We kissed, I loved, you betrayed
My youth, a trust, perfect days.
You went, I mourned, nothing left,
I was, you were, my hope bereft.

1984

Having faith in the change
the wind might bring
is a thing
y’know?
a challenge
testing bitter thoughts
and locked up hearts
too long apart

But it will blow
y’know?
this wind we wait for
bringing other thoughts
to sit inside
and while away togetherness

I watch the forecasts
come and go
y’know?
and pretend that there’s a pattern

This mapped isle
has never been one
for clement weather
but I’ll pretend to know

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, Litera, Poetry Life & Times and Freshet

Keywords/Tags: Stoops, folly, wisdom, children, wise, know, knowing, understand, understanding, life, death, grave, years, dark, leaves, trees, prince, toad, kiss, fairytale, coffin, fortress, bloodletting, maple, syrup

.
Lear wanders in stormy open, bares warring elements,
The heavens blister, crackle, night is balmy shroud,
Wretched monarch babbles in sprinkles of wind cold,
Arguments lost by ones own pouring perturbations
And raining sky said 'nothing will come from nothing.'

Howl, howls into blackness treed in lightning splits,
His outcast soul, reels, fleshed, cut to smithereens,
Tang of salt burns on the bluffs and the sea rages,
So entire and ceremonious is Lear's fall meted out,
Air spoke, 'nothing from nothings ever yet was born.'

Sky proclaimed to man child King, here is a reckoning,                            
Each mad choice was self infliction, now wind flays
And sweet Cordelia lies in her innocent **** grave,
Sky, in thralls of thundering asks, 'what say thee now,
King of highborn follies, even purple heaths are rags,

Yet black and above you and night shades, whine,
Unworthy King, done in by compounded effects,
The might of maelstroms in low butterflies wings,
How now, bare trees, knifing reeds, skeletal flashes,
To rains of night are ever your lanyards my lord,'

Sad Lear so near oblivion fell mute, sky went on,
'Howl and cry mad King your reaper calls beyond,
The icy brisk heavens await to brusque you away,
Your slipshod kingdom was mere and fools' dream,
Howl, til howls abrupt abate, for nothing now comes.'
.

Days from now we look back and find we left a clue to

now

this moment
you meet me now and

we agree
something shall change if we

agree

to see this all-self-ish-ness from your

God POV,
which you imagined as good as any you

imagined
as you aged from I to we.