I have spent too many hours looking at the screen
I searched again for words that'll make me feel complete
but all I write is something that I'd heard before
and my words all look like you

Imperfect Sonnet
by Michael R. Burch

A word before the light is doused: the night
is something wriggling through an unclean mind,
as rats creep through a tenement. And loss
is written cheaply with the moon’s cracked gloss
like lipstick through the infinite, to show
love’s pale yet sordid imprint on us. Go.

We have not learned love yet, except to cleave.
I saw the moon rise once ... but to believe ...
was of another century ... and now ...
I have the urge to love, but not the strength.

Despair, once stretched out to its utmost length,
lies couched in squalor, watching as the screen
reveals “love’s” damaged images: its dreams ...
and ******* limply, screams and screams.

Originally published by Sonnet Scroll

Keywords/Tags: tenement, rats, unclean, cheap, sordid, despair, squalor, TV, screen, sonnet, limp, limply, screams

Let’s be alone together
At the Starbucks a mile from here
It doesn’t matter which one because we are all together
Making sure the connectivity is near

On our laptops we tunnel into reality
I predisposed emotional wasteland of hopes and dreams
Do we work or do we escape out of this present piece?
Of time and space we manifested in this dream

The English language cannot describe everything
Simulation is such a weak word you see
It seems like something that is on our screens
But in reality we are the screen

Have you seen my granny?
She shoots like Johnny Wayne,
Smokes cigarettes like Garbo,
Sings like Kelly in the rain.

She's doubtless at the movies
Watching Audrey zip 'round Rome,
And wishing she were young enough
To run away from home.

My nana laughs like Rita,
Plays chess like Steve McQueen,
She smoulders like her heroes do
Up on that silver screen.

Have you seen my granny?
She loves Bogart and Bacall,
And in her dreams forever
She is blonde and six-foot tall.

oh LCD night! the incandescent yesterday
is burning to the touch--
my cathode-ray tube dreams, once switched off,
leave a film of electricty that leaves a shock on your finger
whenever you touch the doorknob.

the streetlights turn off when i step under them
and only when i look to them they glow.
i must have passed by this light a thousand times
and not once did i stop and think of it as anything
but a dim, yellowed, moth-ridden reminder
of the departed souls of roadkill
underneath.

how many secrets are hidden beneath this concrete?
how much bubbling rage does gravel conceal?