the creature has noticed me. it has thousands of broken legs on its face and keeps tabs, never wasting an hour without checking in, watching my home grow bigger in the corner. i am a long bodied cellar spider, suspended, inverted beneath the guitar case, just right of the bed frame. food is scarce, but i sense we share this hunger in the humid subterranean habitat. it takes on thinness, shakes at times, makes day into night, flips pages, tele-spells, turns night into day again.

micro-fibrous dust settles on my spinnerets, a twitchy sneeze draws attention, the cruelest of details. while unraveling undaunted one pseudo-day sort of night, a pulse was released comma intent to ****. it came like resolute qualia, something my eight eyes can’t see. the plastic cave, the broken allegory, all ghastly and converging. as soon as the web gets jostled, a switch will summon my stunning epileptic display. i am ready to give it a leg, but only from the calve. it has never come this close.

What used to matter
Now its all useless.

All those those things I thought were true
Seems like I didn't even had a clue.
Even though I was used to the pain
Cause it was the only thing made me feel alive!
Now it seems to not matter
It was all useless!

Waking up everyday with the same burden
Caught in the web I, myself had woven
What it really seems
Is that nothing really matters!

My head starts spinning
My body's shaking
Thinking about what could've done!
My feet starts walking
My hands are reaching
Desire for my world to burn!

And still I am here
Just waiting for you...
Drowning in the pool of agony
With disbelief in Separation!!!

The Composition of Shadows (I)
by Michael R. Burch

(for poets who write late at night / by monitor light)

We breathe and so we write; the night
hums softly its accompaniment.
Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.

And what we mean we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’
strange golden weight, each plosive’s shape—
curved like the heart. Here, resonant,

sounds’ shadows mass beneath bright glass
like singing voles curled in a maze
of blank white space. We touch a face—
long-frozen words trapped in a glaze

that insulates our hearts. Nowhere
can love be found. Just shrieking air.

Published by The Lyric, Candelabrum, Triplopia, Romantics Quarterly, Iambs & Trochees, Hidden Treasures, ImageNation (UK), Yellow Bat Review, Poetry Life & Times, Vallance Review, Poetica Victorian. Keywords/Tags: writing, poetry, night, monitor, glass, phosphors, web, page, internet, online, social media, sound, files, white space

We (as far as I can remember)
Started out to recreate a sane conversation
In which facts of all shades and shapes would
Simply emerge and connect themselves into
Acting structures.

There was a phase in which
Burgeoning ways and means of
Unearthing and spreading these bits
Occupied and riveted most attention;
Followed by something – Fear? Sense? –
Expressing as allergens to ungrounded factoids
And structures acting not from meaning
But obviously from the hindbrain.

After who knows how many rounds of
Lunge feint riposte I found my little self in a
Small drifting group which seems mostly set on
Maintaining through and despite all that something
Uniquely value-added – esthetic, mimetic, cosmogenic or
In any case fertile in cross-breeding ways – is going to fly
On be nurtured and eventually cover the terraqueous globe.
But there seems to be a tacit condition set in this local world,
That the “novel factoid” stream from ongoing earth-21st century
Goings on be ignored. Which begs the question of why do we need
1,200 geosynchronous satellites to do this.
Or –
Was that my drift?

For what is life

But a series of convoluted steps each interconnected with the finest intricacy of a spider's web.

What does one do if they step off these paths
or find their strings crossed?

What do they think when they look to their left
just to see another web perfectly whole?

Delicate

Symmetrical

Beautiful

Then they look to their own and can't help but see the left side is skewed.

A line, fatter than it should be.

They look at that other web.

And so they stop.

What are they to do but sit and think?

Why can't I do that?

What point did I go wrong?

Suspended in the air with no way down because it is too late to turn back.  

And they give up.

her fingers crawled
around my mouth
like a spider