You see words the same way I do,
With eyes that glow in yearning,
With heart bursting at the seams—
My comrade, you are.

We traverse these dimensions
Of black and white,
Where the smell of papers
Lingers into our lives.

Each smile is a memory,
A dream or an adventure;
We have bonds beyond reality
More precious than any treasure.

It is carved deep into our marrow,
Identical to the myths that we hallow,
The moment you read any prose,
Fate binds us as fellows.

Your mind and my mind
Like God's hands they intertwined,
Creating myriads of realities
That only we could realize.

Bound
by Michael R. Burch, circa age 14-15

Now it is winter—the coldest night.
And as the light of the streetlamp casts strange shadows to the ground,
I have lost what I once found
in your arms.

Now it is winter—the coldest night.
And as the light of distant Venus fails to penetrate dark panes,
I have remade all my chains
and am bound.

Published as “Why Did I Go?” in my high school journal the Lantern in 1976. I have made slight changes here and there, but the poem is essentially the same as what I wrote in my early teens.

I wish things had gone differently
That I’d no longer feel lonely
But that ringing in my ear
Oh is it killing me my dear

And why is the silence so loud
As sharp as noise heard in a crowd
Here staring blankly at the wall
I wonder, why can’t I be whole

The answers I have no yet found
To these questions stuck in my mind
Or maybe it’s that I am blind
And to all ‘ them I’ll remain bound