The spiders glide in night by night,
Following a trail, light by light.

On top of the webs stand the spiders,
Ready to attack all threats with lighters.

A schism of venom to fill the cracks
Of the pieces that have always fit
And a wall is lifted upon their backs;
A webbed foundation of grit.

Brother Iran
by Michael R. Burch

Brother Iran, I feel your pain.
I feel it as when the Turk fled Spain.
As the Jew fled, too, that constricting span,
I feel your pain, Brother Iran.

Brother Iran, I know you are noble!
I too fear Hiroshima and Chernobyl.
But though my heart shudders, I have a plan,
and I know you are noble, Brother Iran.

Brother Iran, I salute your Poets!
your Mathematicians!, all your great Wits!
O, come join the earth’s great Caravan.
We’ll include your Poets, Brother Iran.

Brother Iran, I love your Verse!
Come take my hand now, let’s rehearse
the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
For I love your Verse, Brother Iran.

Bother Iran, civilization’s Flower!
How high flew your towers in man’s early hours!
Let us build them yet higher, for that’s my plan,
civilization’s first flower, Brother Iran.

Published by MahMag (translated into Farsi by Mahnaz Badihian), Other Voices International, Thanal Online (India), Deviant Art, Portal Vapasin (Farsi). Keywords/Tags: Iran, Iranian, Farsi, Persia, Persian, brotherhood, culture, civilization, poetry, literature, poets, mathematicians, philosophers

'Every competition - is not
A struggle to win over others
But a battle over one's own insecurities
To overcome a perception of exclusion'

Do not ever allow yourself
to reduce the incomprehensible miracle
of your very existence

to basic questions of self-worth.
Do not ever allow your boss to write you off
as nothing more than a worker

who is failing to meet
some arbitrary set of expectations.
Do not ever allow a bully to tell you
that you are nothing more than a child

lacking in physical strength.
Do not ever allow a politician
to boil your being

down to a cheap distillation
of inside jokes and snickering, racist
circumlocutions.

The fact that you are here,
today,
alive and present
and reading these words
is a stentorian, staggering miracle.

We are,
all of us,
perhaps guilty
of occasionally forgetting
this fundamental fact.

But we must remember,
you and I,
and every other being with us,
that we sprang forth from nothing—
absolute oblivion—
into awareness and consciousness
and individuality, and personality
in this gargantuan, freezing, largely empty universe.

Allow me to remind you
that that idea
is entirely incredible—
the purest void was somehow spun into
the totality of your being—
into the infinity of the present moment—
a Möbius-strip mindfuck
expanding outward in space and time
reaching toward all directions simultaneously.

The fact that you and I are here is miraculous.
And the fact that you exist is a miracle.

Do not ever let
our sickly civilization
try to tell you anything to the contrary.

Gravel mounds in the mist
Are the mountain ranges of fantasy,
Spring green, eerie seen
Through commuter train windows.

Pitched roofs recede
Into infinite distance,
And junkyard parking lots are legion
In the gray suburban obscurity.

Factories and landfills loom,
Monuments and mausoleums,
The labor and the leavings
Of the little colossi.

suffering Clots in my gut
humanity gurgles In my throat
holes drilled into the Veins of the earth
as i taste a country drenched in colonIzed blood on my Lips
a melting arctIc leaks from my eyes
weStern destinies fester in my chest
as the fissures in its surface smoke my lungs out like burning gAsoline
i can Touch each pole with the pads of my fingers
and shake the glassy world
one day i will lay flat and press my tongue agaInst the world
and feel it dissOlve in my mouth
like the fizzy tablet of Nothing it is

How sweet is the affliction of humanity
to speak of it's ills renders me unsocial
to think of it's crimes too horrendous
How sweet it is to turn an eye away

And farewell, sweet world, my dearest
fiend.  That we remain calm and serene
while all things great and small burn
makes us one of a kind.  

That I have secluded my sanity from all
******* of my fellow creatures
and have remitted self to tangled
words and convoluted thoughts ...
makes all of my internal organs
breath easier.

How sweet is our affliction.

Humanity!

:: 10-07-2018 ::