#blake
Withering sidles the prison from beyond the walls; pendulums practice the renunciation of nocturnal effervescence. Symbiosis fosters, as sorrow ferments— accumulation laughter is within me. I abstain from the madness of these the cells, therefore I am severely punished by my reptilian jailers. They tighten my chains: shackles of Earth-cell domain.
Feb 16
Feb 16, 2026 at 6:02 PM UTC
angels dance in the inferno
of creativity
untouched by it's heat
just illuminated in flame
while I stumble through
a forest
with trees I couldn't bring
to life on a page
but Blake in his divine
madness
saw angels in the branches
Aug 28, 2025
Aug 28, 2025 at 8:09 PM UTC
In the middle of the journey of your life
you had wandered from the straight path.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and you took both of them.
You broke on through to the other side
but came back stateside pretty often.
Being lied about, you stopped lying.
From men and women you could sometimes require
the lineaments of gratified desire.
Clouds may wander, lonely,
but you’re pretty good at finding company.
Apr 28, 2024
Apr 28, 2024 at 2:28 AM UTC
she was my jane doe, my everything.
we flew to arizona.
she was my partner, my lover, wondering what i could be thinking about.
her. a different kind of her
"not now," she thinks,
"what about jane doe?"
i understand, and oblige.
the light stirs
we crash down and fall and almost burn
but live
others were not so lucky.
when we fell, i thought about her.
my jane doe.
this place wasn't a place of god, no matter what it said
the things they did to women
children
babies
sickening.
it reminded me of what they did to her,
my jane doe.
her, my partner, my lover
was gone, but i still found her.
we walked and knew we would lose each other again,
no matter how much it hurt us
the light continued to stir
and when it did
i saw her,
my jane doe,
my everything.
it happened so many years ago
we were children
young souls destined to go to heaven
if we were good.
if we weren't, they would lecture us, punish us.
yours was undeserved,
my jane doe.
i tried to be good. i tried to not say a word.
i knew what sin meant,
but i knew even more of your love for me
love.
the prophet said it was love when he slaughtered the women and children.
the heretic said it was love when she played with me like she did all those years ago
they didn't know. they'll never know
but i knew
when i knew you were there,
my jane doe,
my one and only,
my everything.
the child was you, the one who came back for me,
my jane doe.
it was nobody's fault; not yours, not mine, but his?
there is no doubt.
there is nothing.
but you,
my jane doe.
one last stir of light
helpless,
we would be one again.
now i lie here alone
where artificial light stirs
where voices mumble
and when two people say
they have plans for me.
Aug 30, 2022
Aug 30, 2022 at 4:55 PM UTC
Part of life is flowing,
part of life is falling,
part of life is growing,
part of life is knowing
this goes on and on. Art as Intuition,
shared by the art itself, AI says.
Oct 30, 2020
Oct 30, 2020 at 2:56 PM UTC
Orpheus
by Michael R. Burch
after William Blake
I.
Many a sun
and many a moon
I walked the earth
and whistled a tune.
I did not whistle
as I worked:
the whistle was my work.
I shirked
nothing I saw
and made a rhyme
to children at play
and hard time.
II.
Among the prisoners
I saw
the leaden manacles
of Law,
the heavy ball and chain,
the quirt.
And yet I whistled
at my work.
III.
Among the children’s
daisy faces
and in the women’s
frowsy laces,
I saw redemption,
and I smiled.
Satanic millers,
unbeguiled,
were swayed by neither girl,
nor child,
nor any God of Love.
Yet mild
I whistled at my work,
and Song
broke out,
ere long.
Keywords/Tags: Orpheus, singer, poet, William Blake, whistle, Satanic, mills, manacles, law, leaden, ball, chain, prison, song, freedom
Mar 30, 2020
Mar 30, 2020 at 1:34 AM UTC
Last night into the room she crept,
awhilst I lay in bed and slept.
My dreams there caught on sleep’s broad reef
she breached sleep’s net, the blanket thief.
Copyright © 2004 Gary Brocks
Aug 28, 2018
Aug 28, 2018 at 12:47 AM UTC
i know it’s hard to believe, love
you are so precious to me
i would give up everything for you
i’d give up my eyes
even if it meant
i’d never be able to see you
i’d give up my lips
even if it meant
they’d never touch yours
i’d give up summer days
and chocolate spread
and soft kisses
and warm baths
and sunrises
and milk and cookies
i’d give you everything
if only to make you smile
Feb 20, 2018
Feb 20, 2018 at 6:29 AM UTC
drowning, drowning under,
these voices loud as thunder,
the dragon and the tiger,
the hermit and the miser,
twist the paths of fate.
the devil was my brother,
he took me to the river
where the waters flow forever,
beside the laughing heather,
a river full of hate.
the dragon said; "i'll burn you."
the tiger said; “i’ll maul you.”
the hermit said; “i live on my own.”
the miser said; “i won’t give you a loan.”
the devil was my brother,
he threw me in the river
where the waters flow forever,
beside the laughing heather.
drowning, drowning under,
these voices loud as thunder,
i watched the laughing heather,
while the river flowed forever
and my soul was filled with hate.
i shouted to my brother;
“devil be ******
“i am ****** he replied,
“like the river of hate
and my sister need best understand
the hell that flows forever,
beside the laughing heather.”
“but i am your sister,” i cried.
“i am the devil,” he softly replied.
Sep 18, 2017
Sep 18, 2017 at 2:56 PM UTC
To behold the daybreak!
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass
In days like this one,
when rain drops so light
& everything dips
into weeping grey
my sanity longs for memories.
My sanity longs
like impulsive recalling
of plummeting sadness
in greying day
sashaying mournful recollects
from sunrise to daybreak.
Remembering vanishes
in the joyful marrow of life.
There, forgetting lives.
Tell me the last time
bliss comforts your soul.
It is a transient tick
too stiff to evoke.
What about the last time
pain feigns your saneness.
Memories turned into bullets
slitting shrapnel
warping into my soul.
Happiness lasts for a second.
Sadness, a lifetime.
Tell me how to get rid
the hurting clout of ache
existing as a blunt fragment
benign yet reminisced.
Daybreak pours so hard
and my sanity like a waning light
crawls back in a miasmatic cave
along the river known
to be a home of a witch
& her cursing narrative
of throwing silver saucers
making her a spotless shadow
through vestal times
never again a thriving spirit.
Forget Blake. Forget Whitman.
Only in daybreak
where everything
churns into life,
my sanity shrinking back
collapsing
into surreal gaps.
Here & there,
my sanity longs for memories.
Dec 9, 2016
Dec 9, 2016 at 10:31 PM UTC
he walks in awe, and would curse my interest in night
of clear silence and sighs
at promiscuous men's obsession with purity
within his aspect and his eyes
he looks down to my ******* and I ask him why
to which he replies and typically denies
he caresses those who adore lust and then calls them 'whores' when they are no less
had they been tighter.. but he likes lace?
his hands stroke my raven tress
as he says I am not like the rest
he whispers that he will handle me best
but if I was not pure I know I would be in another place
I stroke his cheek and admire his brow
yet why does this man objectify me as eloquent
so soft? don't reply to my letter. so calm? you haven't met me properly, have you?
deceived by my smile but I am not deceived by yours, o' 'gent'
if only more had visited below
but then again, my heart would still be innocent!
May 23, 2016
May 23, 2016 at 1:03 PM UTC
Should well have known that I was truly asleep,
Sat next to you,
And you next to my hallucinations of false maturity,
With both of us by chance reading Blake,
And me understanding that both of us were then looking for some romanticized outlook on life.
And the fact that I was so taken back by your taste,
More so how beautiful you were,
Clad in white and for once sitting still.
May 11, 2016
May 11, 2016 at 9:02 PM UTC
I am at random,
And the lines formless
In my mind:
A lover and the pain,
A cat and a dying master,
Memories while walking
Among the tombs,
The names are faces.
And the void is a mind globe
Spreading itself into a sphere
As the sweat scourges my forehead,
I wipe my third eye:
Hours leapfrog from page
To page,
The sound of poetry is among
Everything I have known,
A dispersed word translates
Me for the verse,
But I am insubstantial,
Much as my thoughts.
In my room,
On my desk,
I brood over the wind of yesterdays
Erosions,
I am nailed to a tree,
Deep into a lifeless tree,
I am no poet saint.
I am not here nor there,
And when all the words have convened,
I will find a piece of myself
In every poem,
Though I remain incomplete.
Feb 19, 2016
Feb 19, 2016 at 3:10 PM UTC
There is but one inside each of us,
The magnificent irony that is you,
The gift of emotion and darkness,
Light and the solemn silence.
In each there is a word never spoken,
The lord of his or her pen stroke,
Like a library of dreams
Disclosed to the insensible mind.
In vain with each passing day
The infinite ache of the lifespan
Becomes an accessible garden
And fountains of immersive memory.
And to die is but to awaken,
We toil in the philosophy of words,
Without strength or direction
Writing sorrowful verse.
Haiku, sonnet, free verse,
Stars, skies, oceans, meadows,
All are symbolic to the perceptions
In the void of the eye's twilight views.
Painfully we probe the depth
And fathom the darkness,
Heaven becomes a metaphor,
Hell seems too real, the Power....
Long before me or you,
The dead poets took the dark
And shown them in the light
In his or her fading dusk.
The gallery of poems,
Impalpably dreaded like life,
And we are the dead whom write
Of life in the setting sun.
Power, which had written this poem,
Disfiguring the poet, perpetually dark,
The word speaks through us,
The curse is to observe as it all passes away.
Feb 11, 2016
Feb 11, 2016 at 7:48 PM UTC
1. You buy flowers and a card as an excuse to write a poem, even though you're single.
2. When " How Do I love you, let me count the ways"... And you literally lost count.
3. When Cupid calls you corny.
4. When you make a poem out of those little heart candies.
5. Cupid throws up a little in his mouth after reading your exceedingly sweet sonnet.
6. You bought your kid Valentines day cards for his class and wrote haiku's on every one.
7. You ponder the box of chocolates, and how it is like life, though it sounds familiar, you title your poem "Life is Like a Box of Chocolates".
8. You buy roses and a card filled with your sweet words for your ex, though she calls you a stalker, you are glad she called you.
9. You recite Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, and you're in the shower.
10. You suddenly bulk up on Pablo Neruda, ready to take on the romantic world.
11.As you look at your hellopoetry site while driving, you see a smear of blood on the windshield, two small wings, and what looks like a bow and arrow.
12. When you write a poem and have no one to give it to, suddenly Mom is the best Valentine ever.
13. When you go on the big date, secretly you have your own penand paper in your back pocket, writing verses when you excuse yourself from the dinner table.
14. When you write a poem for your wife, your side girlfriend and your mistress, just because it feels romantic, it is Valentines after all.
15. When you give the wrong poem to your wife, instead of the mistress.
16. Your girlfriend is suddenly a diabetic due to your sweet poem.
17.When you write a poem on hellopoetry and dedicate it to your Valentine, even though you don't have one.
18. When you buy yourself roses and a box of chocolate, write a beautiful poem to yourself, you might be a romantic poet.
19. When your secret admirer is you, the secret poems don't have the same effect.
20. Last but no least, you might be a poet when you wonder if Cupid is lonely and write an invite in the form of a sonnet to see if the little guy will join you for a poetry reading.
Feb 11, 2016
Feb 11, 2016 at 3:12 PM UTC
At this hour the walls are black,
They breathe with apparitions as
The sky splits open,
I am alone as the sun dial walks
Across the stone bodies,
Where there were once streets and homes
Now lay in waste filled with your
Silhouette of silver memory,
Vast as my Earth at the crossroads
Of eight directions I walk through
a gallery of echoes and the infamy
Of the present,
And the verbiage of the moment carries
Your luminous spectre,
A master of reflections,
The dialogue of a lonely poet....
I am but a poem haunted by your ghost,
petrified by the frame of your spectral silhouette.
Feb 10, 2016
Feb 10, 2016 at 3:51 PM UTC
With the sun settling down,
The huge candor of the dusk settles
In on its spectral enchantments
And its usual "Only God could have done this",
Portico: Where the day is meditated
And the sigh of humbled gratitude sets in,
As the stars form
Across the eyes and her hand
In your own,
It is simply good to have a moment
Between the day,the sky,
and everything in between.
Feb 9, 2016
Feb 9, 2016 at 10:51 PM UTC
In every century
You will hear of a comet lost in time;
Haley's was here an eye blink ago,
And the rivers replenish the oceans
One and again.
There will be a small light in the sky
That you will not see tomorrow
Because it is now dead,
And it died millions of years
Before the luminous rays hit
The first womb of Eve.
There will be children grown
Into formidable singulars,
And each one is barely here
When the sun yawns, another passes away.
And when the sky is full
You will count the stars
With your child, just to teach them how
To count.
The eclipse will haunt one because it is
Like a darkness that comes to visit
In between one decade and another,
You will question yourself to see
Where you were before.
And there are premature moons,
Babies of the cosmos,
And you will name one after your daughters
That brought you to look
Again at the hopeful skies.
And when you are done here,
As you leave for eternity
To the Blue Sun,
You will look back
And see the tiny miniscule miracle
That was a star being born.
Feb 4, 2016
Feb 4, 2016 at 12:22 PM UTC
Don't close your eyes,
The wind has just begun
To sing her song,
The rain had just fallen
To tickle the windows.
And the sounds are an enchantment,
The song of the humming storm
As the night reveals herself,
She is a wondrous traveller
Who catches falling meteors
And turns them into flashing lights,
She waters the ground intent on
Life giving life.
Don't sleep,
The rhythmic nature
Of her kissing the glass,
The crystals she hangs to
Shine in a morning dew
For a magical beginning!
Don't sleep,
She rumbles a world
To isolate the imagination
Between the mind and a pillow
She lulls one to a different world.
And when you do sleep,
Your dreams will be as a lightning's
Child free into the sky
Shooting up into space
Where dreams are born.
Feb 3, 2016
Feb 3, 2016 at 12:13 PM UTC
Your body is a Heavenly crime;
I am caught like a mountain
To the sky
And I am certain of your Angelic presence:
I am absent of myself when your naked
Light forms another plain like
A light of bright silhouettes dancing
At the precipice of eternity,
The night in your hair as
The moonlight dances a seduction
That makes Angels fall.
The nape of your neck to your shoulders
Where I mapped my world in a
Cascade of kisses and I am sure
I saw your wings in the dancing shadows.
A thousand sighs around your
Waist as I trace forever with
My touch,
The tongue as it tastes from
A fountain of your flesh:
Daily I drink of you.
Your thighs like a petrified miracle
Tormenting my eyes,
They close that I might drown
The other senses between them.
A painful tenderness in your body,
I make love to an Angel.
Feb 2, 2016
Feb 2, 2016 at 9:52 AM UTC
Here in the dusk of the day I dilute
Myself into anything:
I am a hummingbird and I go fanning
The flora of the forest,
I move in a slow motion when I watch
Myself fly,
However I am also the wind which carries
Each feather in a flight of fancy,
And soon the Luna dances into my
Fluttering wings and I am lit
By the mist of living water as the moon
Makes them tiny falling stars,
A galaxy is lost in my wings,
And soon I am the rain in the night
As I cover the earth in liquidity
With my falling ways
Giving life to life,
And while the rain I covered
My sad human form walking in the
Afterthoughts of the hummingbird,
As I move into the darkness,
And I remember I am afraid
Of the shadows.
Feb 1, 2016
Feb 1, 2016 at 7:26 PM UTC