All I know I have learned from anime.

I have learned that intelligent high schoolers and unbelievable power sources should be kept far apart,

That there is a harem out there for everyone,

That ***** are the ultimate source of power in the universe,

and that nothing in all the world can not be improved by the addition of giant robots.

I have discovered that studio gainax has a huge stockpile of LSD, and that I must discover its location.

I have learned that Makoto Shinkai loves the taste of your tears,

and that Satonshi Kon is the thing the boogie man checks under his bed for.

But most of I have learned that you should always take that swing,

That if you stand strong you can pierce the heavens,

That if you stand together with those who mean the most to you, you will never be defeated,

And that true love can span the galaxies, knows no boundaries, and never dies.

Otaku forever.

Just a wicked peacenik’n quick draw from the Paw
Game of Thrones’n the Shah, cRussian bones of the law
When the baby-skull splitters want nuclear winter
Ideal New Cold steel and send Chernobyl shivers
Down Roman Republicans’ severed headlines
Till there’s no more dead kids on for prophet front lines
I’m in exile sharpenin’ [sic]kles in style
Pyongyang’n Kuomintang climate denials
Erasing their nation-hate racial profiles
Outpacing their skinhead disgraces by miles
Shell casin’ this place like the Nuremberg trials
For Fords sellin’ swastikas stockpile bibles
Defiled by Normandy tide genocidals
Fresh meat off the boat spreadin’ Plague mercantiles
I smile and **** ‘em with kindness
Then grind
Battle tax in my acid bath
Salt Marchin’ prime
Because WAR IS THE CRIME
I’m the Clown Prince of Rhyme,
Level 9 state of mind
Like the state of Rakhine
The Black Hand before time
Runnin’ Africa’s Luciest Sky Diamond mine
I’m the ronin alone in
The monkey god shrine
And my guile’s reprisal’s Versailles treaty signed
Strippin’ pride from the Rhine
Now your Motherland’s mine
Swine

Life in Duality and Non-Duality

Birth is the first gate.
Death is the second gate.
Between these two gates lies the path of life
travelled by all sentient beings.
All are born.
All will die.
Between death and rebirth lies the unameable state
where the next life is chosen, determined by the individual Isnesses
stockpile of accumulated Karmas,
Good and Bad.
All human beings,due to their accumulated Karmas,
both Good and Bad,
must pass through this unameable state
and be reborn into their next life.
All beings accumulated Karmas,Good and Bad,
are assessed in that state and that assessment determines the next life they are  reborn into.
There are NO exceptions to this process ever.
Karmas,Good and Bad,are accumulated in each life.
Karmas ,Good and Bad,are the result of the morality
of each individuals actions.
Karma is of three types.
Good Karma which ties each individual
to the Wheel of Incarnated life,death and rebirth.
Bad Karma which ties each individual
to the Wheel of Incarnated life,death and rebirth.
Neutral Karma is the only way that each individual
to can free themselves from
the Wheel of Incarnated life,death and rebirth.
Both Good and Bad Karmas tie each and every human being
to the endless cycle of birth,life,death and rebirth as a human being.
Only Neutral Karma can free each individual from
the endless cycle of birth,life ,death and rebirth as a human being.
Neutral Karma is only realisable through the practise
of the Six Fundamental Yogas.
Neutral Karma is the only way to erase both Good and Bad Karmas.
The practise of the Six Fundamental Yogas increases the BrainBloodVolume to the level of that of  Foetus in the Womb,which causes the Mind and Conditioned Identity
to dissolve,temporarily or permanently.
Those individuals,female and male equally,
whose practises of the Six Fundamental Yogas cause
the Mind and Conditioned Identity to dissolve temporarily or permanently will enter into union with the Isness of the Universe
as an equal,temporarily or permanently.
Those individual human beings who  pass their lives accumulating Good and Bad Karmas are unable to escape from the endless cycle of birth,life,death and rebirth.
For the overwhelming majority of human beings who refuse to generate Neutral Karma,by practising the Six Fundamental Yogas,life can only be lived, in the state of
Mind created Duality and  Non-Duality.
They are unable to enter into the state of union with the Isness of the Universe as an equal.
The permanent feature of such a life lived in either Duality or Non-Duality is the ceaseless deep suffering of being separated from the Isness of the Universe as an equal.
For those very few human beings who,through the practise of the Six Fundamental Yogas,have dissolved Mind and Conditioned Identity,permanently,life is lived in union with
the Isness of the Universe as an equal.
Life is lived in the state of Experiential Knowingness
which is called Separate and Merged.
They live out their last lives in this realm in union with Isness of the Universe as an equal.

www.thefournobletruthsrevised.co.uk

.

i get to be ridiculous, i'm an artist, it's only that my ridiculousness doesn't border with the Vatican City, or Switzerland that it's deemed "weird" (symbol use, also know as passing on misnomers, ~ - that's ambiguity, a stranger punctuation construct from the hyphen), it's weird because i'm attired in familiar clothing to an Essex loafer, i don't have the currency to buy fancy Pompidou mascara or lipstick and stroll with other drag queens at gay pride... i'm back-of-the-woods type of guy, on the Cartesian Libra heavyweight to the side of 'i think' than on the pigeon-**** weight side of 'i am' - mathematically speaking that's like 2 + 1 = 3 - "schizoid" thinking coupled to non-schizoid behavioural patterns therefore means... an increased threshold capacity for experiencing pain.

the first time i smoked marijuana
(and i didn't know how to roll
a joint of marijuana and tobacco)
was the happiest time of my life,
i exercised a lot, practised Roman bulimia
unconsciously - no pills, nothing,
******* down my throat, later
i trained the *suprahyoid and the infrahyoid
muscles so well that
i could just throw the chocolate bars up,
trained them so well as if i was gagging
on a *****... but to keep a body image,
well, you know, to look **** (add sarcasm
with the italics) you have to do what women
do, for me it was a Roman Bulimia,
for them, dieting - it was weird owning
a different body from the one i own now,
c.c.t.v. Narcissus-shadow stalker was all a craze back then,
too much self-conscious ******* wrapped in
a ***** and sent to a daycare centre -
it feels great these days, drinking 70cl of whiskey
a night, and why would i be bragging without
a bowler hat and a cane a butterfly prim
on my neck and a neat suit?
i read Bulgakov, that'll do, i have an operatic
cat at this moment, i've never heard so many variations
of meow after the doors to the garden are closed
and he's told to remain indoors after 9p.m.,
he sits on the bathroom windowsill and wants
to be nannied in the lap while someone smokes
downstairs... 'fella, same fresh air down here as up there'...
it's more of a fox than a cat...
he matured to be ~10 kilograms, and so's a mature fox,
i know, i weighed one, cutting a work's pay for
some sanitary worked one night
when i was eager to buy a few beers... mature foxes
~10 kilograms minus 21 grams (you know, the
Higgs' boson of soul, alejandro gonzález iñárritu -
but why add ñá so close? it's -nia- anyway,
so Mexico or e ** ** **, the Mexican Hew, huh?
ah... Habana!)
swear to god, never heard so many variations...
where was i? ah, adapting Bach's polyphony within
poetry, could have been a king david, but i smashed
my lyre... i never liked the cheap one-man tennis
and a brick wall of poetry within claim of stiffening repeats:
rhyme... bounce... rhyme... Bunsen! rhyme... bounce...
rhyme... Bunsen! ya-d'ah ya-d'ah ya-d'ah...
a carousel in Golders Green where all the payots
flew off and made french pastry curls... cinnamon... mm.
and two books i wish i'd written -
closed society and it's allies, the alt. to Popper's
antonym based yawn-epic - Karl, falsifier -
and anger and restlessness, the alt. to a Danish
epic by Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling -
alt. say it as it is - ******* is like a bow-tie event,
a moth a butterfly event - the ******* was
there for a reason, pleasure from *******
when your *** partner was "feeling tired",
men and women are both libido struck sometimes
to extremes, they mentioned f.g.m. but didn't mention
m.g.m., with ******* you ain't chasing, you ain't
playing the dating game - circumcision gave
women the upper hand, the toy machine of manhood,
you have ******* for a reason, it's not in line with
ancient Hebraic laws where you have to do 613 things
to obey... and with ******* you're less likely to
go Boko Haram cuckoo and steal girls for their ******* -
i believe the fabled conversation between Zeus and
Hera is necessary - women derive more pleasure
from ***... but men derive more pleasure from life -
well, if you have *******, see the image problem?
i'm dressed... you're undressed... i have two capacities
and a tool to curb my libido, you have jack and a stockpile
of nukes - with a cigar smoking duke on percussion
that only takes one press and the whole orchestra starts
up with a crescendo rather than a build-up.
oh right... the first time i started smoking marijuana i
was 21... i remember it clearly, i don't know how i managed
to roll a joint... Edinburgh 2007, Montague Street,
i rolled one... smoked it... lay on the floor...
and giggled my way through Daft Punk's album human
after all - giggled and danced horizontally...
solipsism at it's finest... later i met a girl who said that
*** after marijuana was so much better than sober...
i beg to disagree... given that solo moment,
and ******* prostitutes drunk, esp. in Amsterdam,
where i don't have to feel any English sensibilities on the matter.

Is there a natural virility to the fertilities of the inductions of space time’s continuums?  Is this a microcosmic phenomenon or more dependent on the depths of pervasion of its macrocosmic relativities.  Perhaps there is a unifying field theory we are not yet aware of which explains how it paradoxically is a little bit of both.  Regardless, given the fact that there probably was no beginning to the universe then quite literally an eternity has already passed.  So why then, given our understanding of the physics of physical interaction, is not all in a state of complete entropy?  
     This afore mentioned fecundity must exist.  Further in it’s quite likely the cause of physical existence as we know it.  I have a theory: This creationism occurs at such an imperceptible rate that positive eons of quadrillions of ages must pass in order for the cosmos to replenish its stockpile of physical matter (possibly matter without atomic structure as we know it) so that a new cycle of infinite big bangs in infinite space can occur.  Ushering in a new 500 billion to trillion year cycle of physical existence as we know it.  Further again, perhaps the implosion’s contraction’s revisions are the cause of the atomic structure of matter we experience during this new physical cycle.
      The thought of such quantum leaps to me for the intensities of physical matters existence and catalytic capabilities.  
     Granted your not going to find these speculations touted as fact in a Wikipedia excerpt.  The answers are in fact unknown.  I’m merely being hypothetically thoughtful with what I’ve learned of possibilities prospectus.   Given these truths allow me to hypothesize further.  
     It seems to me that the evolution of the organic morphologies of biological ontogeny were created by a conceptually reflective derivative (or perhaps antiderivative on the interpolations of integration) of functional physical mechanics.  That perhaps the creative force behind their inception (similar to the afore mentioned natural inductions of space time’s continuums) was the physical realism of and or the residual harmonic vibrations of kinetic supremacy.  
     Consider, the planet we’re on is revolving at approximately 60,000 miles per hour relative to the sun, the solar system we inhabit is revolving at approximately 500,000 miles per hour around the center of our galaxy.  Our galaxy is traveling at approximately 1,332,000 miles per hour through space with our local group of galaxies and revolving at approximately 216,000 miles per hour around the center of mass of this group of galaxies.  All this to give you some conception of the kinetic actualities of our planet’s trajectory’s extant as a projectile.  We have an almost incredible amount of potential or kinetic energy that is generated by our physical velocity through space.  Although we don’t seem to be aware of the impending preponderances of this realism as tellurian denizens it is nonetheless fact to our intellectual relativities.  
     Once again perhaps the actuality of and or the residual harmonic vibrations of the actuality of this phenomenon are the impetus behind the evolution of the organic morphologies of biological ontogeny.  We don’t know for certain how the first amino acids were formed.  Much less how these acids in the primordial soup made the quantum leap to living existence as biological organisms.  Once again I hypothesize it was a conceptually reflective derivative (or antiderivative) of the creationism behind functional physical mechanics.  e.g. the natural inductions of space time continuum and the quantum leaps created by the implosion’s contraction’s revisions of our big bang.
     By now you may be wondering why I have extrapolated these hypothetical scenarios about the physical creationism of our universe and the perceived similarly analogous state of organic and biological origins, so I’ll tell you.  I hoped it might make the dissertation I’m about to make on the fecundities of the corporeally preternatural and perhaps metaphysical inclinations of our sentient race easier to comprehend.
     With the advent of biological organisms the diversity of physical existence has apparently exceeded its physical complexity.  Understanding has evolved.  Relatively extraneous interpolations of adhesively practical extremity succeed in a hierarchy of functionally integral forms.  Being a firm believer in evolution this phenomenon makes me wonder: Is the impetus behind the genetic anomalies that influence the seemingly positive nature of natural selection’s progression a pervasion from the social contiguities of a species? Perhaps a random occurrence with no discernable precedent?  Or, more likely even, the equivocal nature of the superior essence of the ontological state of the beings involved?
     Though many believe that it is truly a random occurrence I have a tendency to want to believe otherwise.  That just as there is a natural fecundity to the induction of space time’s continuum there is a positively oriented inclination integral to evolutional progression.  A sort of élan vital on the orthogenesis overtures.  Granted it is somewhat dependant on the phenological nature of environment but improvements occur which have little to do with the ability to cope with the weather.    
      So is there such a thing as élan vital as it relates to ethology’s entelechy?  Is there any benefit for humanoid demagoguery in pursuing zoomorphic zoolotry as a social contiguity?  Can we actually make accession to transcendentally existential ascension?
     The obvious answer would appear to be yes, at least in partiality.  Maybe we’re incapable (at present) of assimilating incorporeity ideology’s non-corporeal states and existing as godlike disembodied spirits (who perhaps have not lost their proclivity for corporeally preternatural being) but social relativities are an evolving state.  Truly the better we treat each other the better off all will be.  Now I’m not talking about being a bunch of fawning sycophants or schmaltzy schlep-it-ness schmucks, more like the swanky saunter obsequious diligence could indentured servant sail lend to all.  Not given because it’s mandated but because it’s the essence of social contiguity’s evolution.  Granted the individual must remain sacrosanct.  Our metaphysical prowess is at best hypothetical.  Actual magic is not a tool in our kit-bag though I aspire to such everyday as I attempt to be teleportation real with my telepathy to the demons I appear to be confronted with.  I site clairaudience clairvoyance on the vicinity victuals of vigilante villain, the propinquity habitations of harbinger’s harangued, the proximity parameters of perimeter’s peripherals, why I’ll even throw in the objectified manifest’s diminutive minutia iotas of self inductive interstitial extrapolation, and if that doesn't get it I'll talk about the embark embargo extraditions and the extraversion embezzling euthanasia extortions.  The thought of such spatiotemporal telemetry tactician.  Protractive analyses of dimensional delineation on the terrestrial equestrian.  Tellurian terrene!!
     The obvious realisms of all of this are that we are indeed capable of making these quantum leaps armed practical magic.  I say lets fecundity get down to it.  Exserted protuberances of erotica erectile errantry, the vibrant volition of verve.  I’ve had enough of vapid flatulence and insidiously sinister archaic.  Mankind’s inability to supersede his developing anachronism may well be the cause of his demise!!!  We’ll become theosophy’s theophany incarnate, the ecstatic euphorias of corporeally preternatural’s enigma entity on the identity crisis!!!!

I am the hermit who lives in my head.
I gather...
I analyse...
I stow away all that I've learnt.

Because when the wind would blow
and the earth wouldn't understand.
When the world would tremble,
shaken by man's ruthless hand.

I am the hermit who lives in my head.
I listen...
I keep...
I stockpile in the shadows.

Because in my blood exists grudge...
And my bones, weary from despair.
My skin screams exhaustion
and my body feigns to care.

I am the hermit who lives in my head.
I overthink...
I hide...
I hoard all my thoughts.*

Because the walls have ears
and these pages bear eyes.
What my heart truly knows...
Is that your mouth tells only lies.

Hallucinating Bureaucracies and auditory Hallucinations : When the voice in your head speaks when you don't want it to, to head's of State not present. I could snuggle in bed if I wanted to, but I've got to orchestrate and reorganize the Clinton dowry. It started outright with trying on a purple, yellow, and blue button down shirt that had Scabies in the sleeve- and now you're all going to know why Mr. and Mrs. Obama don't want to talk to me about potentially increasing livestock traffic across the Americas. I think could practice will follow from such a manure, I mean maneuver. I pick up 10 or so bottles of plastic single-serve water for consumption in my apartheid room. It's awful in here. The gold disappears from the mines, and even the hands I used to work with are blurring up in the twister, and as much as you call or don't call I have no business managing your intentions- only mine. Some barrge of women over thirty. But still there isn't a problem. The river is beginning to flood, and the fishery's stockpile is running low. Maybe we ought to empty out an African mass grave and fill it with blacklists of co-conspirators and then make a drake or a flume out of the narrow walkways between the cities. Then maybe we'll have water to last us through the dry season.----------------------------------------------------------­--------------------------------- Where in the world is Sam in Hammond, Can Diego? Forklifting pillars, bribing monkeys, playing with his Mickey Mouse and Michelob, catching the taller, eighteen and up crowd catch the last car riding the rapid drop from Space Mountain through, "It's a Small World After All:"  

It's a world of laughter a world of tears, it's a world of hopes and a world of fears. There's so much that we share, that it's time we're aware- it's a small world after all."  

And then he takes the biggest gulp of water into his mouth that I've ever seen the man take, and he puts it in a small cooler that's strapped to the back of his calf, and he swears to me that the aeroplanes are going to come loop around, and when they do their glorious water-landing, he and I, or rather, the both of us, will be saved. Saved, hm? I don't even bother sharing insights or my insides. I quickly flash him the most-pod horrific a tryst that irons down a photo of Egon and I back in the Old City, what was it, Chicago, or something that very much sounded like Chicago. Could be totally awesome and I'll chime in that now is the time when we do our work best. That's all. Intrepid,

I wear white
I wear white

I wear white and stare right back at
the other end of the world

The hems of the loosely fitting traditions
Barely touch the ground anymore

I wear white
I wear white
White like the chalk on the blackboard switched from
right to left.

Aimless and bereft of the desert I once called mine,
I walk alone

I wear white, I wear white
As I have done for 14 hours
and 14 years

7000 miles on the screen and 2 more up there
to be precise. It faded for every mile
Just as it has been doing since the day Darwish died

I wear white, I wear white
A different breed of Semite than they're used to

Not walking but flowing almost
as contradictory as "poutine Arabesque"
The routine wears my jaw out
as the vowels twist from right to left

I wear white, I wear white
Not just quite there yet
Not even close
Not even halfway to the surface but then again
I suppose we've always been at ease at the depths of the sea
Pearls and black gold abound

I forget that sometimes in between
intermittent bouts and doubts of "3arabiyun ana"
As if that's what makes up the anatomy of an Arab
As if that's enough for you, Khaled

I wear white
I wear white
Or at least I tell myself I do
Leave myself open to the prospect
of life starting anew
Forcing myself to see it through
See life through your eyes
Or are they my own **** you ?

Tell me for the love of Christ
Call me by name and don't
bury me under the empty discarded photo frames
that you stockpile

I'm calling to you, Walid
And will keep on calling
And trying and burning and aching and failing and dreaming and irritating
like a bad itch

I sink under it all and push it all off step 3 repeat as necessary

I scream in the tongue that you deafen your ears to and pull at the beard you've tried to shave off
I pluck at the horizontal heartstrings you've tried to mute

Above all, I wear white...
And I fight.... I fight.....

I FIGHT

I'm a doomsday prepper
Afraid of zombie lepers
And nuclear line steppers
So I spend my life preparing
Instead of repairing
A civilization that is constantly crumbling
I focus on post-apocalyptic rumbling

My self reliance
Met my defiance
In an alliance
Of deadly appliance
When I have no faith in the government
Because they might make preparing futile
For the disasters of my wonderment
I don't copy their community style
They'll just die when the world ends
So they're a waste of the time I spend

I tried to look above
To find love
But a giant tidal wave
Blocked the sun's rays
And I could feel the Earth quake
Under my shaking feet
So I decided it was a mistake
And to avoid what's sweet

I will no longer be a misfit
After the apocalypse
I will be more comfortable than everyone else
But will I really keep my resources to myself?
I say of course
From my high horse
I fantasize about being right
So others will see the light
Of a nuclear blast
And see that I last
They'll beg to see my stocked shelf
Yet I will offer no help
I'll say my memory is hazy
Didn't you call me crazy?
Protecting my goods in that vulnerable hour
With a stockpile of firearm firepower

I prepare for an impending doom
That'll create some elbow room
Instead of friends I gather supplies
For a cataclysmic surprise
Where everyone dies
Then I'll be happy
Hunting and trapping
All alone
In a blast zone
Where someone once said
Life is what happens
While you're making plans
But the apocalypse
Is my promised land

Poems about Things that Break

These are poems about things that break and/or shatter: a bubble, glass, a mirror, a twig or tree limb, a thunderstorm, cities and towers in times of war, old habits, our hearts, and sometimes Love itself.



Shattered
by Vera Pavlova
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I shattered your heart;
now I limp through the shards
barefoot.



Dark-bosomed clouds
pregnant with heavy thunder ...
the water breaks
―Michael R. Burch



As grief reaches its breaking point
someone snaps a nearby branch.
―Yamaguchi Seishi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



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



Eros, the limb-shatterer,
rattles me,
an irresistible
constrictor.
―Sappho, fragment 130, loose translation by Michael R. Burch



My heart is unsteady as a rocking boat;
besieged by such longing I weaken with age
and come close to breaking.
―Otomo no Sakanoue no Iratsume, loose translation by Michael R. Burch



Mirror
by Kajal Ahmad, a Kurdish poet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My era’s obscuring mirror  
shattered
because it magnified the small
and made the great seem insignificant.
Dictators and monsters filled its contours.            
Now when I breathe
its jagged shards pierce my heart
and instead of sweat
I exude glass.



Mirror Images
by Michael R. Burch

She has belief
without comprehension
and in her crutchwork shack
she is
much like us ...

tamping the bread
into edible forms,
regarding her children
at play
with something akin to relief ...

ignoring the towers ablaze
in the distance
because they are not revelations
but things of glass,
easily shattered ...

and if you were to ask her,
she might say―
sometimes God visits his wrath
upon an impious nation
for its leaders’ sins,

and we might agree:
seeing her mutilations.

Published by Poetry SuperHighway and Modern War Poems



Second Sight
by Michael R. Burch

I never touched you―
that was my mistake.

Deep within,
I still feel the ache.

Can an unformed thing
eternally break?

Now, from a great distance,
I see you again

not as you are now,
but as you were then―

eternally present
and Sovereign.



Ghazal
by Mirza Ghalib
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Not the blossomings of song nor the adornments of music:
I am the voice of my own heart breaking.

You toy with your long, dark curls
while I remain captive to my black, pensive thoughts.

We congratulate ourselves that we two are different
but this weakness has burdened us both with inchoate grief.

Now you are here, and I find myself bowing:
as if sadness is a blessing, and longing a sacrament.

I am a fragment of sound rebounding;
you are the walls impounding my echoes.



Bubble
by Michael R. Burch

.................Love
..........fragile elusive
.......if held too closely
....cannot.........withstand
..the inter..................ruption
of its.............................. bright
..unmalleable.............tension
....and breaks disintegrates
......at the............touch of
.........an undiscerning
..................hand.

I believe this is my only shape/shaped/concrete poem.



Because Her Heart Is Tender
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth, on the first anniversary of 9-11

She scrawled soft words in soap: “Never Forget,”
Dove-white on her car’s window, and the wren,
because her heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her. As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.

She wrote in sidewalk chalk: “Never Forget,”
and kept her heart’s own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.

Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers’ glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on ...
she stitches in damp linen: “NEVER FORGET,”
and listens to her heart’s emphatic song.

The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.

She writes in adamant: “NEVER FORGET”
because her heart is tender with regret.

Published by Neovictorian/Cochlea, The Villanelle, The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Nietzsche Twilight, Nutty Stories (South Africa), Poetry Renewal Magazine and Other Voices International



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.



Breakings
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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

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



Mate Check
by Michael R. Burch

Love is an ache hearts willingly secure
then break the bank to cure.



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.

Published by The Lyric, Black Medina, The Eclectic Muse, Kritya (India), Shabestaneh (Iran), Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Captivating Poetry (Anthology), Strange Road, Freshet, Shot Glass Journal, Better Than Starbucks, The Chained Muse, Famous Poets and Poems, Sonnetto Poesia, Poetry Life & Times



Resemblance
by Michael R. Burch

Take this geode with its rough exterior―
crude-skinned, brilliant-hearted ...

a diode of amethyst―wild, electric;
its sequined cavity―parted, revealing.

Find in its fire all brittle passion,
each jagged shard relentlessly aching.

Each spire inward―a fission startled;
in its shattered entrails―fractured light,

the heart ice breaking.

Published by Poet Lore, Poetry Magazine and the Net Poetry and Art Competition



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
as 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 husks into some raging 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 heights of awareness from which we were seized.

Published by Songs of Innocence, Romantics Quarterly, Poetry Life & Times and The Chained Muse



Distances
by Michael R. Burch

There is a small cleanness about her,
as if she has always just been washed,
and there is a dull obedience to convention
in her accommodating slenderness
as she feints at her salad.

She has never heard of Faust, or Frost,
and she is unlikely to have been seen
rummaging through bookstores
for mementos of others
more difficult to name.

She might imagine “poetry”
to be something in common between us,
as we write, bridging the expanse
between convention and something . . .
something the world calls “art”
for want of a better word.

At night I scream
at the conventions of both our worlds,
at the distances between words
and their objects: distances
come lately between us,
like a clean break.

Published by Verse Libre, Triplopia and Lone Stars



The Ruins of Balaclava
by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Oh, barren Crimean land, these dreary shades
of castles―once your indisputable pride―
are now where ghostly owls and lizards hide
as blackguards arm themselves for nightly raids.

Carved into marble, regal boasts were made!
Brave words on burnished armor, gilt-applied!
Now shattered splendors long since cast aside
beside the dead here also brokenly laid.

The Greeks erected shimmering marble here.
The Romans drove wild Mongol hordes to flight.
The Mussulman prayed eastward, day and night.

Now owls and dark-winged vultures watch and leer
as strange black banners, flapping overhead,
mark where the past piles high its nameless dead.



Once Upon a Frozen Star
by Michael R. Burch

Oh, was it in this dark-Decembered world
we walked among the moonbeam-shadowed fields
and did not know ourselves for weight of snow
upon our laden parkas? White as sheets,
as spectral-white as ghosts, with clawlike hands
****** deep into our pockets, holding what
we thought were tickets home: what did we know
of anything that night? Were we deceived
by moonlight making shadows of gaunt trees
that loomed like fiends between us, by the songs
of owls like phantoms hooting: Who? Who? Who?

And if that night I looked and smiled at you
a little out of tenderness . . . or kissed
the wet salt from your lips, or took your hand,
so cold inside your parka . . . if I wished
upon a frozen star . . .  that I could give
you something of myself to keep you warm . . .
yet something still not love . . . if I embraced
the contours of your face with one stiff glove . . .

How could I know the years would strip away
the soft flesh from your face, that time would flay
your heart of consolation, that my words
would break like ice between us, till the void
of words became eternal? Oh, my love,
I never knew. I never knew at all,
that anything so vast could curl so small.

Originally published by Nisqually Delta Review



Eras Poetica II
by Michael R. Burch

“... poetry makes nothing happen ...”―W. H. Auden

Poetry is the art of words: beautiful words.
So that we who are destitute of all other beauties exist
in worlds of our own making; where, if we persist,
the unicorns gather in phantomlike herds,
whinnying to see us; where dark flocks of birds,
hooting, screeching and cawing, all madly insist:
“We too are wild migrants lost in this pale mist
which strangeness allows us, which beauty affords!”

We stormproof our windows with duct tape and boards.
We stockpile provisions. We cull the small list
of possessions worth keeping. Our listless lips, kissed,
mouth pointless enigmas. Time’s bare pantry hoards
dust motes of past grandeurs. Yet here Mars’s sword
lies shattered on the anvil of the enduring Word.



The Higher Atmospheres
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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



Old Habits Die Hard
by Gulzar
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The habit of breathing
is an odd tradition.
Why struggle so to keep on living?
The body shudders,
the eyes veil,
yet the feet somehow keep moving.
Why this journey, this restless, relentless flowing?
For how many weeks, months, years, centuries
shall we struggle to keep on living, keep on living?
Habits are such strange things, such hard things to break!



Having Touched You (The Boy in the Bubble)
by Michael R. Burch

What I have lost
is not less
than what I have gained.

And for each moment passed
like the sun to the west,
another remained

suspended in memory
like a flower
in crystal

so that eternity
is but an hour
and fall

is no longer a season
but a state
of mind.

I have no reason
to wait;
the wind

does not pause
for remembrance
or regret

because
there is only fate and chance.
And so then, forget...

Forget that we were very happy
for a day.
That day was my lifetime.

Before that day I was empty
and the sky was grey.
You were the sunshine,

the sunshine that gave me life.
I took root
and I grew.

Now the touch of death is like a terrible knife,
and yet I can bear it,
having touched you.

I wrote this poem as a teenager after watching "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" with John Travolta playing a young man with a defective immune system who risks death for a chance at love.



Published as the collection "Poems about Things that Break"

Keywords/Tags: break, breaking, breakings, shatter, shattered, shattering, delicate, fragility, fragment, touch, cruelty, brutality, abuse, stress, love, pain, relationships, society, mrbreak, mrbbreak

Is there a natural virility to the fertilities of the inductions of space time’s continuums?  Is this a microcosmic phenomenon or more dependent on the depths of pervasion of its macrocosmic relativities.  Perhaps there is a unifying field theory we are not yet aware of which explains how it paradoxically is a little bit of both.  Regardless, given the fact that there probably was no beginning to the universe then quite literally an eternity has already passed.  So why then, given our understanding of the physics of physical interaction, is not all in a state of complete entropy?  
     This afore mentioned fecundity must exist.  Further in it’s quite likely the cause of physical existence as we know it.  I have a theory: This creationism occurs at such an imperceptible rate that positive eons of quadrillions of ages must pass in order for the cosmos to replenish its stockpile of physical matter (possibly matter without atomic structure as we know it) so that a new cycle of infinite big bangs in infinite space can occur.  Ushering in a new 500 billion to trillion year cycle of physical existence as we know it.  Further again, perhaps the implosion’s contraction’s revisions are the cause of the atomic structure of matter we experience during this new physical cycle.
      The thought of such quantum leaps to me for the intensities of physical matters existence and catalytic capabilities.  
     Granted your not going to find these speculations touted as fact in a Wikipedia excerpt.  The answers are in fact unknown.  I’m merely being hypothetically thoughtful with what I’ve learned of possibilities prospectus.   Given these truths allow me to hypothesize further.  
     It seems to me that the evolution of the organic morphologies of biological ontogeny were created by a conceptually reflective derivative (or perhaps antiderivative on the interpolations of integration) of functional physical mechanics.  That perhaps the creative force behind their inception (similar to the afore mentioned natural inductions of space time’s continuums) was the physical realism of and or the residual harmonic vibrations of kinetic supremacy.  
     Consider, the planet we’re on is revolving at approximately 60,000 miles per hour relative to the sun, the solar system we inhabit is revolving at approximately 500,000 miles per hour around the center of our galaxy.  Our galaxy is traveling at approximately 1,332,000 miles per hour through space with our local group of galaxies and revolving at approximately 216,000 miles per hour around the center of mass of this group of galaxies.  All this to give you some conception of the kinetic actualities of our planet’s trajectory’s extant as a projectile.  We have an almost incredible amount of potential or kinetic energy that is generated by our physical velocity through space.  Although we don’t seem to be aware of the impending preponderances of this realism as tellurian denizens it is nonetheless fact to our intellectual relativities.  
     Once again perhaps the actuality of and or the residual harmonic vibrations of the actuality of this phenomenon are the impetus behind the evolution of the organic morphologies of biological ontogeny.  We don’t know for certain how the first amino acids were formed.  Much less how these acids in the primordial soup made the quantum leap to living existence as biological organisms.  Once again I hypothesize it was a conceptually reflective derivative (or antiderivative) of the creationism behind functional physical mechanics.  e.g. the natural inductions of space time's continuum and the quantum leaps created by the implosion’s contraction’s revisions of our big bang.
     By now you may be wondering why I have extrapolated these hypothetical scenarios about the physical creationism of our universe and the perceived similarly analogous state of organic and biological origins, so I’ll tell you.  I hoped it might make the dissertation I’m about to make on the fecundities of the corporeally preternatural and perhaps metaphysical inclinations of our sentient race easier to comprehend.
     With the advent of biological organisms the diversity of physical existence has apparently exceeded its physical complexity.  Understanding has evolved.  Relatively extraneous interpolations of adhesively practical extremity succeed in a hierarchy of functionally integral forms.  Being a firm believer in evolution this phenomenon makes me wonder: Is the impetus behind the genetic anomalies that influence the seemingly positive nature of natural selection’s progression a pervasion from the social contiguities of a species? Perhaps a random occurrence with no discernable precedent?  Or, more likely even, the equivocal nature of the superior essence of the ontological state of the beings involved?
     Though many believe that it is truly a random occurrence I have a tendency to want to believe otherwise.  That just as there is a natural fecundity to the induction of space time’s continuum there is a positively oriented inclination integral to evolutional progression.  A sort of élan vital on the orthogenesis overtures.  Granted it is somewhat dependant on the phenological nature of environment but improvements occur which have little to do with the ability to cope with the weather.    
      So is there such a thing as élan vital as it relates to ethology’s entelechy?  Is there any benefit for humanoid demagoguery in pursuing zoomorphic zoolatry as a social contiguity?  Can we actually make accession to transcendentally existential ascension?
     The obvious answer would appear to be yes, at least in partiality.  Maybe we’re incapable (at present) of assimilating incorporeity ideology’s non-corporeal states and existing as godlike disembodied spirits (who perhaps have not lost their proclivity for corporeally preternatural being) but social relativities are an evolving state.  Truly the better we treat each other the better off all will be.  Now I’m not talking about being a bunch of fawning sycophants or schmaltzy schlep-it-ness schmucks, more like the swanky saunter obsequious diligence could indentured servant sail lend to all.  Not given because it’s mandated but because it’s the essence of social contiguity’s evolution.  Granted the individual must remain sacrosanct.  Our metaphysical prowess is at best hypothetical.  Actual magic is not a tool in our kit-bag though I aspire to such everyday as I attempt to be teleportation real with my telepathy to the demons I appear to be confronted with.  I site clairaudience clairvoyance on the vicinity victuals of vigilante villain, the propinquity habitations of harbinger’s harangued, the proximity parameters of perimeter’s peripherals, why I’ll even throw in the objectified manifest’s diminutive minutia iotas of self inductive interstitial extrapolation, and if that doesn't get it I'll talk about the embark embargo extraditions and the extraversion embezzling euthanasia extortions.  The thought of such spatiotemporal telemetry tactician.  Protractive analyses of dimensional delineation on the terrestrial equestrian.  Tellurian terrene!!
     The obvious realisms of all of this are that we are indeed capable of making these quantum leaps armed practical magic.  I say lets fecundity get down to it.  Exserted protuberances of erotica erectile errantry, the vibrant volition of verve.  I’ve had enough of vapid flatulence and insidiously sinister archaic.  Mankind’s inability to supersede his developing anachronism may well be the cause of his demise!!!  We’ll become ethology's entelechy, zoomorphic zoolatry's  incarnate, the ecstatic euphorias of corporeally preternatural’s enigma's entity on the identity crisis!!!!