Some say we don't sleep others frawn
Many claim it is short my bottle rebufe
I can't count life days are not figured
I can't stretch blessing pleasure resists.

Poverty is a sin Covid 19 is a crime
No coughing no sneezing all at war
The world is faceless
The white gaurds at the frontiers

How many of your neighbors ache?
Were your grave enough for the pain?
Were your tears able to stream the agony?
The world is faceless.

Some became tycoons others cry
The Giants are standing to fall
There was no world no power
WHO sneeze America shiver
The world is faceless.

For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought:
I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair
that fell across her face, the apricot
clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed
so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan.

The memory of her gathers like a flood
and bears me to that night, that only night,
when she and I were one, and if I could ...
I’d reach to her this time and, smiling, brush
the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact
each feature, each impression. Love is such
a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone
before we recognize it. I would crush

my lips to hers to hold their memory,
if not more tightly, less elusively.

Published by The Raintown Review, The Eclectic Muse, Kritya, Gostinaya (in a Russian translation by Yelena Dubrovin), Boston Poetry Magazine, Freshet, Jewish Letter (Russia), Poetry Life & Times, Sonnetto Poesia, Trinacria, The New Formalist, Pennsylvania Review. Keywords/Tags: Memory, remembrance, love, name, features, face, hair, eyes, lips, mrbmem, crush, impression, recognize, recognition, remember, remembered, forgot, forgotten, angel, wan, night, flood

I cupped your face
and my hands stung
because you knew
what it meant
to be
holy

she said:
you are a man knowing cruel, knowing hard,
with strangest soft skin, a funny way of talking,
lick my face with your words so I’ll learn,
to be tough and tender too, this I want, wanted

he replied:
life gave me splinters, broken from rough edges,
left under my exterior to fester, blister, and scar,
life licked my face, taught me mean, and the words
that came with that, were sand papered on my skin

she answered:
I’m not blind, I can feel, smell your contradictories,
want your antibodies in my blood, survival skills,
to be what I am not, and keep too, what I’ve got, to
be infected and protected, knowing words defensive

he listened:
what you desire, is the health that comes after,
after what you don’t understand, until you’ve
loved, lost, been beaten down so that getting up is
miraculous, this unteachable, this licking by words

she insisted:
your arrhythmic rhymes, skinflint perspectives,
this is what I ask, what I need, what you can give,
what is in your possess, what you need to unburden,
making me better for making you lessened

he wept:
and said nothing.

for nothing taught appreciating silence and that,
was the beginning,
of what she wanted,
of what he did not,
of what he gives reluctantly


8:16AM
Wed May 20
Isle of Mind

If angels had faces on this Earth,
They would look like a mom.

My tissue got a scar over all my weary skin,
my tears got not tissues to clear my sin,
bearing all those scars, I've been with none but with myself in war,
I killed myself over and over, those scars now is a shining surface,
I try to hide my face,
Because sometimes I feel disgrace.
I wish I could go back and replace.