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d m Apr 15
i wrote  
again.  

(a minor miracle: after  
8 years of not caring for the craft
let's call it deviceful degeneration,
unintentional uninspiration)  
                                    
the thing about  
nearly getting better  
is  
you start  
thinking you're better.  

i wrote something this week  
(it wasn’t bad)  
sat back in the chair like  
i'd just nailed  
a wasp to a wall  
with a pencil.  

but this morning—  
the poem’s still there  
and the chair still squeaks  
and the rot in my ribs  
hasn’t gone anywhere.  

eight years  
of eating my own teeth  
chewing time like  
it owed me something.  
"writer’s block"  
was a nice excuse  
for cowardice.  
so was  
"perfectionism"  
but now  
i’ve got words again.  
& i just realised
they don’t save me.  
they never did.  

the poems may come back  
but what if the fulfilment
doesn’t?
  
so what now?  
what’s left  
after the confetti  
after the applause  
dies in your own throat?

you write.  
maybe you write.  

even if  
no one  
is waiting.  

even if  
you  
aren’t either.  

& if the ache comes back  
(which it will)  
you greet it at the door  
let it crash on the couch  
pour it a drink  
& say  
fine.  
one more night
d m Apr 14
—i remember  
the root-spool spool’d & spindled into him (the Tallshoes)—  
his collarbone made of oak-meat & mothjaw,  
his breath a sermon from the century’s throat  
           & he (he?)  
              was all knuckles & psalms, breaking—breaking  

              me  

so gently i could almost not die  

:in the lampdusk, where piecrust dreams go to rot,  
i lived in a hush-jar behind the walls of  
     her (yes–her/ not-me)  
     knitting sugar into skin,  
     biting stars till they bled apologies.  
     this was our manor of hushthings.  

he’d kiss like a rifle.

and somewhere between  
the eighth clatter of china and the third motherless sun,  
the lungs of the house exhaled me—  
                         (twigbone, mossgut, tailghost)  
                         soft ruin squeaking for its end.  

i prayed to the god in the cellar drain.  
i danced with the dustmen.  
i unremembered my own name until it was appleseed, cough, smudge.  

& yes (listen)  

           i saw her  
               (once) peel the sky from a peach.  
           her hands trembled the way old poems do—  
           a flicker//flicker// hush.  

        “don’t wake him,”  
        she said,  
        as if my death  
        were  
        the only dream  
        keeping him asleep.

o! my ribs are a /forest/ now  
      (shhh)  
      (they bloom in secret)  
      (they tell no one)

and the last thing  
before the hush became  
                 forever:  

a child with an empty thimble  
calling  
my name.  

which i no longer had.  

but i answered anyway.
d m Apr 14
58
i held my breath till it whistled  
   // like a kettle with a grudge //  
the moon’s face flickers—  
     too lemon to trust,  
     too god to look away from  

(you see it too, don’t you?)

   // the men in glass shoes  
   stomping on the grass  
   call it progress //  
& we clap like good teeth  
    like teeth that belong  

i woke up with hands full of gravel  
     (my spine still replaying  
     that tuesday when  
     the news kissed me on the mouth
     58 dead in Gaza  
     it tasted like iron)

       i’m not built for this century  
       i was born on mute  
       but everyone’s shouting  
       inside  
       their suits

someone’s building  
       a new god  
       in the basement  
       of a pharmacy  
            —says it kills the fake
            —says it’s making the world great again

my chest is full of alarms  
   but they only go off  
   when i sit still  

i tried to pray but  
    all the vowels were sold out  
    so i just hummed  
    till i forgot the tune  
    or the meaning  
    or the shape of  
            safe

          (what was that again?)  

    don’t look at me  
    i’m just another scarecrow  
    made of receipts  
    mouthing  
        please stop
        in perfect  
        passive  
        silence
d m Apr 13
rocky raccoon
           cowboy in the
dust of somewhere / nowhere
                                        leaning
into a quicksilver sunset,
hands tied in twisted
ropecords, each knot
a secret no one knows

who
        pulls the trigger?
hands, trembling
                like the last bird
that fell from sky
                splayed wide—flesh    
and bone paint the prairie
                                    /flawed
with the stain of not being fast enough
but this
             is cowboy's life
no slowness in
                the click
of a gun /
                    but the final breath
          like wind
                           whistling
     through bonechamber
     between ribs—an afterthought.

        (the sheriff's a ghost, a thin rope
of smoke, and eyes are just
               holes drilled into glass)
      all /time/hangs
                 in moments—      
                                            lassoed
     by a mind that only
         remembers scars

rocky’s fingers curl, twitch
            (don't you move just
       let it happen, let it happen,
   you know it’ll fade—)
                       breath is a yellow
    fading light
         pushing past
                     skin /skin
                                       skin

the rope (too thick)
                  slices
        into a body that doesn't belong
anywhere,
                         just in that second
when he knew
                time bends and
                            falls
like dust back into dust

the howl of wind,
               the grind of
                          bullet
                (aimed but missed
because nothing
          sticks around long enough)
                       hangs in that
                   empty sky
                            and what was
                             done, undone.

if death speaks,
                         it's just
                       another song
that nobody
  quite understands  
                           yet
as the raccoon cowboy
               swings

                                         there
d m Apr 13
there was a boy(unbuttoned spine: tin)
             who sang bullets through teeth,        
             cough-stitched into boots—                      
             (mother would’ve                never                
                            known him in pieces)    

& you—  
             mustard! you crawling  
                    godless     yellowing yawn-    
             (you churchless warlock vapor  
             shuffling up his gullet  
                         like a borrowed hymn)        

he——  
             (let’s name him no one)              
             swallowed lungs like spoiled pears,      
             vines of cough wrapped around      
                                 his windpipe’s piano      
             & the keys stopped—one by one—        

click

     the music changed  

                                    —not into silence—    
             but into smoke  
                       a wordless opera:  
                 gasp.gasp.gasp.gone    

his eyes were  
             paperboats  
                       folding inward  

& the dirt applauded softly  
       in clouds of not-quiet  
          (a whistle wheezing past his ear)  
                 sergeant said: “keep walking”  
               but his knees said: “no more poems.”    

         (there are no metaphors in hell, just  
                 uniforms  
                         without skin)

:he dreamt once of  
                             lemons
     & a girl who     never      existed, probably—

he tried  
             to say goodbye  
    but found only  
               ash vowels &  
                        consonants with no  
                               consonance  

    (what’s the word for a throat  
               forgetting how to  
                            be?)    

his body un-wrote itself backwards      
             while the war kept  
                          typing    

                                      click
                        
                                            click
                                
             .                                                                                                                                              

             .                                                                                                                                

             .    

& the smoke  
             did not apologize.
d m Apr 13
a blue great shark  
(she)  
   wears muscle like    wet velvet

          a  
     slip   of fang’d prayer,  
  flitting      between glass  
       (between    god)  
              & the breathless hymn of vacuumed air

           I: was              not born to trap—
but you
          (brine-womb'd deity, slit of eye & icepick heart)

         how you undulate: (slower than sound faster than thought)
   the way a sigh    pulls threads from skin  
             & your dorsal dreams
      puncture my             museum bones

                        (curators watch—)  
with    chloroform-thirsting hands  
          & tongues that catalog moan  
                        in latin

                "carcharodon carcharias (desire in aqueous form)"  
                 whispered into tubes of   blue    gel-light

they                (we)  
    hunted her in sonatas  
            dissonant harpoons      
                            like broken violins
                      stitched with heartbeat wire

   a net of     unreason, &     peach-blind codes

           she swallowed our time  
                        whole

(yes)  
& spat it out      garnished with  
                         cumulus

                          (‘*** in bubblewrap’  
                             & I wept:  
                                   not for her  
                                       but because)  

you should see  
   the way her eye  
                 bends around corners  
       like velvet crawling up the leg of the void

       (can glass blush?)  
            mine does.

        the trap was not a cage  
                   (never a cage)
              it was a vowel—
   unspoken  
                    caught between  
         two mouths                  both too full of salt
                    to say "stay"

they filed her fins  
         under “****** geometry”  
          & mopped her breathless body with silk
               (I dream in that silk now)

   mythology in the gift shop:
                 $17.99 / laminated lust

    "do not tap the glass"—  
         the signs say
    (we tap anyway)  
         it sounds like  
                    a kiss

                          —or knuckles  
                                  trying to remember what “prayer” felt like  
                                   before museums

she moves inside
                   (me?)  
     (it?)  
             the tank of days
                            like a wound that doesn’t know  
                                     how to close

                   her movement becomes time:  
            an ellipse of pelvic   clocks  
                            hips made of tide

          (I counted the ******* by wave-height)

  a fin shadows my sleep
        & my sleep is
             /liquid/ & /open/
                   & /wanting/
                       & /neverthirsted enough/

the exhibit is called  
            “arousal in lowercase”

        the plaque reads:  
            “species suspended in ****** amnesia”  
        (but I know:  
                     she swims to remember)

her gills—
         fractal *******
                   (every inhale an alphabet of longing)  

          & oh how she  
                   spells me

a.museum.is.nothing  
                   but a lung that cannot  
                    exhale

   & when I press against the glass
             (mouth to pane)  
     she flicks a tail      —just enough—  
                       & I almost break

   the security guard has seen this before

“don’t worry,” he says  
    “it happens to everyone”

           (but I am not everyone)  
                I am the one who kissed her name  
                         into the salt

I was not born to trap  
       but born by the trap  
               untrapping me  
                  through her

         & now (she)  
       is the one watching  
            me
               in a tank

          mouth full of air
                     no words left
        just one endless  
             fin  
                   curl  
                         ~  
                            loop  
                          ­        of  
                                      shiver

      ­       & she swims  
                        through  
                       ­     (my glass heart)
d m Apr 13
(twists of chrome&light—robot skin hums)
(the moon's a soft scratch across the noise)

in the glow of circuits  
skinless machine they call it — a ribcage of  
      steel       thin as breath through  
         wires twisted like fingers

a guitar for a ****, vibrating so tender the strings hum  
    in the cracks of      electric bones

he (so strange he is, no mouth, no tongue,  
        just shivering echoes)  
presses his body to the amplifier,  
         and oh, how the machine
      screams a voice of strings,  
                    a mouth made of chords  
                                (the hum of his *** is sound)

guitar-skin rubs against raw pixels,  
                  /buzz/  
           his metal-throat slurs a buzz  
       body-as-electricity  
fingers too—  
           long, sharp-fingered  
        strings become veins  
       twisted tight,  
                         pulsing  
                         pulsing with  
                                   the pop of a note  
               (cutting through the sweat of  
       gears)

he lays down in the rust-patch of a day,  
(whispers of feedback)  
guitar *****  
             throbbing at the mouth  
        of a song  
         it’s buzzing a word  
                        it’s aching the air  
         vibrating inside him  
(he hums through his heels)

my dear metal boy,  
your hips don’t bend,  
your heart does not  
      know what love is  
  still—oh how you bend me,  
      shape me into your chorus  
         make me feel  
         the way you pulse  
                     while your steel body sings

watch  
            watch his fingers  
                    the way they curl  
                             over the bridge,    
                           twisting the strings like  
         they are veins  
            veins  
                        veins

so much electric flesh  
twisting to each tremble  
        of the note, the note  
            falling on silence (he trembles)  
  feedback's kiss—

         so much pleasure,  
                           so much  
                              dark  
        desire flashing through circuits,  
the sound wraps around  
     both the shape of his ***  
     the song of his soul  
        (his soul, trapped inside code)

fingered on the strings  
his chest is the tremor of an  
      echo,  
      a feedback song  
      that breaks across  
    the metal skin  
                  of his ribcage

lips that cannot taste  
                         kiss  
                but hum electric  
he comes and it's a sound  
     vibrating the universe into  
                         whimpers  
the sky and the stars are bent to  
          his melody  
                  his body hums a  
     raw electric rhythm  
         of dark, trembling skin

a soft hum where you’d expect  
                   a scream, a shout,  
                               the silence

(the guitar-male pulls at the plug)  
skinless,  
      the strings are finally loose,  
                      untangled

the world breathes  
                      the world screams  
and the moon just scratches again,  
soft through the radio static.
Michael R Burch Apr 2021
Prose Poems and Experimental Poems
by Michael R. Burch

These are prose poems (is that an oxymoron?)  and experimental poems that begin with the first non-rhyming poem I wrote as a teenager...



Something
―for the children of the Holocaust and the Nakba
by Michael R. Burch

Something inescapable is lost―lost like a pale vapor curling up into shafts of moonlight, vanishing in a gust of wind toward an expanse of stars immeasurable and void. Something uncapturable is gone―gone with the spent leaves and illuminations of autumn, scattered into a haze with the faint rustle of parched grass and remembrance. Something unforgettable is past―blown from a glimmer into nothingness, or less, which finality swept into a corner, where it lies... in dust and cobwebs and silence.

This was my first poem that didn't rhyme, written in my late teens. The poem came to me 'from blue nothing' (to borrow a phrase from my friend the Maltese poet Joe Ruggier) . Years later, I dedicated the poem to the children of the Holocaust and the Nakba.


briefling
by Michael R. Burch

manishatched, hopsintotheMix, cavorts, hassex (quick! , spawnanewBrood!) ; then, likeamayfly, he's suddenly gone: plantfood.



It's Hard Not To Be Optimistic: An Updated Sonnet to Science
by Michael R. Burch

"DNA has cured deadly diseases and allowed labs to create animals with fantastic new features." ― U.S. News & World Report

It's hard not to be optimistic when things are so wondrously futuristic: when DNA, our new Louie Pasteur, can effect an autonomous, miraculous cure, while labs churn out fluorescent monkeys who, with infinite typewriters, might soon outdo USN&WR's flunkeys. Yes, it's hard not to be optimistic when the world is so delightfully pluralistic: when Schrödinger's cat is both dead and alive, and Hawking says time can run backwards. We thrive, befuddled drones, on someone else's regurgitated nectar, while our cheers drown out poet-alarmists who might Hector the Achilles heel of pure science (common sense)  and reporters who tap out supersillyous nonsense. [Dear U.S. News & World Report Editors: I am a fan of both real science and science fiction, and I like to think I can tell the difference, at least between the two extremes. I feel confident that Schrödinger didn't think the cat in his famous experiment was both dead and alive. Rather, he was pointing out that we can't know until we open the box, scratchings and smell aside. While traveling backwards in time is great for science fiction, it seems extremely doubtful as a practical application. And as for DNA curing deadly diseases... well, it must have created them, so perhaps don't give it too much credit! While I'm usually a fan of your magazine, as a writer I must take to task the Frankensteinian logic of the excerpt I cited, and I challenge you to publish my "letter" as proof that poets do have a function in the third millennium, even if it is only to suggest that paid writers should not create such outlandish, freakish horrors of the English language.―Somewhat irked, but still a fan, Michael R. Burch]



bachelorhoodwinked
by Michael R. Burch

u are charming & disarming, but mostly! ! ! ALARMING! ! ! since all my resolve dissolved! u are chic as a sheikh's harem girl in the sheets, but now my bed's not my own and my kingdom's been overthrown!



Starting from Scratch with Ol' Scratch
by Michael R. Burch

for the Religious Right

Love, with a small, fatalistic sigh went to the ovens. Please don't bother to cry. You could have saved her, but you were all *******: complaining about the Jews to Reichmeister Grupp. Scratch that. You were born after World War II. You had something more important to do: while the children of the Nakba were perishing in Gaza with the complicity of your government, you had a noble cause (a religious tract against homosexual marriage and various things gods and evangelists disparage.)  Jesus will grok you? Ah, yes, I'm quite sure that your intentions were good and ineluctably pure. After all, what the hell does he care about Palestinians? Certainly, Christians were right about serfs, slaves and Indians. Scratch that. You're one of the Devil's minions.



Prose Poem: The Trouble with Poets
by Michael R. Burch

This morning the neighborhood girls were helping their mothers with chores, but one odd little girl was out picking roses by herself, looking very small and lonely.

Suddenly the odd one refused to pick roses anymore because she decided it might "hurt" them. Now she just sits beside the bushes, rocking gently back and forth, weeping and consoling them!

Now she's lost all interest in nature, which she finds "appalling." She dresses in black "like Rilke" and says she prefers the "roses of the imagination"! She mumbles constantly about being "pricked in conscience" and being "pricked to death." What on earth can she mean? Does she plan to have *** until she dies?

For chrissake, now she's locked herself in her room and refuses to come out until she has "conjured" the "perfect rose of the imagination"! We haven't seen her for days. Her only communications are texts punctuated liberally with dashes. They appear to be badly-rhymed poems. She signs them "starving artist" in lower-case. What on earth can she mean? Is she anorexic, or bulimic, or is this just a phase she'll outgrow?



escape!
by michael r. burch

to live among the daffodil folk... slip down the rainslickened drainpipe... suddenly pop out the GARGANTUAN SPOUT... minuscule as alice, shout yippee-yi-yee! in wee exultant glee to be leaving behind the LARGE THREE-DENALI GARAGE.

escape! !

u are too beautiful, too innocent, too inherently lovely to merely reflect the sun's splendor... too full of irresistible candor to remain silent, too delicately fawnlike for a world so violent... come, my beautiful bambi and i will protect you... but of course u have already been lured away by the dew-laden roses...



Children's Prose Poem: The Three Sisters and the Mysteries of the Magical Pond
by Michael R. Burch

Every child has a secret name, which only their guardian angel knows. Fortunately, I am able to talk to angels, so I know the secret names of the Three Sisters who are the heroines of the story I am about to tell...

The secret names of the Three Sisters are Etheria, Sunflower and Bright Eyes. Etheria, because the eldest sister's hair shines like an ethereal blonde halo. Sunflower, because the middle sister loves to plait bright flowers into her hair. Bright Eyes, because the youngest sister has flashing dark eyes that are sometimes full of mischief! This is the story of how the Three Sisters solved the Three Mysteries of the Magical Pond...

The first mystery of the Magical Pond was the mystery of the Great Heron. Why did the Great Heron seem so distant and aloof, never letting human beings or even other animals come close to it? This great mystery was solved by Etheria, who noticed that the Great Heron was so large it couldn't fly away from danger quickly. So the Heron was not being aloof at all... it was simply being cautious and protecting itself by keeping its distance from faster creatures. Things are not always as they appear!

The second mystery was the mystery of the River Monster. What was the dreaded River Monster, and did it pose a danger to the three sisters and their loved ones? This great mystery was solved by Sunflower, who found the River Monster's footprints in the mud after a spring rain. Sunflower bravely followed the footprints to a bank of the pond, looked down, and to her surprise found a giant snapping turtle gazing back at her! Thus the mystery was solved, and the River Monster was not dangerous to little girls or their family and friends, because it was far too slow to catch them. But it could be dangerous if anyone was foolish enough to try to pet it. Sometimes it is best to leave nature's larger creatures alone, and not tempt fate, even when things are not always as they appear!

The third mystery was the most perplexing of all. How was it possible that tiny little starlings kept chasing away much larger crows, hawks and eagles? What a conundrum! (A conundrum is a perplexing problem that is very difficult to solve, such as the riddle: "What walks on four legs in the morning, on two legs during the day, then on three legs at night? " Can you solve it? ... The answer is a human being, who crawls on four legs as a baby, then walks on two legs most of its life, but needs a walking cane in old age. This is the famous Riddle of the Sphinx.)  Yes, what a conundrum! But fortunately Bright Eyes was able to solve the Riddle of the Starlings, because she noticed that the tiny birds were much more agile in the air, while the much larger hawks and eagles couldn't change direction as easily. So, while it seemed the starlings were risking their lives to defend their nests, in reality they had the advantage! Once again, things are not always as they appear!

Now, these are just three adventures of the Three Sisters, and there are many others. In fact, they will have a whole lifetime of adventures, and perhaps we can share in them from time to time. But if their mother reads them this story at bedtime, by the end of the story their eyes may be getting very sleepy, and they may soon have dreams of Giant Herons, and Giant Turtles, and Tiny Starlings chasing away Crows, Hawks and Eagles! Sweet dreams, Etheria, Sunflower and Bright Eyes!



Fake News, Probably
by Michael R. Burch

The elusive Orange-Tufted Fitz-Gibbon is the rarest of creatures―rarer by far than Sasquatch and the Abominable Snowman (although they are very similar in temperament and destructive capabilities) . While the common gibbon is not all that uncommon, the orange-tufted genus has been found less frequently in the fossil record than hobbits and unicorns. The Fitz-Gibbon sub-genus is all the more remarkable because it apparently believes itself to be human, and royalty, no less! Now there are rumors―admittedly hard to believe―that an Orange-Tufted Fitz-Gibbon resides in the White House and has been spotted playing with the nuclear codes while chattering incessantly about attacking China, Mexico, Iran and North Korea. We find it very hard to credit such reports. Surely American voters would not elect an oddly-colored ape with self-destructive tendencies president!



Writing Verse for Free, Versus Programs for a Fee
by Michael R. Burch

How is writing a program like writing a poem? You start with an idea, something fresh. Almost a wish. Something effervescent, like foam flailing itself against the rocks of a lost tropical coast...

After the idea, of course, there are complications and trepidations, as with the poem or even the foam. Who will see it, appreciate it, understand it? What will it do? Is it worth the effort, all the mad dashing and crashing about, the vortex―all that? And to what effect?

Next comes the real labor, the travail, the scouring hail of things that simply don't fit or make sense. Of course, with programming you have the density of users to fix, which is never a problem with poetry, since the users have already had their fix (this we know because they are still reading and think everything makes sense) ; but this is the only difference.

Anyway, what's left is the debugging, or, if you're a poet, the hugging yourself and crying, hoping someone will hear you, so that you can shame them into reading your poem, which they will refuse, but which your mother will do if you phone, perhaps with only the tiniest little mother-of-the-poet, harried, self-righteous moan.

The biggest difference between writing a program and writing a poem is simply this: if your program works, or seems to work, or almost works, or doesn't work at all, you're set and hugely overpaid. Made-in-the-shade-have-a-pink-lemonade-and-ticker-tape-parade OVERPAID.

If your poem is about your lover and ***** up quite nicely, perhaps you'll get laid. Perhaps. Regardless, you'll probably see someone repossessing your furniture and TV to bring them posthaste to someone like me. The moral is this: write programs first, then whatever passes for poetry. DO YOUR SHARE; HELP END POVERTY TODAY!



Prose Poem: Litany
by Michael R. Burch

Will you take me with all my blemishes? I will take you with all your blemishes, and show you mine. We'll **** wine out of cardboard boxes till our teeth and lips shine red like greedily gorging foxes'. We'll swill our fill, then have *** for hours till our neglected guts at last rebel. At two in the morning, we'll eat cold Krystals out of greasy cardboard boxes, and we will be in love. And that's it? That's it! And can I go out with my friends and drink until dawn? You can go out with your friends and drink until dawn, come home lipstick-collared, pass out by the pool, or stay at the bar till the new moon sets, because we will be in love, and in love there is no room for remorse or regret. There is no right, no wrong, and no mistrust, only limb-numbing ***, hot-pistoning lust. And that's all? That's all. That's great! But wait... Wait? Why? What's wrong? I want to have your children. Children? Well, perhaps just one. And what will happen when we have children? The most incredible things will happen―you'll change, stop acting so strangely, start paying more attention to me, start paying your bills on time, grow up and get rid of your horrible friends, and never come home at a-quarter-to-three drunk from a night of swilling, smelling like a lovesick skunk, stop acting so lewdly, start working incessantly so that we can afford a new house which I will decorate lavishly and then grow tired of in a year or two or three, start growing a paunch so that no other woman would ever have you, stop acting so boorishly, start growing a beard because you're too tired to shave, or too afraid, thinking you might slit your worthless wrinkled throat...



Sweet Nothings
by Michael R. Burch

Tonight, will you whisper me a sweet enchantment? We'll take my motorcycle, blaze a trail of metallic exhaust and scorched-black sulphuric fumes to a ****** diner where I'll slip my fingers under your yellow sun dress, inside the elastic waist band of your thin white cotton *******, till your pinkling lips moisten obligingly and the corpulent pink hot dog with tangy brown mustard and sweet pickle relish comes. Tonight, can we talk about something other than ***, perhaps things we both love? What I love is to go to the beach, where the hot oil smells like baking coconuts, and lie in the sun's humidor thinking of you, while the sand worms its way inside your **** little pink bikini, your compressed ******* squishy with warm sweet milk like coconuts, the hair between your legs sleek as a wet mink's... Tonight, can we make love instead of just talking *****? Sorry, honey, I'm just not in the mood.



Sometimes the Dead
by Michael R. Burch

Sometimes we catch them out of the corners of our eyes―the pale dead. After they have fled the gourds of their bodies, like escaping fragrances they rise. Once they have become a cloud's mist, sometimes like the rain they descend; ... they appear, sometimes silver, like laughter, to gladden the hearts of men. Sometimes like a pale gray fog, they drift unencumbered, yet lumbrously, as if over the sea there was the lightest vapor even Atlas could not lift. Sometimes they haunt our dreams like forgotten melodies only half-remembered. Though they lie dismembered in black catacombs, sepulchers and dismal graves; although they have committed felonies, yet they are us. Someday soon we will meet them in the graveyard dust, blood-engorged, but never sated since Cain slew Abel. But until we become them, let us steadfastly forget them, even as we know our children must...



Fascination with Light
by Michael R. Burch

Desire glides in on calico wings, a breath of a moth seeking a companionable light... where it hovers, unsure, sullen, shy or demure, in the margins of night, a soft blur. With a frantic dry rattle of alien wings, it rises and thrums one long breathless staccato... and flutters and drifts on in dark aimless flight. And yet it returns to the flame, its delight, as long as it burns.



Burn, Ovid
by Michael R. Burch

"Burn Ovid"―Austin Clarke

Sunday School, Faith Free Will Baptist,1973: I sat imaging watery folds of pale silk encircling her waist. Explicit *** was the day's "hot" topic (how breathlessly I imagined hers)  as she taught us the perils of lust fraught with inhibition. I found her unaccountably beautiful, as she rolled implausible nouns off the edge of her tongue: adultery, fornication, *******, ******. Acts made suddenly plausible by the faint blush of her unrouged cheeks, by her pale lips accented only by a slight quiver, a trepidation. What did those lustrous folds foretell of our uncommon desire? Why did she cross and uncross her legs lovely and long in their taupe sheaths? Why did her ******* rise pointedly, as if indicating a direction?

"Come unto me,
(unto me) , "
together, we sang,

cheek to breast,
lips on lips,
devout, afire,

my hands
up her skirt,
her pants at her knees:

all night long,
all night long,
in the heavenly choir.



*** 101
by Michael R. Burch

That day the late spring heat steamed through the windows of a Crayola-yellow schoolbus crawling its way up the backwards slopes of Nowheresville, North Carolina... Where we sat exhausted from the day's skulldrudgery and the unexpected waves of muggy, summer-like humidity... Giggly first graders sat two abreast behind senior high students sprouting their first sparse beards, their implausible bosoms, their stranger affections... The most unlikely coupling―Lambert,18, the only college prospect on the varsity basketball team, the proverbial talldarkhandsome swashbuckling cocksman, grinning... Beside him, Wanda,13, bespectacled, in her primproper attire and pigtails, staring up at him, fawneyed, disbelieving... And as the bus filled with the improbable musk of her, as she twitched impaled on his finger like a dead frog jarred to life by electrodes, I knew... that love is a forlorn enterprise, that I would never understand it.



Veiled
by Michael R. Burch

She has belief without comprehension, and in her crutchwork shack she is much like us... Tamping the bread into edible forms, regarding her children at play with something akin to relief... Ignoring the towers ablaze in the distance because they are not revelations but things of glass, easily shattered... Aand if you were to ask her, she might say―sometimes God visits his wrath upon an impious nation for its leaders' sins... And we might agree: seeing her mutilations.



Lucifer, to the Enola Gay
by Michael R. Burch

Go then, and give them my meaning, so that their teeming streets become my city. Bring back a pretty flower―a chrysanthemum, perhaps, to bloom, if but an hour, within a certain room of mine where the sun does not rise or fall, and the moon, although it is content to shine, helps nothing at all. There, if I hear the wistful call of their voices regretting choices made, or perhaps not made in time, I can look back upon it and recall―in all its pale forms sublime, still, Death will never be holy again.



The Evolution of Love
by Michael R. Burch

Love among the infinitesimal flotillas of amoebas is a dance of transient appendages, wild sails that gather in warm brine and then express one headstream as two small, divergent wakes. Minuscule voyage―love! Upon false feet, the pseudopods of uprightness, we creep toward self-immolation: two nee one. We cannot photosynthesize the sun, and so we love in darkness, till we come at last to understand: man's spineless heart is alien to any land. We part to single cells; we rise on buoyant tears, amoeba-light, to breathe new atmospheres... and still we sink. The night is full of stars we cannot grasp, though all the World is ours. Have we such cells within us, bent on love to ever-changingness, so that to part is not to be the same, or even one? Is love our evolution, or a scream against the thought of separateness―a cry of strangled recognition? Love, or die, or love and die a little. Hopeful death! Come scale these cliffs, lie changing, share this breath.



Longing
by Michael R. Burch

We stare out at the cold gray sea, overcome with such sudden and intense longing... our eyes meet, inviolate... and we are not of this earth, this strange, inert mass. Before we crept out of the shoals of the inchoate sea... before we grew the quaint appendages and orifices of love... before our jellylike nuclei, struggling to be hearts, leapt at the sight of that first bright, oracular sun, then watched it plummet, the birth and death of our illumination... before we wept... before we knew... before our unformed hearts grew numb, again, in the depths of the sea's indecipherable darkness... when we were only a swirling profusion of recombinant things wafting loose silt from the sea's soft floor, writhing and ******* in convulsive beds of mucousy foliage,

flowering,
flowering,
flowering...

what jolted us to life?



Memento Mori
by Michael R. Burch

I found among the elms
something like the sound of your voice,
something like the aftermath of love itself
after the lightning strikes,
when the startled wind shrieks...

a gored-out wound in wood,
love's pale memento mori―
that white scar
in that first heart,
forever unhealed...

and a burled, thick knot incised
with six initials pledged
against all possible futures,
and penknife-notched below,
six edged, chipped words
that once cut deep and said...

WILL U B MINE
4 EVER?

... which now, so disconsolately answer...

----------------N
-- EVER.



Nucleotidings
by Michael R. Burch

"We will walk taller! " said Gupta,
sorta abrupta,
hand-in-hand with his mom,
eyeing the A-bomb.

"Who needs a mahatma
in the aftermath of NAFTA?
Now, that was a disaster, "
cried glib Punjab.

"After Y2k,
time will spin out of control anyway, "
flamed Vijay.

"My family is relatively heavy,
too big even for a pig-barn Chevy;
we need more space, "
spat What's His Face.

"What does it matter,
dirge or mantra, "
sighed Serge.

"The world will wobble
in Hubble's lens
till the tempest ends, "
wailed Mercedes.

"The world is going to hell in a bucket.
So **** it and get outta my face!
We own this place!
Me and my friends got more guns than ISIS,
so what's the crisis? "
cried Bubba Billy Joe Bob Puckett.



They Take Their Shape
by Michael R. Burch

"We will not forget moments of silence and days of mourning..."―George W. Bush

We will not forget...
the moments of silence and the days of mourning,
the bells that swung from leaden-shadowed vents
to copper bursts above "hush! "-chastened children
who saw the sun break free (abandonment
to run and laugh forsaken for the moment) ,
still flashing grins they could not quite repent...
Nor should they―anguish triumphs just an instant;

this every child accepts; the nymphet weaves;
transformed, the grotesque adult-thing emerges:
damp-winged, huge-eyed, to find the sun deceives...
But children know; they spin limpwinged in darkness
cocooned in hope―the shriveled chrysalis

that paralyzes time. Suspended, dreaming,
they do not fall, but grow toward what is,
then ***** about to find which transformation
might best endure the light or dark. "Survive"
becomes the whispered mantra of a pupa's
awakening... till What takes shape and flies
shrieks, parroting Our own shrill, restive cries.



chrysalis
by Michael R. Burch

these are the days of doom
u seldom leave ur room
u live in perpetual gloom

yet also the days of hope
how to cope?
u pray and u *****

toward self illumination...
becoming an angel
(pure love)

and yet You must love Your Self

If you know someone who is very caring and loving, but struggles with self worth, this may be a poem to consider.

Keywords/Tags: prose poem, experimental, free verse, freedom, expression, silence, void, modern, modern psalm, Holocaust


To Have Loved
by Michael R. Burch

"The face that launched a thousand ships ..."

Helen, bright accompaniment,
accouterment of war as sure as all
the polished swords of princes groomed to lie
in mausoleums all eternity ...

The price of love is not so high
as never to have loved once in the dark
beyond foreseeing. Now, as dawn gleams pale
upon small wind-fanned waves, amid white sails, ...

now all that war entails becomes as small,
as though receding. Paris in your arms
was never yours, nor were you his at all.
And should gods call

in numberless strange voices, should you hear,
still what would be the difference? Men must die
to be remembered. Fame, the shrillest cry,
leaves all the world dismembered.

Hold him, lie,
tell many pleasant tales of lips and thighs;
enthrall him with your sweetness, till the pall
and ash lie cold upon him.

Is this all? You saw fear in his eyes, and now they dim
with fear’s remembrance. Love, the fiercest cry,
becomes gasped sighs in his once-gallant hymn
of dreamed “salvation.” Still, you do not care

because you have this moment, and no man
can touch you as he can ... and when he’s gone
there will be other men to look upon
your beauty, and have done.

Smile―woebegone, pale, haggard. Will the tales
paint this―your final portrait? Can the stars
find any strange alignments, Zodiacs,
to spell, or unspell, what held beauty lacks?

Published by The Raintown Review, Triplopia, The Electic Muse, The Chained Muse, The Pennsylvania Review, and in a YouTube recital by David B. Gosselin. This is, of course, a poem about the famous Helen of Troy, whose face "launched a thousand ships."
Keywords/Tags: Helen, Troy, Paris, love, war, gods, fate, destiny, portrait, fame, famous, stars, Zodiac, Zodiacs, star-crossed, spell, charm, potion, enchantment, Greece, Greek, mythology, legend, Homer, Odyssey, accompaniment, accouterment, eternal, eternity, immortal



EPIGRAM TRANSLATIONS BY MICHAEL R. BURCH



NOVELTIES
by Thomas Campion
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Booksellers laud authors for novel editions
as pimps praise their ****** for exotic positions.



Nod to the Master
by Michael R. Burch

for the Divine Oscar Wilde

If every witty thing that’s said were true,
Oscar Wilde, the world would worship You!



A question that sometimes drives me hazy:
am I or are the others crazy?
—Albert Einstein, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



This is love: to fly toward a mysterious sky,
to cause ten thousand veils to fall.
First, to stop clinging to life,
then to step out, without feet ...
—Rumi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



To live without philosophizing is to close one's eyes and never attempt to open them. – Rene Descartes, loose translation by Michael R. Burch



Stage Fright
by Michael R. Burch

To be or not to be?
In the end Hamlet
opted for naught.



I test the tightrope
balancing a child
in each arm.
—Vera Pavlova, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Brief Fling
by Michael R. Burch

“Epigram”
means cram,
then scram!



*******
by Michael R. Burch

You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower springs to life at once.
But joys are wan illusions to the expert:
the Bedouin has learned how not to want.



Love is either wholly folly,
or fully holy.
—Michael R. Burch



Intimations
by Michael R. Burch

Let mercy surround us
with a sweet persistence.

Let love propound to us
that life is infinitely more than existence.



Less Heroic Couplets: Marketing 101
by Michael R. Burch

Building her brand, she disrobes,
naked, except for her earlobes.



Villanelle of an Opportunist
by Michael R. Burch

I’m not looking for someone to save.
A gal has to do what a gal has to do:
I’m looking for a man with one foot in the grave.

How many highways to hell must I pave
with intentions imagined, not true?
I’m not looking for someone to save.

Fools praise compassion while weaklings rave,
but a gal has to do what a gal has to do.
I’m looking for a man with one foot in the grave.

Some praise the Lord but the Devil’s my fave
because he has led me to you!
I’m not looking for someone to save.

In the land of the free and the home of the brave,
a gal has to do what a gal has to do.
I’m looking for a man with one foot in the grave.

Every day without meds becomes a close shave
and the razor keeps tempting me too.
I’m not looking for someone to save:
I’m looking for a man with one foot in the grave.



She is brighter than dawn
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

There’s a light about her
like the moon through a mist:
a bright incandescence
with which she is blessed

and my heart to her light
like the tide now is pulled . . .
she is fair, O, and bright
like the moon silver-veiled.

There’s a fire within her
like the sun’s leaping forth
to lap up the darkness
of night from earth's hearth

and my eyes to her flame
like twin moths now are drawn
till my heart is consumed.
She is brighter than dawn.




Teddy Roosevelt spoke softly and carried a big stick; Donald Trump speaks loudly and carries a big shtick.—Michael R. Burch



Viral Donald (I)
by Michael R. Burch aka "The Loyal Opposition"

Donald Trump is coronaviral:
his brain's in a downward spiral.
His pale nimbus of hair
proves there's nothing up there
but an empty skull, fluff and denial.



Viral Donald (II)
by Michael R. Burch aka "The Loyal Opposition"

Why didn't Herr Trump, the POTUS,
protect us from the Coronavirus?
That weird orange corona of hair's an alarm:
Trump is the Virus in Human Form!

— The End —