Sun soaking up
Dark in your mind
Paralysed in static terror.
Movement in shade
Sprinting through glass
Vision blurs, frozen fear.
Crazed and deranged
Flailing through mist
Demons bring truthful answers.
Flailing deranged, crazed and afraid vision sees frozen glass.
Mind coming too, sheets soaked with fear, your eyes see the sunrise to.

I am ****** into

Waking;

Silently screaming,

Furiously shaking.

I am far too old

To remember night fear;

Yet wake terribly quaking,

And am left right here.

With trembling heart and flickering flame
I'm guided by worry and followed by shame.

With each creaking step, grievous mistake,
I lose a bit more of the courage I fake.

I curse my bravado for coercing me out!
As it's slowly and surely replaced by my doubt!

Shaped by shadow and forged in gloom,
A devil is born to fashion my doom!

Behind every corner, window, and wall,
The horror draws nearer with hungering call!

"Hear me Villian, make yourself known!"
Any fear I pray I've kept from my tone...

Oh what madness for the midnight mind!
To seek a beast I hope not to find!

A terror- I know it! I'm confident and sure!
The apex of fright, in essence so pure!

A lashing tongue and eyes in rows,
Razor sharp teeth to feed on my woes!

Legs much too many and mercies too few,
My advent of fate has come for its due!

I wish not to witness the monster I've made
So I blow out my candle... and welcome the shade.

911 Carousel
by Michael R. Burch

“And what rough beast ... slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”—W. B. Yeats

They laugh and do not comprehend, nor ask
which way the wind is blowing, no, nor why
the reeling azure fixture of the sky
grows pale with ash, and whispers “Holocaust.”

They think to seize the ring, life’s tinfoil prize,
and, breathless with endeavor, shriek aloud.
The voice of terror thunders from a cloud
that darkens over children adult-wise,

far less inclined to error, when a step
in any wrong direction is to fall
a JDAM short of heaven. Decoys call,
their voices plangent, honking to be shot ...

Here, childish dreams and nightmares whirl, collide,
as East and West, on slouching beasts, they ride.

Published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Mindful of Poetry, Gostinaya and Scholasticus/Fullosia Press. Keywords/Tags: 911, war, violence, retribution, twin towers, terror, terrorism, east, west, dreams, nightmares, error

I'm terrified of what comes next
It could be a kiss from a goddess
Or the devil's *******
This is the end
Isn't it
Maybe I should give up
Or run away
I can feel myself slipping
Into a void of ****

Forty thousand dreams that have come to sudden unexpected end.
Yet millions more tainted by fears with which they must contend.
Who will dream those dreams now that they have gone their way?
Can we hope to dream as we did before when tomorrows pass away?
For now my dream is simple and my hopes and motives true.
When nightmares are over, there are better dreams for me and you.
But if by fickle fates hand my dreams should perish too...
I will hold until my last breath that good dreams return to you.

I didn't die when I was struck by lightning but it was a terrible fright.
The bolt of lightning struck me in the head and gave me second sight.
I saw my neighbors daughter drown in a vision.
Her parents ignored me and it was a bad decision.
If they had listened to me, their daughter wouldn't have drowned.
They don't believe in second sight and their girl is buried in the ground.
Tears rolled down my cheeks when their daughter died.
I couldn't save that poor little girl even though I tried.
Some say I have a special gift but it's irritating when people don't believe.
When I'm ignored, bad things happen and misery is what people receive.
I told a man that I saw him being killed by a train and he flipped me a bird.
He told me to go to hell and he said that my visions are fake and absurd.
He tried to beat a train the very next day and it hit his car.
Because of ignorance, cemeteries are where two people are.
I just had another terrifying vision and it's about you.
You'll die in a plane crash and my vision will come true.
If you ignore me, you'll die but if you listen, you'll remain alive.
You better take what I say to heart or you won't survive.

Because Her Heart Is Tender
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth, on the first anniversary of 9-11

She scrawled soft words in soap: “Never Forget”
dove-white on her car’s window (though the wren,
because its heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her). As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.

She wrote in sidewalk chalk: “Never Forget”
and kept her heart’s own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.

Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers’ glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on ...
she stitches in damp linen: “NEVER FORGET”
and listens to her heart’s emphatic song.
(The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when nestlings fell beyond, beyond, beyond ...
love's reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.)

She writes in adamant: “NEVER FORGET!”
because her heart is tender with regret.

Published by Neovictorian/Cochlea, The Villanelle, The Eclectic Muse, Nietzsche Twilight, Nutty Stories (South Africa), Poetry Renewal Magazine, and Other Voices International. Keywords/Tags: villanelle, 911, terror, terrorism, never, forget, heart, tender, regret, heroism, patriotism, courage, sacrifice