The Quickening
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

I never meant to love you
when I held you in my arms
promising you sagely
wise, noncommittal charms.

And I never meant to need you
when I touched your tender lips
with kisses that intrigued my own –
such kisses I had never known,
nor a heartbeat in my fingertips!

Keywords/Tags: love, quickening, lips, tender, kisses, intrigued, intriguing, heart, heartbeat, pulse, desire

Because You Came to Me
by Michael R. Burch

Because you came to me with sweet compassion
and kissed my furrowed brow and smoothed my hair,
I do not love you after any fashion,
but wildly, in despair.

Because you came to me in my black torment
and kissed me fiercely, blazing like the sun
upon parched desert dunes, till in dawn’s foment
they melt, I am undone.

Because I am undone, you have remade me
as suns bring life, as brilliant rains endow
the earth below with leaves, where you now shade me
and bower me, somehow.

Keywords/Tags: Love, compassion, tenderness, kisses, melt, melting, sun, rain, bower, shelter, comfort, refuge, home, union

Once
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Once when her kisses were fire incarnate
and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame,
when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes,
leaving me listlessly sighing her name . . .

Once when her ******* were as pale, as beguiling,
as wan rivers of sand shedding heat like a mist,
when her words would at times softly, mildly rebuke me
all the while as her lips did more wildly insist . . .

Once when the thought of her echoed and whispered
through vast wastelands of need like a Bedouin chant,
I ached for the touch of her lips with such longing
that I vowed all my former vows to recant . . .

Once, only once, something bloomed, of a desiccate seed—
this implausible blossom her wild rains of kisses decreed.

Published by The Lyric, Writer’s Journal, Grassroots Poetry, Tucumcari Literary Journal, Unlikely Stories, Poetry Life & Times. Keywords/Tags: kisses, fire, incarnate, lipstick, dunes, *******, heat, lips, breath, sighs, passion, desire, lust, ***, bachelorhood, recanted

Kisses for you
for lunch and
for dinner-
for now
'til eternity.

I want to kiss you
My lips quiver when I look at you
My heart screams, it wants more of you
It wants to hold and cradle its own

I wanted to kiss you
But you looked at me with an air of logic
and not of love
And the two are like oil and water
Medicine and wine
Forgiveness and the lack thereof

I waited to kiss you
I never did
That year flew away from me
Our time together
Stifled by the irreversible wind
Of neverending past lives
and loves

But still,
I wish I had kissed you

so here i am, walking away from cadillacs and city lights, as if skipping through soundtracks and photographs. above, the clouds have worn their black veils and the rain, it has started mourning each car i pass by, each block, each step taken. it mourns all the sorrows i cannot poke, all the letters i cannot write, all the words i cannot say.

the rain, it mourns all those summer days of pure bliss, with the sunlight peacefully fissuring through the trees. oh how we kissed, all soiled jeans and grass on sundresses. sweaty palms, hands on thighs, all yours prayers left on my neck. the cigarettes and dogwoods forgotten on our periphery.



i love you, i love you, i love you. you were the first, the last, the always.



and yet, how did we ever become that sweet summer’s downfall? the cigarettes are now ashed under all these spent lights and faint sunset colors. these mint breaths and sun-warmed kisses, now just bruises on my lips — now just memories slowly flaking off my skin.





and i used to love you. stupid, stupid girl.





now the rain has washed all those fields and the sins they’d seen. it has washed my skin of the lingering cigarette smoke, of your kisses, of your touch, and i’m not sure if i ever wanna forget. but even the rain’s heartbreak leaves behind the serenity of the last raindrops. lush grasses. damp streets. that distinct, morning breeze. that subtle scent of petrichor. that quiet settling of the calm.





maybe that’s all i need to know.