...
it was hardly a Guy ******* Ritchie film...
woz itz? but... a decent actor advert...
with "hindsight"...
if i watched the film then...
or as i whatched the now...
and all the known actors jumped the train...
well... cabbage soup... base?
a decent polish / jewish chicken broth...
most of the chicken goes into a ***...
except the *******: you make a *******
roulade with that...
and proper potato bakes...
potato bakes like Heston Blumethal
boils a soft egg...
tatties in cold water... until they start boiling...
then you hunch over them...
boil them for a decent fiver...
turn off the heat...
again... hunch over them...
like an inquistive condor waitig for
the water to stop bubbling...
asking the question: are we all ready...
for the oven? yes, my toy soldiers,
are we, ready?

apparently they taste like christmas
tatties in waistcoats!
my my... what a lovely affair!
cabbage soup? you really need a complete
lack of imagination and a work-around
using root veg...
the european way...
but what is preferred is ensuring
you make a cabbage soup like...
a slav treats a cabbage like a frenchman treats
an onion: you suffocate it...
an hour minimum...
until the crass ******* boils out...
and you're left with...
a sweetness... and softness...
bay leaf all-spice (english spice) included...
some kiełbasa (etymology?
root... kieł- derived from the plural?
kły... canines... suffix -basa?
baza - base... canine-base...
something that requires an understanding
that elevates the dog, "debases" the man...
no quran reader will understand this:
for lack of a better word: shaming food...

where would pakistani cuisine be...
without the pantheon of hindu spices?!
i'll eat like a dog and in so doing:
live a tier above a king...
i still find it highly unimaginative...
to call one fruit "forbidden"
and one meat: "impure"...
whatever Gabriel spoke to Muhammad...
never really explained crab meat...
crab meat crab meat...
the Maldive muslims eat crab meat...
what's crab meat again:
when it concentrates a comparison
with ol' porky porky? scavenger of the seas...
what's with the muslim beef on pork?
and god was critical...
of his perfected animal worthy of
consumption... looks pretty silly from
Beijing... so Beijing is ensuring that Muslims
"look silly"... well... "live"... silly...
so god was so... this that and the other...
then he lent his "all knowing wisdom" and said...
no... this one animal... which you can...
butcher and make use of...
all that's missing is the oink and the hoofs!
or whatever it was: i can't eat the oink,
the grunt remain's the bacon's owner...
and perhaps the "hoofs"...
but such a pristine animal...
tapeworms come... much larger in size...
from aquatic flesh... so...
tic-toc... tic-toc... pull a sly porky on me or...
Gabriel my ***...

the Pwophet sez!
much easier these days: to, "get away" with "it"...
camel jockeys turned oil barons...
yachts... whizzed-up-*******-white-****-****...
and never... the odd-ball from
that long extended lineage of the family
living with a cuddles *****, soft toys...
east of Beirut...
that pencil girth's woe explosion in the sky...
"built" by people...
who employ slave Bangladeshis for
a sunday's worth of sabbath cricket in the desert...
i thought that deserts were only good
for waiting for qurans and dinosaur blood
and myopia and... the odd dehydration
hallucinations?!

i'll eat some sushi to sober up before
i accompany my mother: circa 60 getting
a hip replacement surgery done on her...
i'll sober up: but first things first:
spew...

mind you... below you will find some
ancients inscriptions...
i had to wonder: if the precursor text
of the anglo-sphere people...
the germans and "celts" of the british isles...
the welsh... the scandinavians...
was bound to runes...
before the latin men came...
what did "we", the slavs, use?

before the greeks allowed us entry into
the realm of mediating the otherwise:
quasi-fathomable?
cyrillic is what came: AFTER...
but there was a prior...
i'm no longer interested in the prior...
no more than i am interested in greek...
i once slurred russian cyrillic
for not having any diacritical markers...
i knew they had them...
but that they were... crude...
for lack of a better word...

how does that theory sound?
the: ex Africae omnis est Africanus...
sorry... what?!
giving my scrutiny of phonetic encoding...
am i closer to speak...
or thinking, and if not thinking,
then, reading?!
by the looks of it...
i devolved from encoding in
chinese... perhaps not so much:
sanskrit... but i most certainly suffered
moving across Siberia: obviously: not "i"...

mind you: i've looked at "it" and thought...
me, reproduce? add a stranger to the equation
of my family? i'm just happy to end
the libeage... thank god i don't have
some inheritence complex abounding...
no expectation, no "legacy" akin
to a surname like Rhodes (circa NY)...
i was born with one ****** surname,
which changed... i'll die with another ******
surname: that never made it to a status
of Eshlert... nonetheless! i'll leave...
like a ******* Einstein of an acronym:
E = MC... good for me! bravo ty! bravo ja!

beside the egyptian hieroglyphs...
i'm yet to read something...
from... Congo... perhaps i'm just too ignorant...
or the -igger shade was just too much
that it... grabbed my attention and
i forgot that the victim olympics didn't
happen every 4 years...
but every... whimsical time-span of...
a quarter of the length of a fortnite...

whatever: all out of africa implies...
i'm writing in a devolved chinese...
frozen bits across the siberian fickle desert...
next stopover? Novosibirsk!
no need for pyramids in Novosibirsk...
no "awe" to be found...
when you're toe-dead numb from
frost bite.... is there?!

my letters are a sieve... they allow meaning
through like hands praying to cusp water!
it's, the, reality...
you have ****-wit socialists on one side...
and then... this hyper-inflated
darwinism is all historism on the other...
middle ground, people!
"democracy"! i stand stand both the marxism...
or the darwinism... but arguments failed...
or? we can have the extreme of both ends
of the argument! enough of reading
Pasternak will teach you...
hey... shhh shhh... the collective can
congregate any minute now...
they don't need that many intelligent people
to rally them...
what your, "your" side needs, though?
if enough brass people: stupid enough
to entertain, to lulluby...
em... that's now much to "go on"... is it?
the intelligent with pour gasoline
on a fire...
the entertainers will simply pour
cold milk into a saucepan that contains
milk you're warming to...
melt some butter some honey and an egg yolk
to self-remedy: devoid of big pharma influences...
a witches' brew for a cold and soar throat...

side note: do i "worry" about not having children?
if i lived on the Faroe islands,
Greeland, Iceland, Norway -
i most probably would probably mind...
small town mentality: enlarged...
then again: my family, "my" and "family"
is not exactly accomodating...
why am i not spending time with my grandparents?
at least one side... the "patriarchal" side
drops off: accomodating the madonna anyways...
a sister (my mother) and a brother (my uncle)
are waging a war...
this... "eastender" soap opera is...
i don't have the finances to grativate away
from it...
enter children? and they'd be more ******
up than i already am with my libido
and no outlet... i've stopped seeing prostitutes:
no because i felt "bad":
that one time we only pretended to be
leeching / kissing oysters just because
i forgot to trim my ***** hair:
like some western feminist argument
about the exploitation of romanian women "matters"...
when... the labourer drones of men
of building sites... coming in to work...
hangover... might perhaps... stop...
fuelling the english lush economy...
i didn't want to have children because:
family-wise? things, "things" are messy...
and there's no magic carpet to get me out
of here... not when the last surviving remnant
of a past... i.e. my grandmother,
talks to my dementia riddled grandfather
with the words...
and he stresses them: you no good...
skurwysyn!
elaborate? sure! z-kurwy-syn...
from-a-*****-son..
my grandfather's mother...
well... let's put it in facts...
my grandfather is an illegitimate (
oh **** me, i spelled that right, drunk)
son... his mamma then married...
the father of this illegitimate child...
was a polyglot... spoke 7 languages...
emigrated to the U.S. of A...
remarried, fostered some shards of glass...
and sent his last postcard...
from Niagara Falls... before jumping
into the kamikazee sun...
oh my family is perfect...
then this mother of his...
had two children with a man...
who would beat my grandfather...
which is why he became a "pioneer"
coal-miner aged 15 or 14 or 16...
then this one kid ended up being
fostered... then this "watermelon" of a kid
(nickname) came out...
from a love affair... and when the "*****" died...
his quasi-foster father lived with him...
and in this custard: he...
the father semi-god-know's what...
abused the old man for putting up with
him as a love-child: in wedlock...
and... well thank god there was
no epitaph to begin an end with...

me and children? i am gracious,
i am kind... i don't want them to inherit this
history... which is worse than
a history of germany... at least those *******
had the nazis... which is worthwhile
in terms of exploiting them via video games
as those: evilz badz guyz!

i always think: the sooner i'm dead -
the more chances i have
to either dream... or breathe...
currently i quasi the former and accept
the reality of the latter...
but me and children? my, own, brood?
em... for some capitalistic driven darwinism
pressure ploy of narrative?
taxes and retirement plans for
the western: placebo: aged?
grand'm'ah and gwand'p'ah not fit under
the same roof... set them on the butcher's
path toward the "shop" of wrinkle
and: pristine effortless economic
endeavor... the pig's the lot...
economic meat and... about as barren as a dinner
plate scooped up for examination
once a pauper sat before it to supper...
ingenious! if only, if only we were all born
into a Charlie ******* Dickens' lot of life!
then, only then, we could, we could
perhaps, perhaps: write about it!

i have seen how people have lived their lives...
how... they had wish to write about it...
which always involved a lot of other people -
movie scripts written by directors
and not... actual manuscripts of scripters...
they would write... but then:
started to gag from **** at the mere of thought
of being: brutal, honest, honing...

people either write an honest autobiography,
they ghost it: have someone write a biography,
they write an autobiography that's
designated as: tabloid...
but most importantly... they forget...
a "Moscow"...
when i was in Moscow... i felt like i was
in London for the very first time...
a last time...

i did mention that i didn't envy the russian
diacritical approach...
the odd: miss and "there"...
but no... i didn't envy them...
to me there was no russian orthography...
there is an orthography: which you mind
above any metaphysical discussion...
when, and only when... aesthetics comes
into play...
i.e. rz = ż and ó = u and ch (cerp i ha) = h (samo ha)
this is how orthography is born...
sorry... i'm too "busy" dealing with
orthographic ******* to even mind
your "metaphysics" or a death of (it): interim...

as i stood at the feet of the tower of babel...
i started to su doku the pieces that
pleased my eyes... and the pieces...
left in leftover arabic squiggles of
the remnants of the 20th century...
and the new emergence of environmental
beijing free-of-syndromes to spawn
the 21st... or...
the child of a one-child-state-policy
without a Beijing... only a gradual evaluation
of... concerns for...
not giving birth to yet another ****-wit
of the world's counter to: another
****** of a gullible persuasion...
given that law is blind...
he must have been born: deaf!

- you didn't see me coming;
i didn't even see you leave... -

since the greek letters i tend to most "forget"
are:
- gamma lower-case (γ) because
of the upper-case upsilon (Υ)
- lower-case zeta (ζ) becaue
of the lower-case "11" (ξ)
- eta, lower-case (η) is no real grief
with lower-case EPSILON (ε)
until... you enter the cyrillic
"debate" of е and э...
- lower-case NU (ν) and lower-case
UPSILON (υ)
- Ξ (Θ, Φ) i.e.: XI, PSI, CHI, PHI...
return: that first 'un' is an ale'ks...
alex... but it's not an X in the way that
CHI expresses itself in CHurCH...
lay-teΞ...
- then again... greek orthography begins
in SIGMA... those... quasi-germans...
those remnants of the northern / teutonic
crusade... those Pruσσianς...
or... Prußianς...
the greek F and the greek "F"...
key into a keyhole: Φ...
key turning in a keyhole: Θ...
the iota of four uses... Θ, Φ, Ξ... Ψ...

but that's only the greek... i will not touch
on the glagolitic... until, barely skimming
the draft months earlier...
until i come with my own diacritical markers
and show you: how i was wrong...
yes... the russians do use these markers...
but they, mostly... do not "accent" them...

because i'm no Ezra Pound i didn't have
to imagine going as far back
as the Taoist ideogram...
because i remained bound to the anchor
of europe and...
i really didn't find anything of worth
in africa encoding: silence into their
verbiage with anything:
beside the odd spell of hieroglyphs...
so? i am not an Idaho man...
or whatever mid-western miss-western
******* the genius came from...

i don't have an ideogram:
i have a synonym... the sound is exactly
the same... but Charon 'ave their eyes!
mind you...
ądam and ęwa are off limits...
as is: ł... then again: given that i write in english...
em... "yes, and no"...

but here's my rubric... a rubric implies:
i will not narrate this crap:

don't get me started on the russian variations
of Y... i once said... because the greeks had
names for their letters... and the romans didn't...
well... in western slavic: Y "why, I" has a name:
e'GREK... iGrek... e and i are interchanged
between the western slavs and the islanders...
but the russians?
let me Shakespeare that for you:
pre-scriptum - don't ask me...
how oh how a german umlaut infiltrated
the alphabet: i blame catherine the great...
you have...

е (ye)
ё (yo)
й (-y-) - which acts like a "ȷUDAS"
ы (ý) - alt. to? ıGREK
ю (yu)
я (ya)

all that's missing is a: иы variation?!
let me check my pentagram of vowels...
e, o... u, a... oh right... IO-T'AH-T'AH-T'AH...
sinking the ******* POTEMPKIN!

it's for the best: i'm entrenched in two languages...
which makes me "schizophrenic" /
bilingual... ergo? i have to write in at least:
four... pepper in some latin etc.....
and modern slang? i need that...
and some german... and perhaps a dash
of Gaelic... and some scandi-navigational
pseudo-romancing the rosetta stone...

the rest is quiet "simple"...
a french-atypical acute... because there's no gr'ah-v'eh!
grave ole...
and a dot... like the dot used for no real purpose
in english...

i.e. ь involves the acute...
while the ъ involes the "horde" symbol...
either the dot above the Z in ż or the caron
above the R: ř...
alternative interpretations invoke
even more: 'hide and seek" mechanisms
of the russian Y...
  объект: interJEct with an obJEct...
thus? there just seem to be gradations
of hiding a why (y) with its added vowel...
and its mutant й... crescent mongol moon...
and all the rest of "it"...
since when you "borrow": yew borrow...
you get something along the lines
of: e.g.:

ć.        ць: c.f. surnames ending with -CKI
ń.       нь
ó.      "u" or? Loonin...
ś.        cь
ź.        зь
dz.     ž (dzik - boar - the wild adjective is a tautology)    
ż.      ř       rz   (зъ) or? ж...
ł.       woad... łagodny (he - gentle)
                        łagodna (she - gentle)
š.      sz.      ш             (sh)
č.      cz.      ч               (ch... you're not foreign
to graphemes... mr. Æ ms. Œ...
you simply haven't seen it applied
to consonants... only vowels!)
щ     šč     (szczypta - pinch -
a germanic, saxon "ch" is a cz...
or a caron above the C...
ch' ch'.... akin to the caron above the S...
sh' sh'... so far away from "god": YHWH...
yet so close, so, close!)
ha ha... a "dangling bit"...
and i thought the russians weren't
good at hiding "things"... from ш to щ
you have hidden: a caron a "c"...
a ****'s CHeap... in a dangling "left-over"...
of an otherwise caron S... heap of SH SH ****...

in terms of the cerp and ha and samo ha?
the greek χ (chi) comes into play...
but not like a cheeze...
more like a vowel-catcher breath...
eerie as ****... a HA HA with...
cHA cHA! i.e. like the surds you allow
hindu words access to: gnostic -
'nostic... or... knife... i.e. 'nife...

it's no surprise for me, now...
out of all the black caribbean kids,
the indian and pakistani,
the africans... i was one of the first
to: come out swinging from under
the iron curtain:
distrust levels? high... near almighty...
not enough "japanese" in me
to squander a late debt from
Hiroshima or some other etc.

in some remote original draft...

as ever, i drink, and am a nobody, but then i find myself inclined to look upon the god of gods: whatever remains of worth for the phonetic encoding... whether latin, greek, rune, cyrillic, or ⰒⰑⰃⰀⰐ ⰒⰉⰔⰏ (another googlewhack)... the glagolitic phonetic encoding... sure, first they'll ban the runes in sweden, before realißing that... there's another alphabet... the glagolith...
                  Ⱉ = Ω, given Ѡ = ω...
         this alphabet has been suppressed, long enough!
to be honest? i've never seen a more beautiful letter,
anywhere, other than in the glatolith...
     Ⰿ = M = ᛗ...
                      maybe that's why i like my given names
so much...
                            ⰏⰀⰕⰅⰖⰞ
                 i too! i too have a past!
             i don't need to peer into pseudo-arab ***
the quran religiosity of hieroglyphs
of the northern africans, camel jockeys!
                             there's, oh there's so much
more at stake than the runes...
                what of the Kiev Rus vikings?
this, this is their language:
                ⰕⰑ          "ⰏⰑⰆⰅ"          (może = maybe)    
(to = this)
                                                   (ⰜⰀ = trzeba, trza /
                                                            tsa)­
            ⰕⰔⰑ (tsa)           ⰃⰀ (ga)     ⰂⰀⰓⰉ (vari)
               (gadać = converse... gavari)

    Ⰴ (d)                ⰆⰫⰕ (żyt = fathoming life)

                             ⰆⰫⰕ (worthwile noting:
this is out lot of, a, life)...

      ⰛⰫⰛⰍⰀ (szyszka = cone, of the ᚦᛁᚱ /
                                     ⰡⰑⰄⰟⰀ - fir /
                              jodła tree)

see, i can't solve crossword puzzles...
      i don't know where i would begin,
fathoming this sort of "plaything" thesaurus...
i can play a solitaire mahjong,
i can solve you a su doku puzzle
without wanting to compensate myself
by competing...
                  
   but i do know...
                    what conjured the atom,
the letter?
  what conjured the atom, the letter,
and subsequently, the alphabet?
        noun...
                  the cipher conceptualißation
of making a name, smaller,
so small, in fact...
that letter emerged, and names were
no longer indicative...
of a meaning...
  so much so, that units were
formed, fathomed...
and when merely giving names
to these units, akin to the greeks,
alpha...
        which had to become a-lpha...
and beta had to become b-eta...
          well... only thanks to the latin men...
they became songs...
sing-alongs...
   very much thanks for the H vowel
catcher of the hebrew god...
ah... said the castrato...
  b'eeh sang the castrato...
           em...
  obviously the devil managed to keep
some of the letters...
z'ed...
                 it's still bewildering...
how the latin men "reinterpreted"
the northern runes...
   as the greek men "reinterpreted"
the north eastern glagolitic script...
and to think! to think!
    Ⱃ = R = ρ = rho...
         but what happened, "elsewhere"?
ᚱ = R... but... but... where's the trill?
R, as a letter, looks like it's about
to hide a leg... and start rolling...
ripping apart all other onomatopeias
associated with the rattle of a rattlesnake,
or the sound it could make,
to associate itself with the sound
of water boiling... where did that "go"?
with the french hark "innovation",
and the english tongue...
being bitten and left numb by
a tarantula?!
                      
  point being... i never imagined myself
much of an archeologist...
i always found:
  if you state your "necessary" freedom
to speak?
you're a tongue inside one cranium,
at a particular time, in a universal space...
but, like kierkegaard,
you care more about a freedom to think?
i'm "here", i'm "there", i'm "i'm"
like heidegger might state...
                  using this very modern
language that's english...
          but then sliding back into...
an obscure region of history...
      in two places at once...
        at a universal moment in time,
in a particular space...
                   talking exhausts me,
whenever i start speaking for more than
ten minutes,
there is a cotton mouth infestation,
my tongue turns into a serpent about
to shed a layer of its skin,
and, if i'm lucky,
i will not swollow the tongue...

                    and why wouldn't the runes
be more protected, but currently under
siege -
             both the latin text and the greek
text (respectively),
had the ambition of performing an
x-ray on the runes and the glagolitic texts,
treating them as pseudo-hieroglyphics...

but they found similarities,
   which made this foreign phonetic
encoding systems relateable...

ᚠ = F
                ᚢ = U         (copernican "up-side-down")
ᚨ = A (strange sort of arithmetic, / \
                                              )
               ­ ᚱ = R (d'uh)
   ᚺ = H...
           ᛁ = I
               ᛋ = s
                ᛏ = t (what's with the "bending knee",
so much for the supposed: "arrow"),
               ᛒ = B...
           ᛖ = Σ = E...
                   ᛗ = M...
                   ᛚ = L...
                  ᛟ = o - crude version of circle...

so? the latin men had an easier way to
fathom the runes, and ingest them
into the x-ray vision of post-latin...
   the greeks with the glagolitic script?
much harder...

         Ⱂ = Π = P = ρ (rho)
                 Ⰰ = A = ᛉ = Z...
             Ⱇ = φ = ᚦ = θ...
                             Ѡ = ω...
                Ⱑ = A...
                          Ⱔ = ε....
                                            Ⱚ = θ...

but i agree... you couldn't get "our"
peoples to where we are now,
with these pseudo-hieroglyphics...
   after all: Ⰿ (M) is a beautiful letter...
in glagolitic terms...
          but... it's too complicated for us,
at this moment in time...
it might have had all the necessary
practicality in its necessary time...
that it was allocated to...
but... given people these days
are looking at X-|ɔ\
                              /
\ /_ / ?
                            how ******* hard must
it have been, when,
the phonetic encoding,
was as hard as it, to now, us,
it seems?!
                   so... whatever is happening
in sweden, right now?
       i'm not bemaoning it,
   i have a tattoo... it reads: Sienkiewicz...
the swedish deluge of 1626–29... a.d.,
          **** it, ban the runes...
i've "just" discovered the gagolitic phonetic
encoding, the sort of **** that
st. cyril and methodius had to work with,
and it wasn't as easy as translating /
incorporating the runes...

                     oh sure, i'm waiting...
                 first they ban the runes...
   then they'll have to learn something akin
to the glagolitic script...
             returning back to their x-ray
latin lettering...
                       i still can't believe that
james joyce got away with writing finnegans
wake... without ever employing a single
diacritical marker...
spewing out... what became the modern
english grafitti spreschen...
   e.g.: lolz...
                              und: L8ER...
it's like: the worst of the worst of what
already is the worst in the form
of the h'american demands for acronyms.          

after watching an old couple walk
past me into the supermarket:
    or unlike the men climbing
           the matterhorn:
   which from postcards seems so
much more majestic in its formidable
shape than the goliath everest
    (from postcards) -
                 5 miles, a dark forest,
  and i can show you where english
druids chant: satanus in excelsior!
   and i thought i spoke bad english:
it's: in excelsis satanus...
       i would have approached them,
but then i was alone,
      and there was one idiot shouting
and about a crowd of twenty disciples:
you could hear the murmur
   adhering to the chant from a distance
of about 300 metres...
                    i only had beer on me,
no goat blood, no woad pigment...
                crash a party when they
were having a party in complete
darkness?
                     it's a good thing there was
a song change on my headphones
               and for a minute i picked it up...
wait a minute: i thought i owned
these woods, walking at night?
               ragnarök blood of Hvalba:
unfortunately the norse founded
kiev,
           so if they founded kiev,
                they must have past where
i made mark as: the land immune to
                                       the black death...
if i were an academic with a stipend,
   i'd write another boorish book on the matter
to attract moths...
          but the old couple, hand in hand,
shrinking but not exactly disappearing...
     in me the inherent conceptualisation
of a twin, like a limb missing,
  but with all my limbs intact...
              yet still a twin gleaming in my mind,
as the story i was told in my childhood
no echoes like a behemoth ghouling:
    they said to me:
   did you know that in this world there exists
a person that looks exactly like you?
         what? so i started looking,
      not leonardo, not brad,
                    can't compete -
            if i really am the stronger twin
                 who sent my twin to the plough
and the hearth... am i not to suddenly
    lick ash?
                  but the old couple:
   what a rarity to see, dwarfs,
                                  of former majestic
forms... elsewhere the single mother with
a baby in a buggy at 10 minutes to 11 during
the week, bewildered by reading
frozen foods labels...
           oh... about the supermarket...
grr... mein gott!
                    Surabhis! Surabhis everywhere!
the joy of walking into a supermarket
last, aisles as spacious as any king's
    lonely castle...
        but in the hours 12 in the afternoon
till about 5 in the afternoon?
        traffic jams!
                   zombified shoppers, women,
of course, children to boot...
                           how many times i might
have bumped into them...
      gaze lost, hazy eyed...
                 sometimes i had to walk down one
aisle, emerge from another, just to pass
  a woman standing fiddling with her
hair...
           the new meeting place, apparently,
but that's beside the point,
   the more i listen to radio,
  the more i learned that i'm far from
a music snob...
            take for example:
       free deejays's song
                            el amor es un party...
what? cuba not pretty any more?
              but there's a worthwhile observation
in there:
        only rich men have the chance
        to play a woman's game of "the chase"...
        only rich men get to "chase" women...
        the poor schmucks?
                          ****! have to live with them.  
****... i need to find that
    one exchange in ingmar bergman's
film wild strawberries:
            when the old man wakes from
a dream-memory in which he is
the ****** of a **** scene...
        where a woman is teasing a man
to the point, until he transcendes
                   a teasing woman,
                       and finds a Jezebel...
so upon waking...
                the "children" are picking
flowers in the rain...
                          and there's talk of
abortion...
       at this point it's gone beyond
castration...
                      the conversation invokes
the death-mask of man,
    or man as tomb, and woman as
the robber -
                         apparently once impregnated
man cannot ask for his ***** back,
and in some twisted way:
           and as much as i'd like to "cheat"
having found the screenplay online,
   i have the misfortune of owning the ****
movie...
        and how i like returning
to silent cinema, black & white, foreign,
with subtitles...
                     at this point,
because didn't place the subtitles: on top
of the screen, but at the bottom...
   well, **** me: am i looking for
Cindarella, because focusing back
on those faces means i seem them without
lips and merely eyes and noses,
   and perhaps a chance to spot
   a wriggling, morphed into an insect
st. peter's, if not van gogh's ear!
              or the lost "art" of handwriting...
Cinderella? my focus is so low from
      the action, that i might as well be
  watching, either a ballet, or a *******
riverdance!
             dr. isak borg (a)
marianne borg (b)
        dr. evald borg (d)

such a weird and heart-numbing thinking
went into writing this...
i have a history, a past:
regardless of having children and with
their existence: some sort of guarantee
for a future...
that i have a past, a history,
and it exists... outside of its current
written format,
that i can escape with or without having
children: that i would have probably
later ***** mentally...
having ingested all this third party
quasi-history propaganda
for the only history that's being
salvaged: the insect prone libido
of a status quo... well then...
let my "failure" be the patent for all future
success.
for everything worth some sushi glue? this isn't part of it.
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
i'll be honest, i lost the second volume  of Kant's critique
in the house, i lost the rhythm of reading the first volume,
but then i found the second volume
like a breadcrumb, where i left off:
the thesis v. antithesis section,
accurately
                 antimonia of pure reasoning
(the fourth conflict between
                   transcendental ideas)
cf. the only dualism allowed is a bilingualism,
no mono-lingual dualism is verifiable,
it's too abstract and therefore non-practical /
non-practisible - missing adjective
            i.e. without having an allowance
    to be practised, indeed almost every single
word cannot transverse all grammatical classification,
a zebra cannot be a noun, a verb, an adjective,
an adverb etc., hence what i tried to experiment
with was whether a mono-linguistic system
could practice dualism purely, no, it couldn't,
mono-linguistic systems abstracted dualism
without a useful process within them,
the whole good and evil, chaos and order dichotomy,
such dichotomy that never approached a dialectics,
hence mono-linguistic systems could not convene
dualism, because they were mono-linguistic and
not bilingual...
in reference to translating
                                            the fourth conflict between
                   transcendental ideas,
i.e. czwarty konflikt miedzy ideami transcendentalnymi,
English stress of articles / vectors, meaning
a point be made, or the point can be made,
one is wishy-washy wave of the hand (dispersion),
the other is definite, microscopic, vector
from co-ordinates (0, 0) leading to (23, 12) of the (x, y)
graph; i went among the Celts and learned to write
drunk and be happy;
                                      ironic though as to why
Darwinism gained such popularity given the English
use of indefinite and definite articles: a-      -the    
end up with some sort of ism.
there's a warning about the fourth antimony, and there's
also this poem, indeed i was bemused by the antimony
i'm not surprised that he didn't understand the narrative too,
narrating philosophically is a hard craft,
you can't really engage with dialectics, cartwheels sure,
ouroboros (snake eating itself) sure,
it's hard to reach the Pre-Socratics, but almost every
philosopher after Socrates is doing just that...
to internalise dialectics (i'd rather criticise the lack
of diacritical marks in English), and that's why
philosophy compared to standard literature of fiction
and novel can be termed pure, narration.
it is pure narration, the practice of -
hence off character study, hence hardly memorable,
but an antidote to what the present system of education
prescribes the young: dates (1066 a.d., 1945, 1914),
or Pythagoras... qwen the queen was born (on purpose, and
why? exactly, q / queue, why / i, etc.)... it's like they're
taking a test on becoming Britain's residential candidates
with questionnaires that no one talks about in pubs
over pints. i mean the warning against the fourth antimony
in the antithesis ends up stating poetically:
both proposals were sound. depending on how one
peeled the vantage point, from which want came to
observe the lunar motion.
zebra Aug 2016
love is a
state of mind
an emotion
sometimes ephemeral
sometimes steadfast

its source
an archetype
formless
it is not a relationship
although it may exist
in a relationship
or only
in a moment
like a spark in the dark
it is a function of imagination
as is empathy
it is magical thinking

*** may be an instrument of love
or a powerful healing balm
in and of it self
a profound therapy
and seen as an act of
divine grace

the ancients knew this
but unlike them
we have taken
sacred prostitutes
from ancient temples
vessels of the
goddess eroticism
Astarte of the Canaanites
Áine of the Celts
Min of the Egyptians
Aphrodite of the Greeks
Kama of the Hindus
Inanna of the Mesopotamians
and transformed them into demons
by subjugation to the depths of our subconscious

the archetypal female was replaced
by the neutered holy ghost
the patriarchal symbolic genital mutilation of women
a gift of horrors by Romes Council of Nicea
crippling values written in stone
frigidity guilts child
an abysmal morality
a theft by
kleptomaniacs of freedoms desire

for two millennium
vessels of the goddess
have been transmuted into a profanity
inflicting
a cold homicide on
****** freedom
forcing the abandonment
of a most essential constituent of sanity
the miraculous repair and revitalization
of the soul
through passions physical touch
sensual love
and the release of pent up desire

and left in its place
a harness of deprivation
an expression of a regressive culture
that promotes
a barren terrain
between
emotional ****** insecurity
and the monotony of monogamy


I am a voice of Thelema for the coming Aeon of Horus
LOVE IS ALL LOVE UNDER WILL
philosophical spiritual ,adult
John F McCullagh Dec 2011
Famine had come to our shores
The poor and weak it claimed.
It was our staple, the potato, which failed.
There was no lack of grain.

The landlords were exporting crops
While they watched their tenants bide.
A crueler death than Cromwell gave
Back when he let God decide.

The Wealthy were the Protestants,
centuries in the ascendant.
The victims, mostly Catholic,
of native Celts descendant.

Starvation is a lingering death.
It is not quick or kind.
Green Grass was, for many,
the last meal on which they dined.


When our neighbor, Kitty Kelly, died,
too proud to take the soup.
We boarded ship for old New York
And left behind our youth.
Irish Famine
Mateuš Conrad Feb 2016
science has entrenched itself in stating that original humanism is an idiocy, science believes that only scientific humanism can suffice, and original humanism i.e. humanism not schooled in science is a waste of time, man's development watching paint dry, i.e.: i feel dumber writing a poem and not an equation to align to einstein's relativity.

the english don't recognise long-term humour,
a bit like the polish not able
to recognise old school migrants of
their mutual organic constituents
speaking their tongue, they play it dumb,
with statements like huh? what? om?
the english are smart, let's not disagree,
but their intelligence is short-lived,
like their appreciation of humour,
quick wit buckle stiletto (meaning an easy
girl), they're intelligent in terms of
how quickly you colt-drawn a six-shooter into
conversation for a pick-me-up,
the english have short-term intelligence
exercised for humoristic attention,
their long-term humour is used in defending
democracy... the english have no long-term
humour parameters, i'm guessing because
of the celts... it's all short-term, i.e.:
how quickly can i retort to a joke and choke
on a whimsical mushroom that's an umbrella?
hence the many innovations...
steam engine... the umbilical cord attached
to arabia... joke is quick... joking is quicker...
tense social parameters of having a drink...
laugh it up... drink alone.

they make slapstick damnable and satire exceptional,
but their satire requires canned laughter,
it's called satire but i call it lazy humour...
look what slapstick gave us... charlie chaplin
gave birth to adolf ******* ******!

— The End —