What is this?
Is it a dream?
Nothing changes,
Yet nothing stays the same.

Remember,
We’re not here.
We all exist,
As one elsewhere.

I wade into its forest
and wander inside its ocean
this heart carries their rhythm
my love ‘tis its own

I soar across this earth
and walk beyond its skies
my feet rest upon its solidity
its foundation is my home

I ingest its symphony
and bathe in its purity
this mind becomes empty
Oneness and I, alone

I listen to its fruitfulness
harvesting its riches
this body fills with silence
its void is my unknown

It sees through these eyes
all of its creations
this spirit is in but not of this world
my breath it has bestowed

Goddess
by Michael R. Burch

“What will you conceive in me?”—
I asked her. But she
only smiled.

“Naked, I bore your child
when the wolf wind howled,
when the cold moon scowled . . .
naked, and gladly.”

“What will become of me?”—
I asked her, as she
absently stroked my hand.

Centuries later, I understand:
she whispered—“I Am.”

Published by Romantics Quarterly (the first poem in the first issue), Penny Dreadful, Unlikely Stories, Underground Poets, Poetically Speaking, Poetry Life & Times, Little Brown Poetry. Keywords/Tags: Muse, Goddess, Erato, Beloved, poetic, inspiration, lyric, poetry, divinity, Orpheus, Sappho

Like fingers running across a harp
from shoulder toward feet
I fall deeper into you.
My fingertips pause
here and there in their journey
to feel the sweet vibrations
of your body
and in these small silences
I enter your divinity.

DON'T YOU LOOK AT ME!

i am ravishing, but i am ruinous.
my bones are connected by chaos,
my muscles by vengeance, my
teeth by blood—i am not a sight
to behold, i am a watercolor left
to rot.

the gods gaze upon me and hang
their heads in shame, in chagrin,
in white hot resentment. i am
medusa with peony lips and a
treasonous grin—there is beauty
in this cataclysm even aphrodite
cannot touch.

DON'T YOU TOUCH ME!

destruction can be found in the
hell between my hips, in crevices
where you do not belong. please,
stay back, or i will feast upon the
warmth in your chest, the grace
on your tongue, the light that's
in your heart.

DON'T GET TOO CLOSE!

but you kiss me anyway and you
taste like reparation. oh, my baby,
i cannot get enough. you wilt and
wither under my touch and i carry
you across galaxies.

you invite me to taste you and i
swallow you whole instead. i can
learn to live with the guilt in my
throat because it's more bearable
than feeling completely

alone.

Having been brought up as Catholic,
I was always told that
God was a jealous god.
Jealous.
That there is no room
for other so-called "gods" in his churches,
and that there can be no room for another
in the hearts of his disciples, his children.
Children.
     Now, a man of twenty-six years,
I ask, I wonder,
why do we invest our faith in a God
who is jealous, when we ourselves
do all we can to abolish
the jealousy in our own hearts?
Is God so unsure of himself that,
were we to merely consider another,
he would reject us and hold us in contempt?
And yet, he is described as "perfect."
Perfect.
That he need not work to improve himself,
though we here on Earth
do all that we can to come close
to purity and perfection.
     As a man of only twenty-six years,
I can tell you with a certain conviction
that God is only a child -
a child in need of guidance, himself.
And I wonder still, more than ever, it seems,
why we look to God at all
and not to ourselves.