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Awesome
I am happy to hear you are happy

I love happily ever afters

You deserve fairytales

Like we had once upon a time before midnight struck and switched everything back to ****
Not every person gets a happy ending
I’m confident that if all the King’s Men
were women, Humpty Dumpty
would have survived.
Jellyfish Dec 2023
Tricky sentences flew after moonrise,
A battle commenced under moonlight,
Swings and beams chased eachother
Like fireflies dance around lovers

It was a sight to see unlike any other
I enjoyed the chase as if I were further,
To be honest I didn't realize it was such a fight
until I saw my hand disappear to reveal the moon.
Reimers Oct 2023
When butterflies no longer take their flight,
The vibrant hues turn dim, day turns to night,
In the fairytale we thought would never
end,
True love awakens as the mundane descends.

That's where the real journey will commence,
Hold your beloved, let your souls' recompense.
When your heart beats calm, steady, and true,
That's when love's authenticity shines through.

Do not fear, embrace this honest reveal,
Facing the truth, emotions raw and real.
Only then, deserving of the love we earn,
To a deeper, lasting fairy tale we return.
Odd Odyssey Poet Aug 2023
Once upon a time a kiss,
in a land of feelings, and desire
Lived what we thought was the perfect kiss,

Our very first words, of tasting one other,
and a journey of potential love;
finding our likes and dislikes, we soon came to discover

Cinderella kisses- at a time you and I had a ball,
waking up from such a lucid dream, as kids
And being so innocent and pure as a Snow white,
still skipping stones along a stream of our dreams

Never telling our parents of this young relationship we had,
and of all those secret places you and I had kissed- our neverland
As I was losing my fingers in all of the curls of your hair;
I climbed the towers of kissing up your neck with steady kisses;
to impress myself on my Rapunzel of no other compare

As I imagined you, pricked by my passion;
a sweet endless dream of beauty, with my resting head
on your bare chest; you were always such a Sleeping beauty
Sleeping in all of our cuddles, I was waiting patiently
to wake up another morning with you

Even to this day, I wonder if we could have ended our story
with a happily ever after final kiss
Sigh, it was all a fairytale,
just made to help me reminisce

                  ...the end.
I was a bit tipsy upon writing this
unknown Jun 2023
You always wanted to be treated like a queen, like a princess.
Be in a kingdom of love, faith, hope, care, respect, and honesty.
Acting as if your life was filled with fairytales, filled with possibilities.
Drowning with the thoughts of battling with once upon a time and happy ending.

You once painted him as your knight in shinning armor.
Described him as your light in a place that's filled with darkness.
You wrote everything perfectly, but on what reason? What purpose?
Were you just overwhelmed by fulfilling the thought of being with him?

Two different paths to take, one choice to make.
One choice to make.
One path to take.
And without hesitation you choose him, over and over again.

Little by little you started to wonder,
What was really the purpose of doing this? Of being with the knight that shined light?
Was the light made everything clear? Or did it just blinded you?
Still you've got no answer, you're lost in your imaginations.

Your knight in shinning armor? Did he really saved you?
Your light in the darkness? Did you really see everything?
The path you took? Was it really the right path?
You should be saying yes, but why are you gloating?

Didn't you want this? Didn't you prayed for this?
Didn't you waited for this? Didn't you work hard for this?
The story you created for how many years just to make your life magical,
Yet you're stuck in your own fairytale that has no spark anymore.
Michael R Burch May 2023
These are poems I call my Fables...



Will There Be Starlight
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Will there be starlight
tonight
while she gathers
damask
and lilac
and sweet-scented heathers?

And will she find flowers,
or will she find thorns
guarding the petals
of roses unborn?

Will there be moonlight
tonight
while she gathers
seashells
and mussels
and albatross feathers?

And will she find treasure
or will she find pain
at the end of this rainbow
of moonlight on rain?

Published by TALESetc, Starlight Archives, The Word (UK), Poezii (Romanian translation by Petru Dimofte), The Chained Muse, Famous Poets & Poems, Grassroots Poetry, Inspirational Stories, Jenion, Regalia, Poetry Webring and Writ in Water; also set to music by the award-winning New Zealand composer David Hamilton.


She Gathered Lilacs
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

She gathered lilacs
and arrayed them in her hair;
tonight, she taught the wind to be free.

She kept her secrets
in a silver locket;
her companions were starlight and mystery.

She danced all night
to the beat of her heart;
with her tears she imbued the sea.

She hid her despair
in a crystal jar,
and never revealed it to me.

She kept her distance
as though it were armor;
gauntlet thorns guard her heart like the rose.

Love!—awaken, awaken
to see what you’ve taken
is still less than the due my heart owes!

Published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Borderless Journal, The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Shabestaneh (Iran), Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Famous Poets and Poems, The Chained Muse, Inspirational Stories, Lilac Blossom Collection, English Poetry, Love Poems and Poets, Not Just a Label and Captivating Poetry (Anthology)



Step Into Starlight
by Michael R. Burch

Step into starlight,
lovely and wild,
lonely and longing,
a woman, a child . . .

Throw back drawn curtains,
enter the night,
dream of his kiss
as a comet ignites . . .

Then fall to your knees
in a wind-fumbled cloud
and shudder to hear
oak hocks groaning aloud.

Flee down the dark path
to where the snaking vine bends
and withers and writhes
as winter descends . . .

And learn that each season
ends one vanished day,
that each pregnant moon holds
no spent tides in her sway . . .

For, as suns seek horizons,
boys fall, men decline.
As the grape sags with its burden,
remember—the wine!

Published by The Lyric, The Chained Muse, New Lyre, Poetry Life & Times, The Hypertexts and OperaNews



The Folly of Wisdom
by Michael R. Burch

She is wise in the way that children are wise,
looking at me with such knowing, grave eyes
I must bend down to her to understand.
But she only smiles, and takes my hand.

We are walking somewhere that her feet know to go,
so I smile, and I follow ...

And the years are dark creatures concealed in bright leaves
that flutter above us, and what she believes—
I can almost remember—goes something like this:
the prince is a horned toad, awaiting her kiss.

She wiggles and giggles, and all will be well
if only we find him! The woodpecker’s knell
as he hammers the coffin of some dying tree
that once was a fortress to someone like me

rings wildly above us. Some things that we know
we are meant to forget. Life is a bloodletting, maple-syrup-slow.

Published by Romantics Quarterly, Boston Poetry Magazine, Famous Poets and Poems, Vajhu (India), Litera (UK), Art in Society (Germany), Inspirational Stories, Poetry Life & Times and Freshet



Violets
by Michael R. Burch

Once, only once,
when the wind flicked your skirt
to an indiscreet height

and you laughed,
abruptly demure,
outblushing shocked violets:

suddenly,
I knew:
everything had changed.

Later, as you braided your hair
into long bluish plaits
the shadows empurpled

—the dragonflies’
last darting feints
dissolving mid-air—

we watched the sun’s long glide
into evening,
knowing and unknowing ...

O, how the illusions of love
await us in the commonplace
and rare

then haunt our small remainder of hours.

Published by Romantics Quarterly, Muse Apprentice Guild, Victorian Violet Press, Boston Poetry Magazine and Poetry on Demand



The Endeavors of Lips
by Michael R. Burch

How sweet the endeavors of lips—to speak
of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak
in love’s strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak:
for there is no illusion like love ...

Grown childlike, we wish for those storied days,
for those bright sprays of flowers, those primrosed ways
that curled to the towers of Yesterdays
where She braided illusions of love ...

“O, let down your hair!”—we might call and call,
to the dark-slatted window, the moonlit wall ...
but our love is a shadow; we watch it crawl
like a spidery illusion. For love ...

was never as real as that first kiss seemed
when we read by the flashlight and dreamed.

Published by Romantics Quarterly and The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



Desdemona
by Michael R. Burch

Though you possessed the moon and stars,
you are bound to fate and wed to chance.
Your lips deny they crave a kiss;
your feet deny they ache to dance.
Your heart imagines wild romance.

Though you cupped fire in your hands
and molded incandescent forms,
you are barren now, and—spent of flame—
the ashes that remain are borne
toward the sun upon a storm.

You, who demanded more, have less,
your heart within its cells of sighs
held fast by chains of misery,
confined till death for peddling lies—
imprisonment your sense denies.

You, who collected hearts like leaves
and pressed each once within your book,
forgot. None—winsome, bright or rare—
not one was worth a second look.
My heart, as others, you forsook.

But I, though I loved you from afar
through silent dawns, and gathered rue
from gardens where your footsteps left
cold paths among the asters, knew—
each moonless night the nettles grew

and strangled hope, where love dies too.

Published by Penny Dreadful, Carnelian, Romantics Quarterly, Grassroots Poetry and Poetry Life & Times



Pan
by Michael R. Burch

... Among the shadows of the groaning elms,
amid the darkening oaks, we fled ourselves ...

... Once there were paths that led to coracles
that clung to piers like loosening barnacles ...

... where we cannot return, because we lost
the pebbles and the playthings, and the moss ...

... hangs weeping gently downward, maidens’ hair
who never were enchanted, and the stairs ...

... that led up to the Fortress in the trees
will not support our weight, but on our knees ...

... we still might fit inside those splendid hours
of damsels in distress, of rustic towers ...

... of voices heard in wolves’ tormented howls
that died, and live in dreams’ soft, windy vowels ...

Published by The Chariton Review, Romantics Quarterly, The Chained Muse, New Lyre, Poetry Porch/Sonnet Scroll, Muse Apprentice Guild, The Eclectic Muse (Canada), Famous Poets & Poems, Inspirational Stories, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Poetry Life & Times and Sonetto Poesia (Canada)



Moments
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

There were moments
full of promise,
like the petal-scented rainfall
of early spring,
when to hold you in my arms
and to kiss your willing lips
seemed everything.

There are moments
strangely empty
full of pale unearthly twilight
—how the cold stars stare!—
when to be without you
is a dark enchantment
the night and I share.

Published by Tucumcari Literary Review, Romantics Quarterly, Poezii (Romanian translation by Petru Dimofte), Borderless Journal (Singapore), Grassroots Poetry, The Chained Muse, in a Soundcloud reading by Vex Darkly, and in a YouTube reading by Jasper Sole



The Aery Faery Princess
by Michael R. Burch

for Keira

There once was a princess lighter than fluff
made of such gossamer stuff—
the down of a thistle, butterflies’ wings,
the faintest high note the hummingbird sings,
moonbeams on garlands, strands of bright hair ...
I think she’s just you when you’re floating on air.

Published in Whimsy/Poems for Big Kids and A Bouquet of Poems for children of all ages



Fairest Diana
by Michael R. Burch

Fairest Diana, princess of dreams,
born to be loved and yet distant and lone,
why did you linger—so solemn, so lovely—
an orchid ablaze in a crevice of stone?

Was not your heart meant for tenderest passions?
Surely your lips—for wild kisses, not vows!
Why then did you languish, though lustrous, becoming
a pearl of enchantment cast before sows?

Fairest Diana, fragile as lilac,
as willful as rainfall, as true as the rose;
how did a stanza of silver-bright verse
come to be bound in a book of dull prose?

Published by Tucumcari Literary Journal and Night Roses

I believe this poem was written in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, around the time it became apparent that the lovely Diana Spencer was going to marry into the British royal family.



Because She Craved the Very Best
by Michael R. Burch

Because she craved the very best,
he took her East, he took her West;
he took her where there were no wars
and brought her bright bouquets of stars ...

The blush and fragrances of roses,
the hush an evening sky imposes,
moonbeams pale and garlands rare,
and golden combs to match her hair ...

A nightingale to sing all night,
white wings, to let her soul take flight ...
She stabbed him with a poisoned sting
and as he lay there dying,
she screamed, "I wanted everything!"
and started crying.

Originally published by Lone Stars



Happily Never After (the Second Curse of the ***** Toad)
by Michael R. Burch

He did not think of love of Her at all
frog-plangent nights, as moons engoldened roads
through crumbling stonewalled provinces, where toads
(nee princes) ruled in chinks and grew so small
at last to be invisible. He smiled
(the fables erred so curiously), and thought
bemusedly of being reconciled
to human flesh, because his heart was not
incapable of love, but, being cursed
a second time, could only love a toad’s . . .
and listened as inflated frogs rehearsed
cheekbulging tales of anguish from green moats . . .
and thought of her soft croak, her skin fine-warted,
his anemic flesh, and how true love was thwarted.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly

Keywords/Tags: fable, fables, poetic fable, poem, poems, poetry, verse, romance, romantic, love, fairy tale, myth, lullaby, nursery rhyme, child, children, bedtime story
Amanda Kay Burke Feb 2023
Life is no charming fairytale
Even on easiest days
Most blessed person you know
Has demons to keep at bay
There's no such thing as perfect
Beauty eventually will all decay
The only hope we have is to hang on
Find happiness within the disarray
And there is no such thing as happily ever after
Strying Jan 2023
sure I already loved nature before,
how could I not?
with the glorious world around us
a literal fairytale outside our windows.

but something after you said those words,
made the rain look extra special in the light that night,
it was as though your words flipped a switch,
and now everything seemed so pretty.

I was still frightened of everything,
but my focus was no longer on my fear,
but on a feeling of glee,
and I felt so free,
even nothing had truly changed for me.
I think that new possibilities bring fear, but also excitement and confusion. Just trying to take things one day at a time.
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