How can you bare to look at yourself in the mirror?
To claim that cheating face — the one that spit out irrevocable lies — as your own.
As you stare into your smoldering eyes, all you find is an eternal disgrace of your name, your family, and your humanity.
Not even a hero could locate the dignity that been retracted from every source in your body.
In essence, you represent hopelessness.
The pitiful source where we must never direct our wishes to.
After years and years of crumbling, your process of collapsing has begun, but only to suddenly end in a silent thud.
A noise that will never be recognized by the ears of mankind.

I will take the truth from your lips
And kiss the pain out of it,
Till all that remains
Is our happy little lie.

I will take the love in your gift
And throw away the wrapping bit,
Revealing the gains:
Our happy little life.

My teacher asks for the theme,
But I don’t know how to answer
I know and I know that
A theme is or is not one word,
A common thing, a binding spell
A theme is or is not an instruction,
Told by the character’s actions,
Shown in carefully crafted consequences.
A theme is or is not a quality,
Something which defines a character,
Which determines the course of the story
It is or is not more than one sentence.
It is or is not subjective to the reader.
It is or is not, so I don’t know the answer.

But I could tell you about the Little Chinese Seamstress
About blind obsession,
About jealousy, about wonder
Would that be enough? Would that be enough?
I could tell you about how reading is so personal,
Its effect on one
Can not be understood by another
Would that be enough? Would that be enough?
Or how skill is developed by tragic experience
How learning comes from failing to learn
Would that be enough? Would that be enough?
Or if I told you that the quality of a book
is only as good as its final passage,
If I told you that
a story shouldn’t be told until its last word,
Bound by something so profound,
The book must be reread, reanalyzed
Delving into the intricate mind of the author,
With full control over life and reality,
With the power to make one word thousands,
A detail into a novel,
Anything into anything without writing it down,
Because if you can understand what the author was thinking,
Then the author was not thinking at all
Would that be enough?
Could knowing be enough?

If you asked an author
To name to you one of their themes,
Do you think they’d know the answer?
Do you think they’d care what you mean?

Is it more valuable to the student
To understand or to define?
Is it more telling of the mind
To describe an impact,
Or to save time?

I could write ballads of love
Fake as the silicone fillings of the next word,
Beautiful as glistening eyes that never met

But if I forget the words by morning,
Sentences never put to paper, forgotten and forlorn

Would I even care?
Most likely not

Inside the nation exposed to painfluencers,
having original anything is
aristocratic.

Come Down
by Michael R. Burch

for Harold Bloom and the Ivory Towerists

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
blown to the lees
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. Keywords/Tags: Harold Bloom, literary, critic, criticism, elitist, elitism, ivory, tower, heights, mountain, winter, cold, frigid



Rant: The Elite
by Michael R. Burch

When I heard Harold Bloom unsurprisingly say:
Poetry is necessarily difficult. It is our elitist art ...
I felt a small suspicious thrill. After all, sweetheart,
isn’t this who we are? Aren’t we obviously better,
and certainly fairer and taller, than they are?

Though once I found Ezra Pound
perhaps a smidgen too profound,
perhaps a bit over-fond of Benito
and the advantages of fascism
to be taken ad finem, like high tea
with a pure white spot of intellectualism
and an artificial sweetener, calorie-free.

I know! I know! Politics has nothing to do with art
And it tempts us so to be elite, to stand apart ...
but somehow the word just doesn’t ring true,
echoing effetely away—the distance from me to you.

Of course, politics has nothing to do with art,
but sometimes art has everything to do with becoming elite,
with climbing the cultural ladder, with being able to meet
someone more Exalted than you, who can demonstrate how to ****
so that everyone below claims one’s odor is sweet.
You had to be there! We were falling apart
with gratitude! We saw him! We wept at his feet!
Though someone will always be far, far above you, clouding your air,
gazing down at you with a look of wondering despair.