The game is old
The tokens made of ice
From under folds of hooded cloaks
Flash the eyes of mice
But every thousand years
A human player appears
And in his hands
Our fate
               hangs
Like drops of blood
               on yellowed murine fangs
For it is said
By those long dead
That on the day he loses
We all melt away
We all melt away

Lozenge
by Michael R. Burch

When I was closest to love, it did not seem
real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness
it might dissolve in my mouth
like a lozenge of sugar.

When I held you in my arms, I did not feel
our lack of completeness,
knowing how easy it was
for us to cling to each other.

And there were nights when the clouds
sped across the moon’s face,
exposing such rarified brightness
we did not witness

so much as embrace
love’s human appearance.

Keywords/Tags: Love, sweet, sweetness, sugar, melt, melting, dissolve, dissolving, candy, lozenge, confection, tablet, pill, cough drop, capsule, confit, bonbon, honey, sweetie, chocolate

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

Melting
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Entirely, as spring consumes the snow,
the thought of you consumes me: I am found
in rivulets, dissolved to what I know
of former winters’ passions. Underground,
perhaps one slender icicle remains
of what I was before, in some dark cave—
a stalactite, long calcified, now drains
to sodden pools whose milky liquid laves
the colder rock, thus washing something clean
that never saw the light, that never knew
the crust could break above, that light could stream:
so luminous,
                       so bright,
                                         so beautiful . . .
I lie revealed, and so I stand transformed,
and all because you smiled on me, and warmed.

Keywords/Tags: spring, melting, snow, winter, icicle, stalactite, underground, cave, transformation, love, warmth

Underneath
the shifting layers of gravel and soil,
the thin crust of busyness
and distractions
are the hours of merging and melting
from our friction and romance,
in other words
the love and trust
that is our bedrock.

No matter
how beautiful
twinkling snow is

Nothing
feels better
than the first
warm sunbeams
after
a cold winter

Defrosting the freezers
  are far from ****
Nonetheless
They're on the rise

Caps are melting
Shelves are falling
Glaciers are passing ships
  in the traffic lane
They're on the move

This is no song & dance
The poles are looking for
  new real estate and
They're coming soon
  to a neighborhood near you

If pain demanded to be felt,
then my happiness intended to melt.