~for RK, for now~

Until you have bent your ear to Shakespeare's sonnets,
Till you have laughed with Ogden Nash,
Wept with Frost, visited Byron's ghost,
Read the songs of King Solomon,
And once you
Despair of being their equal,
Shed your winter coat of worry,
***** your courage to the sticking point,
Begin to write then with reckless fearlessness,
Unfettered abandon, make a fool of yourself!

Scout the competition.
Weep, for you and I will never surpass
The giants who preceeded us, and yet,
Laugh, cause they thought the same thing as well...

Love borne in briers of a lonely heart
May bloom eternally on heaven's stage
So sweet the lustre that lovers impart
Like ink from a poet's pen on a page

When eternity comes bouquets decay
And letters of love fade into the night
Then mourning comes like a worn out cliche
Uncertainty grow to strangle you tight

Shudder not now my friend the end of love
When its curtains fall; take your final bow
free it of corpus chains to fly above
the empty trails of bards feet left on snow

When the last sonnet can't mend love's sorrow
Toss in Dante's burning heart your arrow

If you'd like to hear,
A reading of my new poems,
Click the link below

Cut and paste to your browser:  https://youtu.be/CacB8e-UT_4

The State of the Art
by Michael R. Burch

Has rhyme lost all its reason
and rhythm, renascence?
Are sonnets out of season
and poems but poor pretense?

Are poets lacking fire,
their words too trite and forced?
What happened to desire?
Has passion been coerced?

Shall poetry fade slowly,
like Latin, to past tense?
Are the bards too high and holy,
or their readers merely dense?

Keywords/Tags: poetry, art, rhyme, reason, meter, form, sonnets, fire, passion, Latin, stale, outdated, past, tense, readers, readership



The Stake
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Love, the heart bets,
if not without regrets,
will still prove, in the end,
worth the light we expend
mining the dark
for an exquisite heart.

Originally published by The Lyric

I look at you and see my undoing,
a picture I paint from a memory.
It looks like you know what you're doing,
deceiving, as many looks tend to be

Flowers will always sing beautifully,
fearless and blooming in throes of a fall,
a lost language, ringing out truthfully
yours is the song I hear loudest of all

Devil-may-care, a lamb to the slaughter,
awaken the beast from a dreamless sleep.
Your petals fall to greet the still water,
a gentle sigh breaking through to the deep.

I hear your call and I feel so alive
I touch you and fall through an empty sky

everybody was cheering for you and me we were voted
after all of those waiting i have done do you see that I am Devoted?
because of you I made myself a writer
you given me light on my darkness
you are my precious igniter
until now I'm still Inspired
because you are admired
you are not required
to give back what i just gave
just watch me until our love transpired
love is truly a leap of faith
i know it might end up becoming a wraith
and goes to a bad abruptness
but i will avoid those shortness,
because of you i Accomplished
one of my goals in my life
to fulfill what I promised
that i can wait for you and I think it's polished
so listen to my golden words,
let my silver ballads sink in
and let my lovely sonnets abide you,
because you are my Necessity
of my prosperity,
you are my love that is Easygoing
that is always outgoing
i am thankful i met a woman like you
that motivated me for my growing.

What craft would it take to venture to see
Where my cold invisible chains were forged?
My comfort resides in a chamber wee
In the era since my flesh has engorged
Farewell, world of mine that swallows me whole
I long to return to my tunneled home
Consume then my form and leave not the soul
Into the depths of my quarters I roam
If my fetal brethren were to come by
My wrinkled smile would stretch ear to ear
Never again breathing the cruel blue sky
As my innards spill out the dregs of fear
And ****** blue veins that pump to my aid
Wrap around my cold corpse; memories fade.

Collapse, unto those fragments lay dying
With ashy dust palms in a blizzard gust
Still, be still those bird’s gentle wings flying
Caught and clipped on the padlock’s iron rust
Molecules collide and corrode slightly
At the wave of a nuclear notion
Allow light to be birthed and bled nightly
In the heart of a fiery ocean
Though, does our love follow the order
Of the chaos swept through the orange seas?
Be it somehow that we keep the border
Holding stable our trembling knees
Tired I grow of disintegration
Slow and subtle disassociation.