Daredevil
by Michael R. Burch

There are days that I believe
(and nights that I deny)
love is not mutilation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There are tightropes leaps bereave—
taut wires strumming high
brief songs, infatuations.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were cannon shots’ soirees,
hearts barricaded, wise . . .
and then . . . annihilation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were nights our hearts conceived
untruths reborn as sighs.
To dream was our consolation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were acrobatic leaves
that tumbled down to lie
at our feet, bright trepidations.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were hearts carved into trees—
tall stakes where you and I
left childhood’s salt libations . . .

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

Where once you scraped your knees;
love later bruised your thighs.
Death numbs all, our sedation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

Keywords/Tags: Daredevil, love, mutilation, tightrope, high, wire, acrobatic, tumble, bruised, fall, sedation, death, mrbdare, mrbch



Passionate One
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Love of my life,
light of my morning―
arise, brightly dawning,
for you are my sun.

Give me of heaven
both manna and leaven―
desirous Presence,
Passionate One.

My wife Beth has been a Daredevil for Love, sometimes engaging in high-wire acts that defied gravity. At times her acrobatic moves resulted in tumbles, falls, and bruises, but she never stopped loving her family and friends. Thus, the first two poems are related, although the woman in the first poem is imaginary.



In My House
by Michael R. Burch

When you were in my house
you were not free―
in chains bound.

Manifest Destiny?

I was wrong;
my plantation burned to the ground.
I was wrong.
This is my song,
this is my plea:
I was wrong.

When you are in my house,
now, I am not free.
I feel the song
hurling itself back at me.
We were wrong.
This is my history.

I feel my tongue
stilting accordingly.

We were wrong;
brother, forgive me.

Published by Black Medina. This is poem about a different kind of high-wire act, a different kind of tension, and a different kind of fall, bruising and mutilation. At the time I wrote this poem, I had hired two fine young black men as programmers and they had keys to my house, where I was the minority on work days.



Less Heroic Couplets: ****** Most Fowl!
by Michael R. Burch

“****** most foul!”
cried the mouse to the owl.

“Friend, I’m no sinner;
you’re merely my dinner!”
the wise owl replied
as the tasty snack died.

Originally published by Lighten Up Online and in Potcake Chapbook #7. In an attempt to demonstrate that not all couplets are heroic, I have created a series of poems called “Less Heroic Couplets.” I believe even poets should abide by truth-in-advertising laws! Mice are acrobatic little daredevils. ― MRB



Leaf Fall
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever winds encountered soon resolved
to swirling fragments, till chaotic heaps
of leaves lay pulsing by the backyard wall.
In lieu of rakes, our fingers sorted each
dry leaf into its place and built a high,
soft bastion against earth's gravitron―
a patchwork quilt, a trampoline, a bright
impediment to fling ourselves upon.

And nothing in our laughter as we fell
into those leaves was like the autumn's cry
of also falling. Nothing meant to die
could be so bright as we, so colorful―
clad in our plaids, oblivious to pain
we'd feel today, should we leaf-fall again.

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea. This is a poem about yet another kind of fall and the kind of bruising that increases with advancing age.



Herbsttag ("Autumn Day" or "Fall Day")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go.
Lay your long shadows over the sundials
and over the meadows, let the free winds blow.
Command the late fruits to fatten and shine;
O, grant them another Mediterranean hour!
Urge them to completion, and with power
convey final sweetness to the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, never will build one.
Who's alone now, shall continue alone;
he'll wake, read, write long letters to friends,
and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down,
restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend.

Originally published by Measure. This is one of my favorite Rilke poems, about the feelings of loneliness a fall day can inspire.



To the boy Elis
by Georg Trakl
translation by Michael R. Burch

Elis, when the blackbird cries from the black forest,
it announces your downfall.
Your lips sip the rock-spring's blue coolness.

Your brow sweats blood
recalling ancient myths
and dark interpretations of birds' flight.

Yet you enter the night with soft footfalls;
the ripe purple grapes hang suspended
as you wave your arms more beautifully in the blueness.

A thornbush crackles;
where now are your moonlike eyes?
How long, oh Elis, have you been dead?

A monk dips waxed fingers
into your body's hyacinth;
Our silence is a black abyss

from which sometimes a docile animal emerges
slowly lowering its heavy lids.
A black dew drips from your temples:

the lost gold of vanished stars.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: I believe that in the second stanza the blood on Elis's forehead may be a reference to the apprehensive ****** sweat of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. If my interpretation is correct, Elis hears the blackbird's cries, anticipates the danger represented by a harbinger of death, but elects to continue rather than turn back. From what I have been able to gather, the color blue had a special significance for Georg Trakl: it symbolized longing and perhaps a longing for death. The colors blue, purple and black may represent a progression toward death in the poem.



I Loved You
by Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
translation by Michael R. Burch

I loved you ... perhaps I love you still ...
perhaps for a while such emotions may remain.
But please don’t let my feelings trouble you;
I do not wish to cause you further pain.

I loved you ... thus the hopelessness I knew ...
The jealousy, the diffidence, the pain
resulted in two hearts so wholly true
the gods might grant us leave to love again.



Wulf and Eadwacer
ancient Anglo-Saxon/Old English poem, circa 960 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My clan's curs pursue him like crippled game;
they'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
It is otherwise with us.

Wulf's on one island; we're on another.
His island's a fortress, fastened by fens.
Here, bloodthirsty curs howl for carnage.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
It is otherwise with us.

My heart pursued Wulf like a panting hound,
but whenever it rained—how I wept! —
the boldest cur grasped me in its paws:
good feelings for him, but for me loathsome!

Wulf, O, my Wulf, my ache for you
has made me sick; your seldom-comings
have left me famished, deprived of real meat.

Have you heard, Eadwacer? Watchdog!
A wolf has borne our wretched whelp to the woods!
One can easily sever what never was one:
our song together.



Hymn for Fallen Soldiers
by Michael R. Burch

Sound the awesome cannons.
Pin medals to each breast.
Attention, honor guard!
Give them a hero’s rest.

Recite their names to the heavens
Till the stars acknowledge their kin.
Then let the land they defended
Gather them in again.

When I learned there’s an American military organization, the DPAA (Defense/POW/MIA Accounting Agency) that is still finding and bringing home the bodies of soldiers who died serving their country in World War II, after blubbering like a baby, I managed to eke out this poem.



Attilâ İlhan (1925-2005) was a Turkish poet, translator, novelist, screenwriter, editor, journalist, essayist, reviewer, socialist and intellectual.

Ben Sana Mecburum: “You are indispensable”
by Attila Ilhan
translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

You are indispensable; how can you not know
that you’re like nails riveting my brain?
I see your eyes as ever-expanding dimensions.
You are indispensable; how can you not know
that I burn within, at the thought of you?

Trees prepare themselves for autumn;
can this city be our lost Istanbul?
Now clouds disintegrate in the darkness
as the street lights flicker
and the streets reek with rain.
You are indispensable, and yet you are absent ...

Love sometimes seems akin to terror:
a man tires suddenly at nightfall,
of living enslaved to the razor at his neck.
Sometimes he wrings his hands,
expunging other lives from his existence.
Sometimes whichever door he knocks
echoes back only heartache.

A screechy phonograph is playing in Fatih ...
a song about some Friday long ago.
I stop to listen from a vacant corner,
longing to bring you an untouched sky,
but time disintegrates in my hands.
Whatever I do, wherever I go,
you are indispensable, and yet you are absent ...

Are you the blue child of June?
Ah, no one knows you―no one knows!
Your deserted eyes are like distant freighters ...

Perhaps you are boarding in Yesilköy?
Are you drenched there, shivering with the rain
that leaves you blind, beset, broken,
with wind-disheveled hair?

Whenever I think of life
seated at the wolves’ table,
shameless, yet without soiling our hands ...
Yes, whenever I think of life,
I begin with your name, defying the silence,
and your secret tides surge within me
making this voyage inevitable.
You are indispensable; how can you not know?



Fragments
by Attila Ilhan
loose English translations/interpretations by Michael R. Burch



The night is a cloudy-feathered owl,
its quills like fine-spun glass.

It gazes out the window,
perched on my right shoulder,
its wings outspread and huge.

If the encroaching darkness seems devastating at first glance,
the sovereign of everything,
its reach infinite ...

Still somewhere within a kernel of light glows secretly
creating an enlightened forest of dialectics.



In September’s waning days one thinks wanly of the arrival of fall
like a ship appearing on the horizon with untrimmed, tattered sails;
for some unfathomable reason fall is the time to consider one’s own demise―
the body smothered by yellowed leaves like a corpse rotting in a ghoulish photograph ...



Bitter words
crack like whips
snapping across prison yards ...

Then there are words like pomegranate trees in bloom,
words like the sun igniting the sea beyond mountainous horizons,
flashing like mysterious knives ...

Such words are the burning roses of an infinite imagination;
they are born and they die with the flutterings of butterflies;
we carry those words in our hearts like pregnant shotguns until the day we expire,
martyred for the words we were prepared to die for ...



What I wrote and what you understood? Curious and curiouser!



escape!
by michael r. burch

to live among the daffodil folk . . .
slip down the rainslickened drainpipe . . .
suddenly pop out
the GARGANTUAN SPOUT . . .
minuscule as alice, shout
yippee-yi-yee!
in wee exultant glee
to be leaving behind the
LARGE
THREE-DENALI GARAGE.



Escape!!
by Michael R. Burch

You are too beautiful,
too innocent,
too inherently lovely
to merely reflect the sun’s splendor ...

too full of irresistible candor
to remain silent,
too delicately fawnlike
for a world so violent ...

Come, my beautiful Bambi
and I will protect you ...
but of course you have already been lured away
by the dew-laden roses ...



Dream of Infinity
by Michael R. Burch

Have you tasted the bitterness of tears of despair?
Have you watched the sun sink through such pale, balmless air
that your soul sought its shell like a crab on a beach,
then scuttled inside to be safe, out of reach?

Might I lift you tonight from earth’s wreckage and damage
on these waves gently rising to pay the moon homage?
Or better, perhaps, let me say that I, too,
have dreamed of infinity... windswept and blue.

This poem was originally published by TC Broadsheet Verses. I was paid a whopping $10, my first cash payment. It was subsequently published by Piedmont Literary Review, Penny Dreadful, the Net Poetry and Art Competition, Songs of Innocence, Poetry Life & Times, Better Than Starbucks and The Chained Muse.



Heat Lightening
by Michael R. Burch

Each night beneath the elms, we never knew
which lights beyond dark hills might stall, advance,
then lurch into strange headbeams tilted up
like searchlights seeking contact in the distance . . .

Quiescent unions . . . thoughts of bliss, of hope . . .
long-dreamt appearances of wished-on stars . . .
like childhood’s long-occluded, nebulous
slow drift of half-formed visions . . . slip and bra . . .

Wan moonlight traced your features, perilous,
in danger of extinction, should your hair
fall softly on my eyes, or should a kiss
cause them to close, or should my fingers dare

to leave off childhood for some new design
of whiter lace, of flesh incarnadine.



Winter Thoughts of Ann Rutledge

Ann Rutledge was apparently Abraham Lincoln’s first love interest. Unfortunately, she was engaged to another man when they met, then died with typhoid fever at age 22. According to a friend, Isaac Cogdal, when asked if he had loved her, Lincoln replied: “It is true―true indeed, I did. I loved the woman dearly and soundly: She was a handsome girl―would have made a good, loving wife … I did honestly and truly love the girl and think often, often of her now.”

Winter Thoughts of Ann Rutledge
by Michael R. Burch

Winter was not easy,
nor would the spring return.
I knew you by your absence,
as men are wont to burn
with strange indwelling fire―
such longings you inspire!

But winter was not easy,
nor would the sun relent
from sculpting ****** images
and how could I repent?
I left quaint offerings in the snow,
more maiden than I care to know.



Ann Rutledge’s Irregular Quilt
by Michael R. Burch

based on “Lincoln the Unknown” by Dale Carnegie

I.
Her fingers “plied the needle” with “unusual swiftness and art”
till Abe knelt down beside her: then her demoralized heart
set Eros’s dart a-quiver; thus a crazy quilt emerged:
strange stitches all a-kilter, all patterns lost. (Her host
kept her vicarious laughter barely submerged.)

II.
Years later she’d show off the quilt with its uncertain stitches
as evidence love undermines men’s plans and unevens women’s strictures
(and a plethora of scriptures.)

III.
But O the sacred tenderness Ann’s reckless stitch contains
and all the world’s felicities: rich cloth, for love’s fine gains,
for sweethearts’ tremulous fingers and their bright, uncertain vows
and all love’s blithe, erratic hopes (like now’s).

IV.
Years later on a pilgrimage, by tenderness obsessed,
Dale Carnegie, drawn to her grave, found weeds in her place of rest
and mowed them back, revealing the spot of Lincoln’s joy and grief
(and his hope and his disbelief).

V.
Yes, such is the tenderness of love, and such are its disappointments.
Love is a book of rhapsodic poems. Love is an grab bag of ointments.
Love is the finger poised, the smile, the Question ― perhaps ― and the Answer?

Love is the pain of betrayal, the two left feet of the dancer.

VI.
There were ladies of ill repute in his past. Or so he thought. Was it true?
And yet he loved them, Ann (sweet Ann!), as tenderly as he loved you.

Keywords/Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Ann Rutledge, history, president, love, lover, mistress, paramour, romance, romantic, quilt, Dale Carnegie



Shattered
by Vera Pavlova
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I shattered your heart;
now I limp through the shards
barefoot.



Warming Her Pearls
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Warming her pearls, her *******
gleam like constellations.
Her belly is a bit rotund...
she might have stepped out of a Rubens.

Published by Erosha, The Eclectic Muse, Muse Apprentice Guild, Nisqually Delta Review, Erbacce, Poetry Life & Times and Brief Poems



Squall
by Michael R. Burch

There, in that sunny arbor,
in the aureate light
filtering through the waxy leaves
of a stunted banana tree,

I felt the sudden monsoon of your wrath,
the clattery implosions
and copper-bright bursts
of the bottoms of pots and pans.

I saw your swollen goddess’s belly
wobble and heave
in pregnant indignation,
turned tail, and ran.

Published by Chrysanthemum, Poetry Super Highway, Barbitos and Poetry Life & Times



Villanelle: Hangovers
by Michael R. Burch

We forget that, before we were born,
our parents had “lives” of their own,
ran drunk in the streets, or half-******.

Yes, our parents had lives of their own
until we were born; then, undone,
they were buying their parents gravestones

and finding gray hairs of their own
(because we were born lacking some
of their curious habits, but soon

would certainly get them). Half-******,
we watched them dig graves of their own.
Their lives would be over too soon

for their curious habits to bloom
in us (though our children were born
nine months from that night on the town

when, punch-drunk in the streets or half-******,
we first proved we had lives of our own).



NOTE: The Natchez Trace is the Nashville bar where I met my future wife Beth. We invented a game called "twister pool" which involved billiards, drinking and a fair bit of physical contortion ...

At the Natchez Trace
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

I.
Solitude surrounds me
though nearby laughter sounds;
around me mingle men who think
to drink their demons down,
in rounds.

Beside me stands a woman,
a stanza in the song
that plays so low and fluting
and bids me sing along.

Beside me stands a woman
whose eyes reveal her soul,
whose cheeks are soft as eiderdown,
whose hips and ******* are full.

Beside me stands a woman
who scarcely knows my name;
but I would have her know my heart
if only I knew where to start.

II.
Not every man is as he seems;
not all are prone to poems and dreams.
Not every man would take the time
to meter out his heart in rhyme.
But I am not as other men—
my heart is sentenced to this pen.

III.
Men speak of their "ambition"
but they only know its name . . .
I never say the word aloud,
but I have felt the Flame.

IV.
Now, standing here, I do not dare
to let her know that I might care;
I never learned the lines to use;
I never worked the wolves' bold ruse.
But if she looks my way again,
perhaps I will, if only then.

V.
How can a man have come so far
in searching after every star,
and yet today,
though years away,
look back upon the winding way,
and see himself as he was then,
a child of eight or nine or ten,
and not know more?

VI.
My life is not empty; I have my desire . . .
I write in a moment that few man can know,
when my nerves are on fire
and my heart does not tire
though it pounds at my breast—
wrenching blow after blow.

VII.
And in all I attempted, I also succeeded;
few men have more talent to do what I do.
But in one respect, I stand now defeated;
In love I could never make magic come true.

VIII.
If I had been born to be handsome and charming,
then love might have come to me easily as well.
But if had that been, then would I have written?
If not, I'd remain; **** that demon to hell!

IX.
Beside me stands a woman,
but others look her way
and in their eyes are eagerness . . .
for passion and a wild caress?
But who am I to say?

Beside me stands a woman;
she conjures up the night
and wraps itself around her
till others flit about her
like moths drawn to firelight.

X.
And I, myself, am just as they,
wondering when the light might fade,
yet knowing should it not dim soon
that I might fall and be consumed.

XI.
I write from despair
in the silence of morning
for want of a prayer
and the need of the mourning.
And loneliness grips my heart like a vise;
my anguish is harsher and colder than ice.
But poetry can bring my heart healing
and deaden the pain, or lessen the feeling.
And so I must write till at last sleep has called me
and hope at that moment my pen has not failed me.

XII.
Beside me stands a woman,
a mystery to me.
I long to hold her in my arms;
I also long to flee.

Beside me stands a woman;
how many has she known
more handsome, charming,
chic, alarming?
I hope I never know.

Beside me stands a woman;
how many has she known
who ever wrote her such a poem?
I know not even one.

Keywords/Tags: Natchez, Trace, love, relationship, relationships, pool, billiards, rhyme, hope, pain, painful, solitude, drink, drinking, enigma, angel, stranger, ambiguity, woman



Happily Never After (the Second Curse of the ***** Toad)
by Michael R. Burch

He did not think of love of Her at all
frog-plangent nights, as moons engoldened roads
through crumbling stonewalled provinces, where toads
(nee princes) ruled in chinks and grew so small
at last to be invisible. He smiled
(the fables erred so curiously), and thought
bemusedly of being reconciled
to human flesh, because his heart was not
incapable of love, but, being cursed
a second time, could only love a toad’s . . .
and listened as inflated frogs rehearsed
cheekbulging tales of anguish from green moats . . .
and thought of her soft croak, her skin fine-warted,
his anemic flesh, and how true love was thwarted.



Haunted
by Michael R. Burch

Now I am here
and thoughts of my past mistakes are my brethren.
I am withering
and the sweetness of your memory is like a tear.

Go, if you will,
for the ache in my heart is its hollowness
and the flaw in my soul is its shallowness;
there is nothing to fill.

Take what you can;
I have nothing left.
And when you are gone, I will be bereft,
the husk of a man.

Or stay here awhile.
My heart cannot bear the night, or these dreams.
Your face is a ghost, though paler, it seems
when you smile.

Published by Romantics Quarterly



Have I been too long at the fair?
by Michael R. Burch

Have I been too long at the fair?
The summer has faded,
the leaves have turned brown;
the Ferris wheel teeters ...
not up, yet not down.
Have I been too long at the fair?

This is one of my earliest poems, written around age 15 when we were living with my grandfather in his house on Chilton Street, within walking distance of the Nashville fairgrounds. I remember walking to the fairgrounds, stopping at a Dairy Queen along the way, and swimming at a public pool. But I believe the Ferris wheel only operated during the state fair. So my “educated guess” is that this poem was written during the 1973 state fair, or shortly thereafter. I remember watching people hanging suspended in mid-air, waiting for carnies to deposit them safely on terra firma again.



Her Preference
by Michael R. Burch

Not for her the pale incandescence of dreams,
the warm glow of imagination,
the hushed whispers of possibility,
or frail, blossoming hope.

No, she prefers the anguish and screams
of bitter condemnation,
the hissing of hostility,
damnation's rope.



hey pete
by Michael R. Burch

for Pete Rose

hey pete,
it's baseball season
and the sun ascends the sky,
encouraging a schoolboy's dreams
of winter whizzing by;
go out, go out and catch it,
put it in a jar,
set it on a shelf
and then you'll be a Superstar.

When I was a boy, Pete Rose was my favorite baseball player; this poem is not a slam at him, but rather an ironic jab at the term "superstar."



Nevermore!
by Michael R. Burch

Nevermore! O, nevermore
shall the haunts of the sea―
the swollen tide pools
and the dark, deserted shore―
mark her passing again.

And the salivating sea
shall never kiss her lips
nor caress her ******* and hips
as she dreamt it did before,
once, lost within the uproar.

The waves will never **** her,
nor take her at their leisure;
the sea gulls shall not have her,
nor could she give them pleasure ...
She sleeps forevermore.

She sleeps forevermore,
a ****** save to me
and her other lover,
who lurks now, safely covered
by the restless, surging sea.

And, yes, they sleep together,
but never in that way!
For the sea has stripped and shorn
the one I once adored,
and washed her flesh away.

He does not stroke her honey hair,
for she is bald, bald to the bone!
And how it fills my heart with glee
to hear them sometimes cursing me
out of the depths of the demon sea ...

their skeletal love―impossibility!

This is one of my Poe-like creations, written around age 19. I think the poem has an interesting ending, since the male skeleton is missing an important "member."



Day, and Night
by Michael R. Burch

The moon exposes pockmarked scars of craters;
her visage, veiled by willows, palely looms.
And we who rise each day to grind a living,
dream each scented night of such perfumes
as drew us to the window, to the moonlight,
when all the earth was steeped in cobalt blue―
an eerie vase of achromatic flowers
bled silver by pale starlight, losing hue.

The night begins her waltz to waiting sunrise―
adagio, the music she now hears;
and we who in the sunlight slave for succor,
dreaming, seek communion with the spheres.
And all around the night is in crescendo,
and everywhere the stars’ bright legions form,
and here we hear the sweet incriminations
of lovers we had once to keep us warm.

And also here we find, like bled carnations,
red lips that whitened, kisses drawn to lies,
that touched us once with fierce incantations
and taught us love was prettier than wise.



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

It is the nature of loveliness to vanish
as butterfly wings, batting against nothingness
seek transcendence ...

Originally published by Hibiscus (India)



in-flight convergence
by michael r. burch

serene, almost angelic,
the lights of the city                  extend
over lumbering behemoths shrilly screeching displeasure;
they say
that nothing is certain,
that nothing man dreams or ordains
long endures his command

here the streetlights that flicker
and those blazing steadfast seem one
from a                distance;
           descend?
they abruptly
part                    ways,

so that nothing is one
which at times does not suddenly blend
into garish insignificance
in the familiar alleyways,
in the white neon flash
and the billboards of Convenience

and man seems the afterthought of his own Brilliance
as we thunder down the enlightened runways.

Originally published by The Aurorean and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, then published by Grassroots Poetry, Unlikely Stories, Bewildering Stories, Scarlet Leaf Review, Famous Poets & Poems and Inspirational Stories



The Pictish Faeries
by Michael R. Burch

Smaller and darker
than their closest kin,
the faeries learned only too well
never to dwell
close to the villages of larger men.

Only to dance in the starlight
when the moon was full
and men were afraid.
Only to worship in the farthest glade,
ever heeding the raven and the gull.



Chit Chat: in the Poetry Chat Room
WHY SHULD I LERN TO SPELL?
HELL,
NO ONE REEDS WHAT I SAY
ANYWAY!!! :(

Sing for the cool night,
whispers of constellations.
Sing for the supple grass,
the tall grass, gently whispering.
Sing of infinities, multitudes,
of all that lies beyond us now,
whispers begetting whispers.
And i am glad to also whisper . . .

I WUS HURT IN LUV I’M DYIN’
FER TH’ TEARS I BEEN A-CRYIN’!!!

i abide beyond serenities
and realms of grace,
above love’s misdirected earth,
i lift my face.
i am beyond finding now . . .

I WAS IN, LOVE, AND HE ******* ME!!!
THE ****!!! TOTALLY!!!

i loved her once, before, when i
was mortal too, and sometimes i
would listen and distinctly hear
her laughter from the juniper,
but did not go . . .

I JUST DON’T GET POETRY, SOMETIMES.
IT’S OKAY, I GUESS.
I REALLY DON’T READ THAT MUCH AT ALL,
I MUST CONFESS!!! ;-)

Travail, inherent to all flesh,
i do not know, nor how to feel,
although i sing them nighttimes still:
the bitter woes, that do not heal . . .

POETRY IS BORING!!!
SEE, IT *****!!! I’M SNORING!!! ZZZZZZZ!!!

The words like breath, i find them here,
among the fragrant juniper,
and conifers amid the snow,
old loves imagined long ago . . .

WHY DON’T YOU LIKE MY PERFICKT WORDS
YOU USELESS UN-AMERIC’N TURDS?!!!

What use is love, to me, or Thou?
O Words, my awe, to fly so smooth
above the anguished hearts of men
to heights unknown, Thy bare remove . . .

Keywords/Tags: Poetry, writing, chit, chat room, forum, website, social media, workshop, mortal, mortality, grass, multitudes, Walt Whitman, love, awe, serenity, serenities, grace, heights, Parnassus, art, spelling, grammar



Renee Vivien Translations

Renee Vivien was a British lesbian and cross-dresser who wrote poems primarily in French.

Song
by Renée Vivien
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When the moon weeps,
illuminating flowers on the graves of the faithful,
my memories creep
back to you, wrapped in flightless wings.

It's getting late; soon we will sleep
(your eyes already half closed)
steeped
in the shimmering air.

O, the agony of burning roses:
your forehead discloses
a heavy despondency,
though your hair floats lightly ...

In the night sky the stars burn whitely
as the Goddess nightly
resurrects flowers that fear the sun
and die before dawn ...



Undine
by Renée Vivien
loose translation/interpretation by Kim Cherub (an alias of Michael R. Burch)

Your laughter startles, your caresses rake.
Your cold kisses love the evil they do.
Your eyes―blue lotuses drifting on a lake.

Lilies are less pallid than your face.

You move like water parting.
Your hair falls in rootlike tangles.
Your words like treacherous rapids rise.
Your arms, flexible as reeds, strangle,

Choking me like tubular river reeds.
I shiver in their enlacing embrace.
Drowning without an illuminating moon,
I vanish without a trace,

lost in a nightly swoon.



Veronica Franco translations

Veronica Franco (1546-1591) was a Venetian courtesan who wrote literary-quality poetry and prose.

Capitolo 19: A Courtesan's Love Lyric (I)
by Veronica Franco
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

"I resolved to make a virtue of my desire."

My rewards will be commensurate with your gifts
if only you give me the one that lifts
me laughing...

And though it costs you nothing,
still it is of immense value to me.

Your reward will be
not just to fly
but to soar, so high
that your joys vastly exceed your desires.

And my beauty, to which your heart aspires
and which you never tire of praising,
I will employ for the raising
of your spirits. Then, lying sweetly at your side,
I will shower you with all the delights of a bride,
which I have more expertly learned.

Then you who so fervently burned
will at last rest, fully content,
fallen even more deeply in love, spent
at my comfortable *****.

When I am in bed with a man I blossom,
becoming completely free
with the man who loves and enjoys me.

Here is a second, more formal version of the same poem, translated into rhymed couplets...

Capitolo 19: A Courtesan's Love Lyric (II)
by Veronica Franco
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

"I resolved to make a virtue of my desire."

My rewards will match your gifts
If you give me the one that lifts
Me, laughing. If it comes free,
Still, it is of immense value to me.
Your reward will be—not just to fly,
But to soar—so incredibly high
That your joys eclipse your desires
(As my beauty, to which your heart aspires
And which you never tire of praising,
I employ for your spirit's raising) .
Afterwards, lying docile at your side,
I will grant you all the delights of a bride,
Which I have more expertly learned.
Then you, who so fervently burned,
Will at last rest, fully content,
Fallen even more deeply in love, spent
At my comfortable *****.
When I am in bed with a man I blossom,
Becoming completely free
With the man who freely enjoys me.

Franco published two books: "Terze rime" (a collection of poems)and "Lettere familiari a diversi" (a collection of letters and poems). She also collected the works of other writers into anthologies and founded a charity for courtesans and their children. And she was an early champion of women's rights, one of the first ardent, outspoken feminists that we know by name today. For example...

Capitolo 24
by Veronica Franco
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

(written by Franco to a man who had insulted a woman)

Please try to see with sensible eyes
how grotesque it is for you
to insult and abuse women!
Our unfortunate *** is always subject
to such unjust treatment, because we
are dominated, denied true freedom!
And certainly we are not at fault
because, while not as robust as men,
we have equal hearts, minds and intellects.
Nor does virtue originate in power,
but in the vigor of the heart, mind and soul:
the sources of understanding;
and I am certain that in these regards
women lack nothing,
but, rather, have demonstrated
superiority to men.
If you think us "inferior" to yourself,
perhaps it's because, being wise,
we outdo you in modesty.
And if you want to know the truth,
the wisest person is the most patient;
she squares herself with reason and with virtue;
while the madman thunders insolence.
The stone the wise man withdraws from the well
was flung there by a fool...

Life was not a bed of roses for Venetian courtesans. Although they enjoyed the good graces of their wealthy patrons, religious leaders and commoners saw them as symbols of vice. Once during a plague, Franco was banished from Venice as if her "sins" had helped cause it. When she returned in 1577, she faced the Inquisition and charges of "witchcraft." She defended herself in court and won her freedom, but lost all her material possessions. Eventually, Domenico Venier, her major patron, died in 1582 and left her with no support. Her tax declaration of that same year stated that she was living in a section of the city where many destitute prostitutes ended their lives. She may have died in poverty at the age of forty-five.

Hollywood produced a movie based on her life: "Dangerous Beauty."

When I bed a man
who—I sense—truly loves and enjoys me,
I become so sweet and so delicious
that the pleasure I bring him surpasses all delight,
till the tight
knot of love,
however slight
it may have seemed before,
is raveled to the core.
—Veronica Franco, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We danced a youthful jig through that fair city—
Venice, our paradise, so pompous and pretty.
We lived for love, for primal lust and beauty;
to please ourselves became our only duty.
Floating there in a fog between heaven and earth,
We grew drunk on excesses and wild mirth.
We thought ourselves immortal poets then,
Our glory endorsed by God's illustrious pen.
But paradise, we learned, is fraught with error,
and sooner or later love succumbs to terror.
—Veronica Franco, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

In response to a friend urging Veronica Franco to help her daughter become a courtesan, Franco warns her that the profession can be devastating:

"Even if Fortune were only benign and favorable to you in this endeavor, this life is such that in any case it would always be wretched. It is such an unhappy thing, and so contrary to human nature, to subject one's body and activity to such slavery that one is frightened just by the thought of it: to let oneself be prey to many, running the risk of being stripped, robbed, killed, so that one day can take away from you what you have earned with many men in a long time, with so many other dangers of injury and horrible contagious disease: to eat with someone else's mouth, to sleep with someone else's eyes, to move according to someone else's whim, running always toward the inevitable shipwreck of one's faculties and life. Can there be greater misery than this? ... Believe me, among all the misfortunes that can befall a human being in the world, this life is the worst."

I confess I became a courtesan, traded yearning for power, welcomed many rather than be owned by one. I confess I embraced a *****'s freedom over a wife's obedience.—"Dangerous Beauty"

I wish it were not considered a sin
to have liked *******.
Women have yet to realize
the cowardice that presides.
And if they should ever decide
to fight the shallow,
I would be the first, setting an example for them to follow.
—Veronica Franco, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Yahya Kemal Beyatli translations

Yahya Kemal Beyatli (1884-1958) was a Turkish poet, editor, columnist and historian, as well as a politician and diplomat. Born born Ahmet Âgâh, he wrote under the pen names Agâh Kemal, Esrar, Mehmet Agâh, and Süleyman Sadi. He served as Turkey’s ambassador to Poland, Portugal and Pakistan.

Sessiz Gemi (“Silent Ship”)
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

for the refugees

The time to weigh anchor has come;
a ship departing harbor slips quietly out into the unknown,
cruising noiselessly, its occupants already ghosts.
No flourished handkerchiefs acknowledge their departure;
the landlocked mourners stand nurturing their grief,
scanning the bleak horizon, their eyes blurring...
Poor souls! Desperate hearts! But this is hardly the last ship departing!
There is always more pain to unload in this sorrowful life!
The hesitations of lovers and their belovèds are futile,
for they cannot know where the vanished are bound.
Many hopes must be quenched by the distant waves,
since years must pass, and no one returns from this journey.

Full Moon
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

You are so lovely
the full moon just might
delight
in your rising,
as curious
and bright,
to vanquish night.

But what can a mortal man do,
dear,
but hope?
I’ll ponder your mysteries
and (hmmmm) try to
cope.

We both know
you have every right to say no.

The Music of the Snow
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This melody of a night lasting longer than a thousand years!
This music of the snow supposed to last for thousand years!

Sorrowful as the prayers of a secluded monastery,
It rises from a choir of a hundred voices!

As the *****’s harmonies resound profoundly,
I share the sufferings of Slavic grief.

Then my mind drifts far from this city, this era,
To the old records of Tanburi Cemil Bey.

Now I’m suddenly overjoyed as once again I hear,
With the ears of my heart, the purest sounds of Istanbul!

Thoughts of the snow and darkness depart me;
I keep them at bay all night with my dreams!

Translator’s notes: “Slavic grief” because Beyatli wrote this poem while in Warsaw, serving as Turkey’s ambassador to Poland, in 1927. Tanburi Cemil Bey was a Turkish composer. Keywords/Tags: Beyatli, Agah, Kemal, Esrar, Turkish, translation, Turkey, silent, ship, anchor, harbor, ghosts, grief, Istanbul, moon, music, snow



Lines for My Ascension
by Michael R. Burch

I.
If I should die,
there will come a Doom,
and the sky will darken
to the deepest Gloom.

But if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

II.
If I should die,
let no mortal say,
“Here was a man,
with feet of clay,

or a timid sparrow
God’s hand let fall.”
But watch the sky darken
to an eerie pall

and know that my Spirit,
unvanquished, broods,
and cares naught for graves,
prayers, coffins, or roods.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

III.
If I should die,
let no man adore
his incompetent Maker:
Zeus, Jehovah, or Thor.

Think of Me as One
who never died―
the unvanquished Immortal
with the unriven side.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

IV.
And if I should “die,”
though the clouds grow dark
as fierce lightnings rend
this bleak asteroid, stark ...

If you look above,
you will see a bright Sign―
the sun with the moon
in its arms, Divine.

So divine, if you can,
my bright meaning, and know―
my Spirit is mine.
I will go where I go.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.


Published as the collection "Daredevil"

on moonstone slab Manmata flames again
from out of ashes rises, gloating unfinality of Shiva's dance
reincarnate offering of endless Self
in Lakshmi's avatar
a fateful prince's heart to lance

and lanced his heart her visage did,
                                                     though with vaster pinions fully pierced was she, in depths
                                                          ­                                                                 ­                 without rivalry~

his lust was sharp to invite solitude,
but easy to conceal,
he imagined cupping her against him,
scoured memory of upward glimpse,
inch  by  inch
with added imagery, invention moulding her
beneath his grasp
from forehead curls along
glowing skin and eyes
to curving, palatially appareled ******* . . .
her open lips . . .  her hips
--but after, merely to dismiss
and even sleep a bit
and quip inside at irony
to be at mercy
of a girl in flowers
when he with arrows demons lay to rest
(though she would, within the selfsame hours lose her wits ;)

in cityscape descried the triad:
gold dome gifts for sky
in shining generosity
Mithila's people overflow with joy
exuding free abundance carelessly--
jewelry loosed on playful street
from overkeen embrace, is left to lie;
loss in ever-present wealth nigh obsolete

musth of elephant, froth of steed,
floral garlands tangle, line and mix
for clouds of honey-bees to lick their feast.
a bustling of virile acrobatic populace--
symphonic mux of chaos tressed,
metropolis of idylls coalesced;
drums, races, grinning faces flinging courtship,
smirking merchants under wigs
bathers splash exotic fish to flit and weave
while ballads sift for higher pitch of love

from elevated terrace ladies prance
and watching from an inner spire
the princess spies her prince--
emerald shoulders, lotus-petal eyes
Vaikunta hidden from their mortal sight
but straining recognition there,
a union ageless as the stars
inspired suddenly another first:
Rama's transfixed stare she feels and meets,
strangers locked entwining glances
--fated simultaneous-- electric heat   like
from a planet sparking for the taste of outer space --
the lightning burns its mark ensouled
in blooms beyond her ripe, anthophilous form,
verdant visions planted in the rays of light
between two instant loves
to slip inside the eyelid entrance
and evermore impregnate with a glory ill,
as separation wills,
to colonize throughout with other Being there
phantasmal yearnings of entrancing elegance
--from dawn of time instilled, akashic script
of binding hurt with joy in love's embrace
condemn desire to a writhing term
when not imbibing such togetherness
a worldless crypt preferred

and so as swift as gymnast flip to fall
the heart is gushing toxic lack,
epic ventricles the viscose tug
in fluid inspiration wrote of Sita's
sudden addict gnashing inner plight
while slips the sight interred within the crowd,
as if a sorcerer the cosmic sea to play her destiny:
the waves inside enraged to overwhelm
the sudden coral crust beneath the swell
an unmarked seaside's lavish drown unto the land
and reeling send this fragile ******
into wilting, her floral haze to drooping fell...
        in revelatory crash of passion's oceanic weight...
attendants pamper uselessly
--from swoon to mood irate
to wait until the next appearance of her mortal god
the only one to sate the shameless need
entwining up within a clenching wrack of milky fits
from bed to sweaty bed they take the burning maiden~
the outer sea inflow in calming dusk meant nothing to the agony of new romance
                       sequestered in hymenic fire, dawning brilliant
                                                       ­                                omni chakral pierce in rays,
                                                                ­                                                              tot­ality relentlessness
and therein descry a wholeness
  yet unregained
a hopeless birdsong careless as the wind
in caring strokes of pollen redolence
for forest ears an endless vibrate mate
of elemental ease the simmer float
upon the dukkha broil paths embroidery of karmic
cookery the godly recipe invoked,
gibed her without cease,
****** flare eternal guna coals to stoke
and spite her with their peace,
for her attainment only next to he
the moon communes the message blinding clear
amid the ghee her girls would light in care
to soften her despair -- but only aggravate her state --
and so by dim refracted moondrops set,
in only gemlight, Sita basks in pain
her gaze entrained by night obsessively
while overhead the crescent hook beams
freely in to fertilize her all-too-chastely girdle there,
petals wilting under body pressed to slab of stone
as mounting groan on groan intones her writhing questioning
of whomever he could be to cast her moaning so
a deity in maidenhead unwitting of such otherlife
left by endless, anthrocosmos' whim to ache, and alone
in wonder scream abandonment from aether poise
confusion reigning noisome nescient choice


















.

‘I am…’ 'Or am I’? Who can say?
‘A posteriori’ leads the way
For the extra and the ordinary
Axiomatic sway,
In the gravity of corollary,
‘A priori’ interplay
Ataraxic overlay of anxious automation,
As the innocence of dissonance delay.
Practicing semantic contemplation,
In willfully prevenient interpolation,
Civilly disobedient in expediently seeming disarray,
Forecasts in vague extrapolation
Contrasts the millennial contagion
Already underway,
Filling nihilistic voids with particles in waves,
To interpret dreams of Freud to free Oedipus’s slaves,
A degreeless scholastic who never misbehaves,
Simulated humanoid dramatic in the affect that he craves,
Inflating linguistics in acrobatic raves,
A thespian who plans conation with legacy engraves.
The probabilistic determiner of cosmogenous debates,
An apperceived inquirer of qualitative states,
Inspiring proprietor of dismality abates.
Challenging aporia as epistemic oscillates,
Stoically, heroically, ‘one’ who amalgamates,
Circling the infinite in hermeneutic calibrates.
An escaped prisoner from depressive disillusion,
Of an introspective extrovert who finds solace in confusion,
The personable recluse fighting an illusion
Breaking down the nuances of every institution.
Calculating consequence as time goes to infinity
Revolutionary commonsense of principal utility,
An opinionated adversary,
to the realist without evidence,
Theorizing in futility,
Stipulating every sense leading to the virility of the pretense that dominates community.
Divergently converging all the efforts we’ve personified,
Inadvertently submerging old traditions that unethically were codified,
Hastening the urgency for purging that which cannot be modified through the merging of the certainty that will no longer coincide,
Stationing the levies to finally stem the tide,
Of periodic enmities disguised to be necessities so blatantly deified.
Observing moral sentiments, perched upon eternity,
As consequential regiments are expounded universally,
To unstratify the residents indiscriminately
And identify quantum elements spiritualistically,
Changing collective behavior individually,
Socializing constructs in joint ventured logo therapy.

NOTE:  This is a short story; not a poem.  (author)

(Sometimes when you don’t know something can’t be done, you discover a way to do it.)

High at the top of a tree in Forest Park, Parker Squirrel lived in a nest that his mother had built from a hollowed out place inside the trunk of an old oak.   A large branch forked away from the main trunk and a hole in the bark conveniently served as a doorway to the outside world.  On one particular morning, Parker poked his head out from the doorway of his home and looked around very carefully at his surroundings.  It wasn’t the first time in his young life that he had peeked at the outside world from his mother’s nest, but this time he was more alert and cautious than he had ever been before.  Today he was orphaned and all alone.  Sometime in the dark of night, while he was hiding deep inside the nest, he was forced to watch in terror when a large owl came and took away his mother.  So today, feeling very timid and afraid, Parker made every effort to look in each direction before leaving his cozy home to explore and search for food.

Just ahead of him he saw that the rustic ranger station stood like a monument, to welcomed visitors to the state park.   On his left he could see the foothills of the purple mountain range.  He knew that these foothills and their woodlands were all part of the place called Forest Park.  Off to his right a dancing brook bubbled along the edge of a grassy meadow.  In its tall grasses he saw a white-tail doe playing with her newborn fawn. There seemed to be no danger in that direction, so Parker stretched his neck upward and watched as white, cotton-ball clouds floated across the azure blue sky.  Finally he looked down at the ground far below just in time to see a large toad quickly hop under the cover of some wild mushrooms.  Still, he sensed no danger.

Unfortunately, in order to see the forest behind him, it was necessary for Parker to leave his nest and climb around to the other side of his oak tree. And that was a problem for Parker, because the little squirrel was still much too timid to take such a chance.  Instead he stretched as far as he could to look around the wide tree trunk and into the woods.

Glancing back into the forest, Parker saw more tall oak trees with their strong, stately trunks.  He saw a scattering of white flowers that revealed the presence of dogwood trees.  A stand of sugar maples displayed their graceful branches and delicate leaves.  He also noticed some early spring flowers and wild mustard plants splashing bright yellow hues against the fresh green Indian grasses where a tiny meadow carpeted the outer edge of the forest floor.

There were no owls!

Even if they were hiding where he couldn’t see them, Parker would know they were there.  He would be able to smell their unmistakable odor.  To nearly all rodents, the owls have a peculiar stench that is putrid and foul.  And even a young squirrel like Parker would recognize it at once.

The young squirrel was fascinated by all he saw.  His furry skin tingled in the warm glow of the bright, noonday sunshine, almost making him forget the tragedy of the previous night.  Parker had only arrived into the world about six weeks ago, but in squirrel time that meant he would soon be approaching young adulthood.  He had always been cozy and comfortable, cradled in the nest his mother had built in the tall oak tree.  He had always enjoyed foraging with her for seeds and nuts.  The pantry was partly filled, even now, with acorns and hickory nuts, which emitted a woodsy aroma that reminded him of his mother.   He loved the wonderful world he saw from his perch and his heart was so happy that he began to chatter a new springtime song, which he seemed to hear playing all by itself inside his head.

Parker was so enthralled by all the new sights and smells filling his senses that he nearly outstretched the length of his body as he leaned outside the doorway to his mother’s cozy nest and suddenly he fell and tumbled onto the forest floor beneath him.  He landed with a horrible thud!  The little squirrel landed on his back into a clump of moss that grew beneath the tall oak, which only moments before had been his citadel.

  “Ouch!” chattered Parker as he recovered his breath.  The fall had knocked the wind from his lungs but as soon as he discovered he could breath again he checked himself all over to make sure he wasn’t seriously hurt.  Then he began to explore the forest floor.

The little squirrel was so excited, as he ran from one discovery to another, that he completely lost track of time.  Before he knew it, he was a long way from his mother’s tree and it was growing dark.   The little squirrel ran from tree to tree looking for his home and finally he stopped at a very tall oak.  Parker was certain that this was the same tree from which he had fallen, so as fast as he could scurry, he climbed up the trunk, searching among its branches for his mother’s nest.  When he failed to find his home in the trunk of the tree, Parker finally realized that he was lost. The young squirrel had exhausted all of his strength running through the woods.

Afraid and suddenly very lonely, Parker was also very sleepy and hungry.   Since he had no food and didn’t know what else he could do, Parker curled up into a ball at the crook of a branch and fell asleep.  Next morning Parker searched the tree again for his home.  To his surprise he stumbled upon a strange nest made up of branches and twigs of oak built close to the trunk of the tree.  This nest seemed substantial and well built.  The interior of the nesting cup was about eight inches across and five inches deep.  Although the nest looked crude from the outside, its bowl was delicately and warmly lined with a combination of moss, feathers and leaves. It was about seventy-five feet from the ground and two fledgling crows were sleeping inside.

An older squirrel might have killed the baby crows for food and driven off the adult birds when they returned, but Parker just climbed inside the nest, curled up beside the sleeping pair, and fell asleep to dream about where he would find his next meal.

Parker’s sleep was interrupted by the noise of the two young birds’ loud clamoring for food.  Their incessant calls were being tended to by the mamma crow, which had returned to the nest and was now busy stuffing their hungry mouths with an assortment of seeds and worms.  As strange as it seems and much to Parker’s surprise, the mother crow also began stuffing his mouth with food just the same as if she was feeding her own children.  Although he didn’t like the earthy taste of the worms, Parker was very hungry and he swallowed every bite.  He found that he was actually quite satisfied with the meal.

Parker soon learned that there had originally been six baby birds occupying the crow nest, but sadly four had recently been taken by the owls in nighttime raids.  Perhaps the loss of her own children was the reason the Mother Crow decided to adopt the baby squirrel and began feeding it along with her own young.  In nature there are many mysteries and not all of them have easy answers.  But, whatever her reason, one thing is very certain.  Parker Squirrel had been officially adopted into the Crow family and he now had a new mother and a new home, complete with a brother and a sister.

Parker’s new siblings were very close to his own age, which meant they soon would begin standing on the edge of the nest and even leave to nearby branches of the tree when they were being fed.  In the course of another week they would be leaving the nest and taking their initial flight while being watched, tended to, and protected by their adult parents.  So Parker had a great surprise awaiting him. He didn’t know it yet, but in just a few days Mamma Crow would be expecting him to learn to fly.  Of course, squirrels, by nature, are curious and quite acrobatic and no one had ever yet told Parker that he couldn’t fly like a bird.   So when the time came for Parker and his siblings to make their initial test flights, he spread his arms and began to flap them hard, as though they were wings, as he leaped from the nest.  Naturally the little squirrel tumbled down once again onto the forest floor with another thud.

Encouraged and nudged along by Mamma Crow and by taunts from his new brother and sister, Parker tried again and again to fly.  Each time he tried flapping his little arms like wings and each time he fell to earth with a thud.  Soon his whole body ached with painful bruises from his many falls.  But even more than the motivation and prodding from his new family, Parker wanted to fly.  There was something inside Parker that made him want to keep trying.  Parker really did want to fly.

Immediately after being adopted, Parker had begun foraging for his own food by pure instinct.  When he found acorns and seeds he brought them by mouthfuls back to the Crow family’s nest.  But now the urge to fly was almost as strong inside him as his urge to scour the forest floor for acorns and nuts.

At night Parker dreamed about flying.  As a younger squirrel he had often dreamed about being a “super squirrel” that flew around the forest, from tree to tree, doing good deeds and fighting off the evil owls with his super powers.  But the urge he felt now to soar through the air was different from the wishful thinking of a childhood fantasy.  Parker felt that he had to fly.  He just had to.

He thought about why he wanted to fly so badly.  It was more than the fact that his new brother and sister could fly.  There was some important reason deep inside him that made him yearn to soar from tree to tree.  As time passed Parker met other squirrels in the forest and he knew very well by now that he was not a crow, so why couldn’t he just be content to be like the other squirrels and forget all about this nonsense of flying after all.  He thought that perhaps it was because he remembered what the owls had done to his mother and what they had done to those siblings from his new family that were taken before he even had a chance to meet them.  Perhaps now, he thought, he was just afraid and only wanted to fly so he could escape the danger of the owls.  Maybe he was just a coward.

The next night when Parker went to sleep he dreamed again of flying.  But there was something different about this dream.  In his dream Parker was not flying like the crows fly.  He didn’t flap his arms up and down like wings.  Instead he just glided and soared with no effort at all.  In this dream he could actually feel the wind flowing over his body as he glided from one tree to another.  When the sun came out and awakened him from his sleep, Parker couldn’t wait to try again.  This time when he jumped from the nest he would not flap his arms because, after all, arms aren’t wings are they?

Before anyone could stop him, Parker leaped from the nest.  He began to fall straight down, but instead of flapping his arms up and down, he stretched his arms and legs out as far as they would reach.  Then, suddenly something happened.  Instead of dropping to the ground with a painful thud, Parker started gliding.  He didn’t fly far enough to reach another tree, but he was able to glide to another branch on his own tree.  After recovering from his own surprise, he looked back to the nest and he saw his mother and brother and sister all standing on the edge of the nest with looks of amazement on their faces.  They were all calling out to him to try it again. This time, having learned what to expect, Parker glided all the way to the next tree.  After a few more tries, Mother Crow was flying right beside him.

One day Mamma Crow told him to follow her.  “Come with me,” she said.  “I want to show you something.”   And he followed her, gliding from tree to tree.  She led him to a new place, deeper into the woods than he had ever been.  Soon they arrived at a place in the forest that almost seemed enchanted.  He was very surprised to see that were lots of other squirrels gliding from tree to tree just like Parker.

“This is your new home,” said Mother Crow to Parker.  “You’re not just an ordinary squirrel, you know, you are a flying squirrel.”

Then she told him, “From the day I first adopted you I knew that you were special. But you had to discover by yourself who you really are.  Here in this place you can be safe and make friends of your own kind.”  After saying goodbye and wishing him well, she waved at him and, looking back one more time, she flew away.

Well, that is how Parker learned to fly and how he discovered who he really was.  After that he continued to live a very happy life with his new friends.  The owls never seemed to trouble him in this part of the woods.  But he never, ever, forgot about Mother Crow and the family that adopted him. Even to this day, Parker often stops by the nest with a mouthful of acorns and nuts.

LOVE POEMS by Michael R. Burch

These are love poems written by Michael R. Burch: original poems and translations about passion, desire, lust, ***, dating, making out, relationships and marriage. On an amusing note, my steamy Baudelaire translations have become popular with the pros ― **** stars and escort services!



Sappho, fragment 42
translation by Michael R. Burch

Eros harrows my heart:
wild winds whipping desolate mountains
uprooting oaks.



Preposterous Eros
by Michael R. Burch

“Preposterous Eros” – Patricia Falanga

Preposterous Eros shot me in
the buttocks, with a Devilish grin,
spent all my money in a rush
then left my heart effete pink mush.



Sappho, fragment 155
translation by Michael R. Burch

A short revealing frock?
It's just my luck
your lips were made to mock!



Sappho, fragment 22
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

That enticing girl's clinging dresses
leave me trembling, overcome by happiness,
as once, when I saw the Goddess in my prayers
eclipsing Cyprus.



I was so drunk my lips got lost requesting a kiss.—Rumi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Negligibles
by Michael R. Burch

Show me your most intimate items of apparel;
begin with the hem of your quicksilver slip ...



Warming Her Pearls
by Michael R. Burch

Warming her pearls,
her ******* gleam like constellations.
Her belly is a bit rotund ...
she might have stepped out of a Rubens.



She bathes in silver
by Michael R. Burch

She bathes in silver,
~~~~~~afloat~~~~~~
on her reflections...



****** Errata
by Michael R. Burch

I didn’t mean to love you; if I did,
it came unbid-
en,
and should’ve remained hid-
den!



Are You the Thief
by Michael R. Burch

When I touch you now,
O sweet lover,
full of fire,
melting like ice
in my embrace,

when I part the delicate white lace,
baring pale flesh,
and your face
is so close
that I breathe your breath
and your hair surrounds me like a wreath ...

tell me now,
O sweet, sweet lover,
in good faith:
are you the thief
who has stolen my heart?



The Effects of Memory
by Michael R. Burch

A black ringlet
curls to lie
at the nape of her neck,
glistening with sweat
in the evaporate moonlight ...
This is what I remember

now that I cannot forget.

And tonight,
if I have forgotten her name,
I remember:
rigid wire and white lace
half-impressed in her flesh ...

our soft cries, like regret,

... the enameled white clips
of her bra strap
still inscribe dimpled marks
that my kisses erase ...
now that I have forgotten her face.



Moments
by Michael R. Burch

There were moments full of promise,
like the petal-scented rainfall of early spring,
when to hold you in my arms
and to kiss your willing lips
seemed everything.

There are moments strangely empty
full of pale unearthly twilight
―how the cold stars stare!―
when to be without you is a dark enchantment
the night and I share.



The Communion of Sighs
by Michael R. Burch

There was a moment
without the sound of trumpets or a shining light,
but with only silence and darkness and a cool mist
felt more than seen.
I was eighteen,
my heart pounding wildly within me like a fist.
Expectation hung like a cry in the night,
and your eyes shone like the corona of a comet.

There was an instant . . .
without words, but with a deeper communion,
as clothing first, then inhibitions fell;
liquidly our lips met
―feverish, wet―
forgotten, the tales of heaven and hell,
in the immediacy of our fumbling union . . .
when the rest of the world became distant.

Then the only light was the moon on the rise,
and the only sound, the communion of sighs.



Righteous
by Michael R. Burch

Come to me tonight
in the twilight, O, and the full moon rising,
spectral and ancient, will mutter a prayer.

Gather your hair
and pin it up, knowing
that I will release it a moment anon.

We are not one,
nor is there a scripture
to sanctify nights you might spend in my arms,

but the swarms
of stars revolving above us
revel tonight, the most ardent of lovers.



For All that I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought.
I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair
that fell across her face, the apricot
clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed
so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan.

The memory of her gathers like a flood
and bears me to that night, that only night,
when she and I were one, and if I could ...
I'd reach to her this time and, smiling, brush
the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact
each feature, each impression. Love is such
a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone
before we recognize it. I would crush
my lips to hers to hold their memory,
if not more tightly, less elusively.



Le Balcon (The Balcony)
by Charles Baudelaire
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Paramour of memory, ultimate mistress,
source of all pleasure, my only desire;
how can I forget your ecstatic caresses,
the warmth of your ******* by the roaring fire,
paramour of memory, ultimate mistress?

Each night illumined by the burning coals
we lay together where the rose-fragrance clings―
how soft your *******, how tender your soul!
Ah, and we said imperishable things,
each night illumined by the burning coals.

How beautiful the sunsets these sultry days,
deep space so profound, beyond life’s brief floods ...
then, when I kissed you, my queen, in a daze,
I thought I breathed the bouquet of your blood
as beautiful as sunsets these sultry days.

Night thickens around us like a wall;
in the deepening darkness our irises meet.
I drink your breath, ah! poisonous yet sweet!,
as with fraternal hands I massage your feet
while night thickens around us like a wall.

I have mastered the sweet but difficult art
of happiness here, with my head in your lap,
finding pure joy in your body, your heart;
because you’re the queen of my present and past
I have mastered love’s sweet but difficult art.

O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
Can these be reborn from a gulf we can’t sound
as suns reappear, as if heaven misses
their light when they sink into seas dark, profound?
O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!

My translation of Le Balcon has become popular with **** sites, escort services and dating sites. The pros seem to like it!



Les Bijoux (The Jewels)
by Charles Baudelaire
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

My lover **** and knowing my heart's whims
Wore nothing more than a few bright-flashing gems;
Her art was saving men despite their sins―
She ruled like harem girls crowned with diadems!

She danced for me with a gay but mocking air,
My world of stone and metal sparking bright;
I discovered in her the rapture of everything fair―
Nay, an excess of joy where the spirit and flesh unite!

Naked she lay and offered herself to me,
Parting her legs and smiling receptively,
As gentle and yet profound as the rising sea―
Till her surging tide encountered my cliff, abruptly.

A tigress tamed, her eyes met mine, intent ...
Intent on lust, content to purr and please!
Her breath, both languid and lascivious, lent
An odd charm to her metamorphoses.

Her limbs, her *****, her abdomen, her thighs,
Oiled alabaster, sinuous as a swan,
Writhed pale before my calm clairvoyant eyes;
Like clustered grapes her ******* and belly shone.

Skilled in more spells than evil imps can muster,
To break the peace which had possessed my heart,
She flashed her crystal rocks’ hypnotic luster
Till my quietude was shattered, blown apart.

Her waist awrithe, her ******* enormously
Out-******, and yet ... and yet, somehow, still coy ...
As if stout haunches of Antiope
Had been grafted to a boy ...

The room grew dark, the lamp had flickered out.
Mute firelight, alone, lit each glowing stud;
Each time the fire sighed, as if in doubt,
It steeped her pale, rouged flesh in pools of blood.



The Perfect Courtesan
by Michael R. Burch

after Baudelaire, for the courtesans

She received me into her cavities,
indulging my darkest depravities
with such trembling longing, I felt her need ...

Such was the dalliance to which we agreed—
she, my high rider;
I, her wild steed.

She surrendered her all and revealed to me—
the willing handmaiden, delighted to please,
the Perfect Courtesan of Ecstasy.



Invitation to the Voyage
by Charles Baudelaire
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My child, my sister,
Consider the rapture
Of living together!
To love at our leisure
Till the end of all pleasure,
Then in climes so alike you, to die!

The misty sunlight
Of these hazy skies
Charms my spirit:
So mysterious
Your treacherous eyes,
Shining through tears.

There, order and restraint redress
Opulence, voluptuousness.

Gleaming furniture
Burnished by the years
Would decorate our bedroom
Where the rarest flowers
Mingle their fragrances
With vague scents of amber.

The sumptuous ceilings,
The limpid mirrors,
The Oriental ornaments …
Everything would speak
To our secretive souls
In their own indigenous language.

There, order and restraint redress
Opulence, voluptuousness.

See, rocking on these channels:
The sleepy vessels
Whose vagabond dream
Is to satisfy
Your merest desire.

They come from the ends of the world:
These radiant suns
Illuminating fields,
Canals, the entire city,
In hyacinth and gold.
The world falls asleep
In their warming light.

There, order and restraint redress
Opulence, voluptuousness.



What Goes Around, Comes
by Michael R. Burch

This is a poem about loss
so why do you toss your dark hair―
unaccountably glowing?

How can you be sure of my heart
when it’s beyond my own knowing?

Or is it love’s pheromones you trust,
my eyes magnetized by your bust
and the mysterious alchemies of lust?

Now I am truly lost!



Passionate One
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Love of my life,
light of my morning―
arise, brightly dawning,
for you are my sun.

Give me of heaven
both manna and leaven―
desirous Presence,
Passionate One.

Manna is "heavenly bread" and leaven is what we use to make earthly bread rise. So this poem is saying that one's lover offers the best of heaven and earth.



Second Sight
by Michael R. Burch

I never touched you―
that was my mistake.

Deep within,
I still feel the ache.

Can an unformed thing
eternally break?

Now, from a great distance,
I see you again

not as you are now,
but as you were then―

eternally present
and Sovereign.



After the Deluge
by Michael R. Burch

She was kinder than light
to an up-reaching flower
and sweeter than rain
to the bees in their bower
where anemones blush
at the affections they shower,
and love’s shocking power.

She shocked me to life,
but soon left me to wither.
I was listless without her,
nor could I be with her.
I fell under the spell
of her absence’s power.
in that calamitous hour.

Like blithe showers that fled
repealing spring’s sweetness;
like suns’ warming rays sped
away, with such fleetness ...
she has taken my heart―
alas, our completeness!
I now wilt in pale beams
of her occult remembrance.



Love Has a Southern Flavor
by Michael R. Burch

Love has a Southern flavor: honeydew,
ripe cantaloupe, the honeysuckle’s spout
we tilt to basking faces to breathe out
the ordinary, and inhale perfume ...

Love’s Dixieland-rambunctious: tangled vines,
wild clematis, the gold-brocaded leaves
that will not keep their order in the trees,
unmentionables that peek from dancing lines ...

Love cannot be contained, like Southern nights:
the constellations’ dying mysteries,
the fireflies that hum to light, each tree’s
resplendent autumn cape, a genteel sight ...

Love also is as wild, as sprawling-sweet,
as decadent as the wet leaves at our feet.



Violets
by Michael R. Burch

Once, only once,
when the wind flicked your skirt
to an indiscrete height

and you laughed,
abruptly demure,
outblushing shocked violets:

suddenly,
I knew:
everything had changed

and as you braided your hair
into long bluish plaits
the shadows empurpled,

the dragonflies’
last darting feints
dissolving mid-air,

we watched the sun’s long glide
into evening,
knowing and unknowing.

O, how the illusions of love
await us in the commonplace
and rare

then haunt our small remainder of hours.



Smoke
by Michael R. Burch

The hazy, smoke-filled skies of summer I remember well;
farewell was on my mind, and the thoughts that I can't tell
rang bells within (the din was in) my mind, and I can't say
if what we had was good or bad, or where it is today.
The endless days of summer's haze I still recall today;
she spoke and smoky skies stood still as summer slipped away ...



How Long the Night
(anonymous Old English Lyric, circa early 13th century AD)
translation by Michael R. Burch

It is pleasant, indeed, while the summer lasts
with the mild pheasants' song ...
but now I feel the northern wind's blast―
its severe weather strong.
Alas! Alas! This night seems so long!
And I, because of my momentous wrong
now grieve, mourn and fast.



Shattered
by Vera Pavlova
translation by Michael R. Burch

I shattered your heart;
now I limp through the shards
barefoot.



Snapshots
by Michael R. Burch

Here I scrawl extravagant rainbows.
And there you go, skipping your way to school.
And here we are, drifting apart
like untethered balloons.

Here I am, creating "art,"
chanting in shadows,
pale as the crinoline moon,
ignoring your face.

There you go,
in diaphanous lace,
making another man’s heart swoon.
Suddenly, unthinkably, here he is,

taking my place.



The Darker Nights
by Michael R. Burch

Nights when I held you,
nights when I saw
the gentlest of spirits,
yet, deeper, a flaw ...

Nights when we settled
and yet never gelled.
Nights when you promised
what you later withheld ...



Moon Poem
by Michael R. Burch
after Linda Gregg

I climb the mountain
to inquire of the moon ...
the advantages of loftiness, absence, distance.
Is it true that it feels no pain,
or will she contradict me?

Originally published by Borderless Journal (Singapore)

The apparent contradiction of it/she is intentional, since the speaker doesn’t know if the moon is an inanimate object or can feel pain.



Because You Came to Me
by Michael R. Burch

Because you came to me with sweet compassion
and kissed my furrowed brow and smoothed my hair,
I do not love you after any fashion,
but wildly, in despair.

Because you came to me in my black torment
and kissed me fiercely, blazing like the sun
upon parched desert dunes, till in dawn’s foment
they melt, I am undone.

Because I am undone, you have remade me
as suns bring life, as brilliant rains endow
the earth below with leaves, where you now shade me
and bower me, somehow.



Stay With Me Tonight
by Michael R. Burch

Stay with me tonight;
be gentle with me as the leaves are gentle
falling to the earth.
And whisper, O my love,
how that every bright thing, though scattered afar,
retains yet its worth.

Stay with me tonight;
be as a petal long-awaited blooming in my hand.
Lift your face to mine
and touch me with your lips
till I feel the warm benevolence of your breath’s
heady fragrance like wine.

That which we had
when pale and waning as the dying moon at dawn,
outshone the sun.
And so lead me back tonight
through bright waterfalls of light
to where we shine as one.



Insurrection
by Michael R. Burch

She has become as the night―listening
for rumors of dawn―while the dew, glistening,

reminds me of her, and the wind, whistling,
lashes my cheeks with its soft chastening.

She has become as the lights―flickering
in the distance―till memories old and troubling

rise up again and demand remembering ...
like peasants rebelling against a mad king.



Medusa
by Michael R. Burch

Friends, beware
of her iniquitous hair―
long, ravenblack & melancholy.

Many suitors drowned there―
lost, unaware
of the length & extent of their folly.



Daredevil
by Michael R. Burch

There are days that I believe
(and nights that I deny)
love is not mutilation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There are tightropes leaps bereave―
taut wires strumming high
brief songs, infatuations.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were cannon shots’ soirees,
hearts barricaded, wise . . .
and then . . . annihilation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were nights our hearts conceived
dawns’ indiscriminate sighs.
To dream was our consolation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were acrobatic leaves
that tumbled down to lie
at our feet, bright trepidations.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were hearts carved into trees―
tall stakes where you and I
left childhood’s salt libations . . .

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

Where once you scraped your knees;
love later bruised your thighs.
Death numbs all, our sedation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.



Mingled Air
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Ephemeral as breath, still words consume
the substance of our hearts; the very air
that fuels us is subsumed; sometimes the hair
that veils your eyes is lifted and the room

seems hackles-raised: a spring all tension wound
upon a word. At night I feel the care
evaporate—a vapor everywhere
more enervate than sighs: a mournful sound

grown blissful. In the silences between
I hear your heart, forget to breathe, and glow
somehow. And though the words subside, we know
the hearth light and the comfort embers gleam

upon our dreaming consciousness. We share
so much so common: sighs, breath, mingled air.



Elemental
by Michael R. Burch

There is within her a welling forth
of love unfathomable.
She is not comfortable
with the thought of merely loving:
but she must give all.

At night, she heeds the storm's calamitous call;
nay, longs for it. Why?
O, if a man understood, he might understand her.
But that never would do!
Darling, as you embrace the storm,

so I embrace elemental you.



Duet, Minor Key
by Michael R. Burch

Without the drama of cymbals
or the fanfare and snares of drums,
I present my case
stripped of its fine veneer:
Behold, thy instrument.

Play, for the night is long.



honeybee
by Michael R. Burch

love was a little treble thing―
prone to sing
and (sometimes) to sting



don’t forget ...
by Michael R. Burch

don’t forget to remember
that Space is curved
(like your Heart)
and that even Light is bent
by your Gravity.

The opening lines were inspired by a famous love poem by e. e. cummings. I have dedicated this poem to my wife Beth, but you're welcome to dedicate it to the light-bending person of your choice, as long as you credit me as the author.



Sudden Shower
by Michael R. Burch

The day’s eyes were blue
until you appeared
and they wept at your beauty.



She Was Very Strange, and Beautiful
by Michael R. Burch

She was very strange, and beautiful,
like a violet mist enshrouding hills
before night falls
when the hoot owl calls
and the cricket trills
and the envapored moon hangs low and full.

She was very strange, in a pleasant way,
as the hummingbird
flies madly still,
so I drank my fill
of her every word.
What she knew of love, she demurred to say.

She was meant to leave, as the wind must blow,
as the sun must set,
as the rain must fall.
Though she gave her all,
I had nothing left . . .
yet I smiled, bereft, in her receding glow.



Isolde's Song
by Michael R. Burch

Through our long years of dreaming to be one
we grew toward an enigmatic light
that gently warmed our tendrils. Was it sun?
We had no eyes to tell; we loved despite
the lack of all sensation―all but one:
we felt the night's deep chill, the air so bright
at dawn we quivered limply, overcome.

To touch was all we knew, and how to bask.
We knew to touch; we grew to touch; we felt
spring's urgency, midsummer's heat, fall's lash,
wild winter's ice and thaw and fervent melt.
We felt returning light and could not ask
its meaning, or if something was withheld
more glorious. To touch seemed life's great task.

At last the petal of me learned: unfold.
And you were there, surrounding me. We touched.
The curious golden pollens! Ah, we touched,
and learned to cling and, finally, to hold.



Myth
by Michael R. Burch

Here the recalcitrant wind
sighs with grievance and remorse
over fields of wayward gorse
and thistle-throttled lanes.

And she is the myth of the scythed wheat
hewn and sighing, complete,
waiting, lain in a low sheaf―
full of faith, full of grief.

Here the immaculate dawn
requires belief of the leafed earth
and she is the myth of the mown grain―
golden and humble in all its weary worth.



Heat Lightening
by Michael R. Burch

Each night beneath the elms, we never knew
which lights beyond dark hills might stall, advance,
then lurch into strange headbeams tilted up
like searchlights seeking contact in the distance . . .

Quiescent unions . . . thoughts of bliss, of hope . . .
long-dreamt appearances of wished-on stars . . .
like childhood’s long-occluded, nebulous
slow drift of half-formed visions . . . slip and bra . . .

Wan moonlight traced your features, perilous,
in danger of extinction, should your hair
fall softly on my eyes, or should a kiss
cause them to close, or should my fingers dare

to leave off childhood for some new design
of whiter lace, of flesh incarnadine.



Redolence
by Michael R. Burch

Now darkness ponds upon the violet hills;
cicadas sing; the tall elms gently sway;
and night bends near, a deepening shade of gray;
the bass concerto of a bullfrog fills
what silence there once was; globed searchlights play.

Green hanging ferns adorn dark window sills,
all drooping fronds, awaiting morning’s flares;
mosquitoes whine; the lissome moth again
flits like a veiled oud-dancer, and endures
the fumblings of night’s enervate gray rain.

And now the pact of night is made complete;
the air is fresh and cool, washed of the grime
of the city’s ashen breath; and, for a time,
the fragrance of her clings, obscure and sweet.



A Surfeit of Light
by Michael R. Burch

There was always a surfeit of light in your presence.
You stood distinctly apart, not of the humdrum world―
a chariot of gold in a procession of plywood.

We were all pioneers of the modern expedient race,
raising the ante: Home Depot to Lowe’s.
Yours was an antique grace―Thrace’s or Mesopotamia’s.

We were never quite sure of your silver allure,
of your trillium-and-platinum diadem,
of your utter lack of flatware-like utility.

You told us that night―your wound would not scar.
The black moment passed, then you were no more.
The darker the sky, how much brighter the Star!

The day of your funeral, I ripped out the crown mold.
You were this fool’s gold.



Desdemona
by Michael R. Burch

Though you possessed the moon and stars,
you are bound to fate and wed to chance.
Your lips deny they crave a kiss;
your feet deny they ache to dance.
Your heart imagines wild romance.

Though you cupped fire in your hands
and molded incandescent forms,
you are barren now, and―spent of flame―
the ashes that remain are borne
toward the sun upon a storm.

You, who demanded more, have less,
your heart within its cells of sighs
held fast by chains of misery,
confined till death for peddling lies―
imprisonment your sense denies.

You, who collected hearts like leaves
and pressed each once within your book,
forgot. None―winsome, bright or rare―
not one was worth a second look.
My heart, as others, you forsook.

But I, though I loved you from afar
through silent dawns, and gathered rue
from gardens where your footsteps left
cold paths among the asters, knew―
each moonless night the nettles grew

and strangled hope, where love dies too.



Unfoldings
by Michael R. Burch

for Vicki

Time unfolds ...
Your lips were roses.
... petals open, shyly clustering ...
I had dreams
of other seasons.
... ten thousand colors quiver, blossoming.

Night and day ...
Dreams burned within me.
... flowers part themselves, and then they close ...
You were lovely;
I was lonely.
... a ****** yields herself, but no one knows.

Now time goes on ...
I have not seen you.
... within ringed whorls, secrets are exchanged ...
A fire rages;
no one sees it.
... a blossom spreads its flutes to catch the rain.

Seasons flow ...
A dream is dying.
... within parched clusters, life is taking form ...
You were honest;
I was angry.
... petals fling themselves before the storm.

Time is slowing ...
I am older.
... blossoms wither, closing one last time ...
I'd love to see you
and to touch you.
... a flower crumbles, crinkling, worn and dry.

Time contracts ...
I cannot touch you.
... a solitary flower cries for warmth ...
Life goes on as
dreams lose meaning.
... the seeds are scattered, lost within a storm.



Chloe
by Michael R. Burch

There were skies onyx at night ... moons by day ...
lakes pale as her eyes ... breathless winds
******* tall elms; ... she would say
that we loved, but I figured we’d sinned.

Soon impatiens too fiery to stay
sagged; the crocus bells drooped, golden-limned;
things of brightness, rinsed out, ran to gray ...
all the light of that world softly dimmed.

Where our feet were inclined, we would stray;
there were paths where dead weeds stood untrimmed,
distant mountains that loomed in our way,
thunder booming down valleys dark-hymned.

What I found, I found lost in her face
while yielding all my virtue to her grace.



If You Come to San Miguel
by Michael R. Burch

If you come to San Miguel
before the orchids fall,
we might stroll through lengthening shadows
those deserted streets
where love first bloomed ...

You might buy the same cheap musk
from that mud-spattered stall
where with furtive eyes the vendor
watched his fragrant wares
perfume your ******* ...

Where lean men mend tattered nets,
disgruntled sea gulls chide;
we might find that cafetucho
where through grimy panes
sunset implodes ...

Where tall cranes spin canvassed loads,
the strange anhingas glide.
Green brine laps splintered moorings,
rusted iron chains grind,
weighed and anchored in the past,

held fast by luminescent tides ...
Should you come to San Miguel?
Let love decide.



Vacuum
by Michael R. Burch

Over hushed quadrants
forever landlocked in snow,
time’s senseless winds blow ...

leaving odd relics of lives half-revealed,
if still mostly concealed ...
such are the things we are unable to know

that once intrigued us so.

Come then, let us quickly repent
of whatever truths we’d once determined to learn:
for whatever is left, we are unable to discern.

There’s nothing left of us here; it’s time to go.



The Sky Was Turning Blue
by Michael R. Burch

Yesterday I saw you
as the snow flurries died,
spent winds becalmed.
When I saw your solemn face
alone in the crowd,
I felt my heart, so long embalmed,
begin to beat aloud.

Was it another winter,
another day like this?
Was it so long ago?
Where you the rose-cheeked girl
who slapped my face, then stole a kiss?
Was the sky this gray with snow,
my heart so all a-whirl?

How is it in one moment
it was twenty years ago,
lost worlds remade anew?
When your eyes met mine, I knew
you felt it too, as though
we heard the robin's song
and the sky was turning blue.



Roses for a Lover, Idealized
by Michael R. Burch

When you have become to me
as roses bloom, in memory,
exquisite, each sharp thorn forgot,
will I recall―yours made me bleed?

When winter makes me think of you―
whorls petrified in frozen dew,
bright promises blithe spring forsook,
will I recall your words―barbed, cruel?



Nothing Returns
by Michael R. Burch

A wave implodes,
impaled upon
impassive rocks . . .

this evening
the thunder of the sea
is a wild music filling my ear . . .

you are leaving
and the ungrieving
winds demur:

telling me
that nothing returns
as it was before,

here where you have left no mark
upon this dark
Heraclitean shore.



First and Last
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

You are the last arcane rose
of my aching,
my longing,
or the first yellowed leaves―
vagrant spirals of gold
forming huddled bright sheaves;
you are passion forsaking
dark skies, as though sunsets no winds might enclose.

And still in my arms
you are gentle and fragrant―
demesne of my vigor,
spent rigor,
lost power,
fallen musculature of youth,
leaves clinging and hanging,
nameless joys of my youth to this last lingering hour.



Your Pull
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

You were like sunshine and rain―
begetting rainbows,
full of contradictions, like the intervals
between light and shadow.

That within you which I most opposed
drew me closer still,
as a magnet exerts its unyielding pull
on insensate steel.



Love Is Not Love
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Love is not love that never looked
within itself and questioned all,
curled up like a zygote in a ball,
throbbed, sobbed and shook.

(Or went on a binge at a nearby mall,
then would not cook.)

Love is not love that never winced,
then smiled, convinced
that soar’s the prerequisite of fall.

When all
its wounds and scars have been saline-rinsed,
where does Love find the wherewithal
to try again,
endeavor, when

all that it knows
is: O, because!



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.



The One True Poem
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Love was not meaningless ...
nor your embrace, nor your kiss.

And though every god proved a phantom,
still you were divine to your last dying atom ...

So that when you are gone
and, yea, not a word remains of this poem,

even so,
We were One.



The Poem of Poems
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

This is my Poem of Poems, for you.
Every word ineluctably true:
I love you.



Enigma
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

O, terrible angel,
bright lover and avenger,
full of whimsical light
and vile anger;
wild stranger,
seeking the solace of night,
or the danger;
pale foreigner,
alien to man, or savior.

Who are you,
seeking consolation and passion
in the same breath,
screaming for pleasure, bereft
of all articles of faith,
finding life
harsher than death?

Grieving angel,
giving more than taking,
how lucky the man
who has found in your love,
this -our reclamation;
fallen wren,
you must strive to fly
though your heart is shaken;
weary pilgrim,
you must not give up
though your feet are aching;
lonely child,
lie here still in my arms;
you must soon be waking.

"O Terrible Angel" is the title of my second collection of love poems for my wife Beth, who is more formally known as Elizabeth Steed Harris Burch.



She Gathered Lilacs
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

She gathered lilacs
and arrayed them in her hair;
tonight, she taught the wind to be free.

She kept her secrets
in a silver locket;
her companions were starlight and mystery.

She danced all night
to the beat of her heart;
with her tears she imbued the sea.

She hid her despair
in a crystal jar,
and never revealed it to me.

She kept her distance
as though it were armor;
gauntlet thorns guard her heart like the rose.

Love! -Awaken, awaken
to see what you've taken
is still less than the due my heart owes!



Once
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Once when her kisses were fire incarnate
and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame;
when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes,
leaving me listlessly sighing her name...

Once when her ******* were as pale, as beguiling,
as wan rivers of sand shedding heat like a mist,
when her words would at times softly, mildly rebuke me
all the while as her lips did more wildly insist...

Once when the thought of her echoed and whispered
through vast wastelands of need like a Bedouin chant,
I ached for the touch of her lips with such longing
that I vowed all my former vows to recant...

Once, only once, something bloomed, of a desiccate seed:
this implausible blossom her wild rains of kisses decreed.



At Once
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Though she was fair,
though she sent me the epistle of her love at once
and inscribed therein love's antique prayer,
I did not love her at once.

Though she would dare
pain's pale, clinging shadows, to approach me at once,
the dark, haggard keeper of the lair,
I did not love her at once.

Though she would share
the all of her being, to heal me at once,
yet more than her touch I was unable to bear.
I did not love her at once.

And yet she would care,
and pour out her essence...
and yet -there was more!
I awoke from long darkness

and yet -she was there.
I loved her the longer;
I loved her the more
because I did not love her at once.



Twice
by Michael R. Burch

Now twice she has left me
and twice I have listened
and taken her back, remembering days

when love lay upon us
and sparkled and glistened
with the brightness of dew through a gathering haze.

But twice she has left me
to start my life over,
and twice I have gathered up embers, to learn:

rekindle a fire
from ash, soot and cinder
and softly it sputters, refusing to burn.



Will there be Starlight
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Will there be starlight
tonight
while she gathers
damask
and lilac
and sweet-scented heathers?

And will she find flowers,
or will she find thorns
guarding the petals
of roses unborn?

Oh, will there be moonlight
tonight
while she gathers
seashells
and mussels
and albatross feathers?

And will she find treasure
or will she find pain
at the end of this rainbow
of moonlight on rain?



Kissin' 'n' buzzin'
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Kissin' 'n' buzzin'
the bees rise
in a dizzy circle of two.
Oh, when I'm with you,
I feel like kissin' 'n' buzzin' too.



The Quickening
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

I never meant to love you
when I held you in my arms
promising you sagely
wise, noncommittal charms.

And I never meant to need you
when I touched your tender lips
with kisses that intrigued my own -
such kisses I had never known,
nor a heartbeat in my fingertips!



Let Me Give Her Diamonds
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Let me give her diamonds
for my heart's
sharp edges.

Let me give her roses
for my soul's
thorn.

Let me give her solace
for my words
of treason.

Let the flowering of love
outlast a winter
season.

Let me give her books
for all my lack
of reason.

Let me give her candles
for my lack
of fire.

Let me kindle incense,
for our hearts
require

the breath-fanned
flaming perfume
of desire.



If I Falter
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

If I regret
fire in the sunset
exploding on the horizon,
then let me regret loving you.

If I forget
for even a moment
that you are the only one,
then let me forget that the sky is blue.

If I should yearn
in a season of discontentment
for the vagabond light of a companionless moon,
let dawn remind me that you are my sun.

If I should burn -one moment less brightly,
one moment less true -
then with wild scorching kisses,
inflame me, inflame me, inflame me anew.



Because Her Heart Is Tender
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

She scrawled soft words in soap: "Never Forget, "
Dove-white on her car's window, and the wren,
because her 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 fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond...
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.

She writes in adamant: "NEVER FORGET"
because her heart is tender with regret.



She Spoke
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

She spoke
and her words
were like a ringing echo dying
or like smoke
rising and drifting
while the earth below is spinning.

She awoke
with a cry
from a dream that had no ending,
without hope
or strength to rise,
into hopelessness descending.

And an ache
in her heart
toward that dream, retreating,
left a wake
of small waves
in circles never completing.



Virginal
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

For an hour
every wildflower
beseeches her,
"To thy breast,
Elizabeth! "

But she is mine;
her lips divine
and her ******* and hair
are mine alone.
Let the wildflowers moan.



the last defense of Love
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

... if all the parables of Love
fell mute, and every sermon too,
and every hymn and votive psalm
proved insufficient to the task
of proving Love might yet be true
in such a cruel, uncaring world...
the last defense of Love, my Love,
the gods might offer, would be You.



Your Gift
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Counsel, console.
This is your gift.

Calm, kiss and encourage.

Tenderly lift
each world-wounded heart
from its near-fatal dart.

Mend every rift.

Bid pain, "Depart! "
Help friends' healing to start.
Keep every reason to grieve
for your own untaught heart.



Rehearsal Reversal
by Michael R. Burch

The wonder of a first kiss
is:
the next will be better,
if less memorable...

and what’s unforgettable’s
this:
that, somehow,
although you just met her,

in the exchange of eclectic eyes
love came, an electric surmise,
with the smell of cordite hair
on a warm wool sweater

more than amply bosomed.
Use
any excess static to light
the fuse.

Fumble-fingered, her bra strap’s cinch
refuses to budge an inch
in either direction.
Who’s

ever prepared to be so stymied?
Smile,
lean back, drag, “relax” awhile
from practice imperfect. I’ll

leave you two jaybirds alone.
Yes, tomorrow she’ll
answer the phone,
show up for your first real date:

late, breathless, and braless!
(WAIT —
before you celebrate:
still celibate).



Reverse Strip
by Michael R. Burch

She cupped her ******* in cotton, wire-cinched,
pulled a pale taupe sheath across red-gilded toes,
across sun-auburned thighs, to midriff, rose,
paraded nimbly to her dresser, pinched
a winsome pair of *******—white with hearts—
between thumb and forefinger, just to show
how well she knew my taste. Then, bowing low,
she stepped into them (here, the music starts,
a vampish tune), slow-wriggled them waist-high.
She used her thumbs to snap elastic to
its proper place. She chose a slip—sky blue—
then shrugged it on, and patted down each thigh.

She then sat down and smiled (there’d be no dress),
uncrossed her legs, shrugged free one talcumed breast...



Dawn Flight
by Michael R. Burch

for Martin Mc Carthy

What is it about love
that defies explanation?—

the weightlessness of being,
the long elliptic climb

into darkness
amid the world’s constant uproar,

the sea’s black waves crashing
incessantly like thunder beneath us,

the long triumphant soar
into thinning contrails of nothingness,

like meteors through ether,
seeing the earth’s dark curve

outlined,
spinning softly beneath us...

gliding, suspended at last,
over the earth pliant and motionless...

feeling, suddenly, the vast
onrush

and illumination.



Of Transience
by Michael R. Burch

How many nights her vulnerability
leaned close and softly pressed its cheek to mine,
held fast by tiny buckled straps impressed
on shoulders white as swans’ white eglantine...

And many were the marks which left their trace,
then soon were gone. The thinnest finest veil
of ashen hair revealed her *******, betrayed
all that I wanted most, but still would fail

to keep me there till morning. For her sighs,
I kissed her lips in wonder; we became
one with the distant thunder. Love is wise
when it comes in flashes, streaking moonlit rain,

but leaves no mark—as transient, as bright
as the searing imprint lightning pens at night.



*******
by Michael R. Burch

It was not for the feast of docile eyes
she shed her latex jeans, her vinyl blouse;
it was not for the catcalls that her thighs,
black-gartered, parted slightly, to arouse
limp dreams, limp organs as onlookers cheered,
revealing paunches belts could not belay.
She shunned their touch, as lepers to be feared,
swerved half-way through her dance, then waltzed away.

But something in her eyes—a mystery
as old as lust, half-veiled by raven hair—
bespoke this certain knowledge: love is free,
but *** must have its fee, transport its fare.
They pay for what they want, and in return
she teaches them what men will never learn.



At the Natchez Trace
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

I.
Solitude surrounds me
though nearby laughter sounds;
around me mingle men who think
to drink their demons down,
in rounds.

Beside me stands a woman,
a stanza in the song
that plays so low and fluting
and bids me sing along.

Beside me stands a woman
whose eyes reveal her soul,
whose cheeks are soft as eiderdown,
whose hips and ******* are full.

Beside me stands a woman
who scarcely knows my name;
but I would have her know my heart
if only I knew where to start.

II.
Not every man is as he seems;
not all are prone to poems and dreams.
Not every man would take the time
to meter out his heart in rhyme.
But I am not as other men—
my heart is sentenced to this pen.

III.
Men speak of their "ambition"
but they only know its name . . .
I never say the word aloud,
but I have felt the Flame.

IV.
Now, standing here, I do not dare
to let her know that I might care;
I never learned the lines to use;
I never worked the wolves' bold ruse.
But if she looks my way again,
perhaps I will, if only then.

V.
How can a man have come so far
in searching after every star,
and yet today,
though years away,
look back upon the winding way,
and see himself as he was then,
a child of eight or nine or ten,
and not know more?

VI.
My life is not empty; I have my desire . . .
I write in a moment that few man can know,
when my nerves are on fire
and my heart does not tire
though it pounds at my breast—
wrenching blow after blow.

VII.
And in all I attempted, I also succeeded;
few men have more talent to do what I do.
But in one respect, I stand now defeated;
In love I could never make magic come true.

VIII.
If I had been born to be handsome and charming,
then love might have come to me easily as well.
But if had that been, then would I have written?
If not, I'd remain; **** that demon to hell!

IX.
Beside me stands a woman,
but others look her way
and in their eyes are eagerness . . .
for passion and a wild caress?
But who am I to say?

Beside me stands a woman;
she conjures up the night
and wraps itself around her
till others flit about her
like moths drawn to firelight.

X.
And I, myself, am just as they,
wondering when the light might fade,
yet knowing should it not dim soon
that I might fall and be consumed.

XI.
I write from despair
in the silence of morning
for want of a prayer
and the need of the mourning.
And loneliness grips my heart like a vise;
my anguish is harsher and colder than ice.
But poetry can bring my heart healing
and deaden the pain, or lessen the feeling.
And so I must write till at last sleep has called me
and hope at that moment my pen has not failed me.

XII.
Beside me stands a woman,
a mystery to me.
I long to hold her in my arms;
I also long to flee.

Beside me stands a woman;
how many has she known
more handsome, charming,
chic, alarming?
I hope I never know.

Beside me stands a woman;
how many has she known
who ever wrote her such a poem?
I know not even one.



BeMused
by Michael R. Burch

You will find in her hair
a fragrance more severe
than camphor.
You will find in her dress
no hint of a sweet
distractedness.
You will find in her eyes
horn-owlish and wise
no metaphors
of love, but only reflections
of books, books, books.

If you like Her looks …

meet me in the long rows,
between Poetry and Prose,
where we’ll win Her favor
with jousts, and savor
the wine of Her hair,
the shimmery wantonness
of Her rich-satined dress;
where we’ll press
our good deeds upon Her, save Her
from every distress,
for the lovingkindness
of Her matchless eyes
and all the suns of Her tongues.

We were young,
once,
unlearned and unwise . . .
but, O, to be young
when love comes disguised
with the whisper of silks
and idolatry,
and even the childish tongue claims
the intimacy of Poetry.



She Was Very Pretty
by Michael R. Burch

She was very pretty, in the usual way
for (perhaps) a day;
and when the boys came out to play,
she winked and smiled, then ran away
till one unexpectedly caught her.

At sixteen, she had a daughter.

She was fairly pretty another day
in her squalid house, in her pallid way,
but the skies ahead loomed drably grey,
and the moonlight gleamed jaundiced on her cheeks.

She was almost pretty perhaps two weeks.

Then she was hardly pretty; her jaw was set.
With streaks of silver scattered in jet,
her hair became a solemn iron grey.
Her daughter winked, then ran away.

She was hardly pretty another day.

Then she was scarcely pretty; her skin was marred
by liver spots; her heart was scarred;
her child was grown; her life was done;
she faded away with the setting sun.

She was scarcely pretty, and not much fun.

Then she was sparsely pretty; her hair so thin;
but a light would sometimes steal within
to remind old, stoic gentlemen
of the rules, and how girls lose to win.



There’s a Stirring and Awakening in the World
by Michael R. Burch

There’s a stirring and awakening in the world,
and even so my spirit stirs within,
imagining some Power beckoning—
the Force which through the stamen gently whirrs,
unlocking tumblers deftly, even mine.

The grape grows wild-entangled on the vine,
and here, close by, the honeysuckle shines.
And of such life, at last there comes there comes the Wine.

And so it is with spirits’ fruitful yield—
the growth comes first, Green Vagrance, then the Bloom.

The world somehow must give the spirit room
to blossom, till its light shines—wild, revealed.

And then at last the earth receives its store
of blessings, as glad hearts cry—More! More! More!

Originally published by Borderless Journal



POEMS ABOUT POOL SHARKS

These are poems about pool sharks, gamblers, con artists and other sharks. I used to hustle pool on bar tables around Nashville, where I ran into many colorful characters, and a few unsavory ones, before I hung up my cue for good.

Shark
by Michael R. Burch

They are all unknowable,
these rough pale men—
haunting dim pool rooms like shadows,
propped up on bar stools like scarecrows,
nodding and sagging in the fraying light . . .

I am not of them,
as I glide among them—
eliding the amorphous camaraderie
they are as unlikely to spell as to feel,
camouflaged in my own pale dichotomy . . .

That there are women who love them defies belief—
with their missing teeth,
their hair in thin shocks
where here and there a gap of scalp gleams like bizarre chrome,
their smell rank as wet sawdust or mildewed laundry . . .

And yet—
and yet there is someone who loves me:
She sits by the telephone
in the lengthening shadows
and pregnant grief . . .

They appreciate skill at pool, not words.
They frown at massés,
at the cue ball’s contortions across green felt.
They hand me their hard-earned money with reluctant smiles.
A heart might melt at the thought of their children lying in squalor . . .
At night I dream of them in bed, toothless, kissing.
With me, it’s harder to say what is missing . . .



Fair Game
by Michael R. Burch

At the Tennessee State Fair,
the largest stuffed animals hang tilt-a-whirl over the pool tables
with mocking button eyes,
knowing the playing field is unlevel,
that the rails slant, ever so slightly, north or south,
so that gravity is always on their side,
conspiring to save their plush, extravagant hides
year after year.

“Come hither, come hither . . .”
they whisper; they leer
in collusion with the carnival barkers,
like a bevy of improbably-clad hookers
setting a “fair” price.
“Only five dollars a game, and it’s so much Fun!
And it’s not really gambling. Skill is involved!
You can make us come: really, you can.
Here are your *****. Just smack them around.”

But there’s a trick, and it usually works.
If you break softly so that no ball reaches a rail,
you can pick them off: One. Two. Three. Four.
Causing a small commotion,
a stir of whispering, like fear,
among the hippos and ostriches.



Con Artistry
by Michael R. Burch

The trick of life is like the sleight of hand
of gamblers holding deuces by the glow
of veiled back rooms, or aces; soon we’ll know
who folds, who stands . . .

The trick of life is like the pool shark’s shot—
the wild massé across green velvet felt
that leaves the winner loser. No, it’s not
the rack, the hand that’s dealt . . .

The trick of life is knowing that the odds
are never in one’s favor, that to win
is only to delay the acts of gods
who’d ante death for sin . . .

and death for goodness, death for in-between.
The rules have never changed; the artist knows
the oldest con is life; the chips he blows
can’t be redeemed.



Pool's Prince Charming
by Michael R. Burch

this is my tribute poem, written on the behalf of his fellow pool sharks, for the legendary Saint Louie Louie Roberts

Louie, Louie, Prince of Pool,
making all the ladies drool ...
Take the “nuts”? I'd be a fool!
Louie, Louie, Prince of Pool.

Louie, Louie, pretty as Elvis,
owner of (ahem) a similar pelvis ...
Compared to you, the books will shelve us.
Louie, Louie, pretty as Elvis.

Louie, Louie, fearless gambler,
ladies' man and constant rambler,
but such a sweet, loquacious ambler!
Louie, Louie, fearless gambler.

Louie, Louie, angelic, chthonic,
pool's charming hero, but tragic, Byronic,
winning the Open drinking gin and tonic?
Louie, Louie, angelic, chthonic.

I used poetic license about what Louie Roberts was or wasn't drinking at the 1981 U. S. Open Nine-Ball Championship. Was Louie drinking hard liquor as he came charging back through the losers' bracket to win the whole shebang? Or was he pretending to drink for gamesmanship or some other reason? I honestly don't know. As for the word “chthonic,” it’s pronounced “thonic” and means “subterranean” or “of the underworld.” And the pool world can be very dark indeed, as Louie’s tragic demise suggests. But everyone who knew Louie seemed to like him, if not love him dearly, and many sharks have spoken of Louie in glowing terms, as a bringer of light to that underworld.



My wife and I were having a drink at a neighborhood bar which has a pool table. A “money” game was about to start; a spectator got up to whisper something to a friend of ours who was about to play someone we hadn’t seen before. We couldn’t hear what was said. Then the newcomer broke—with such force that his stick flew straight up in the air and shattered the light dangling overhead. There was a moment of stunned silence, then our friend turned around and remarked: “He really does shoot the lights out, doesn’t he?” — Michael R. Burch



Rounds
by Michael R. Burch

Solitude surrounds me
though nearby laughter sounds;
around me mingle men who think
to drink their demons down,
in rounds.

Now agony still hounds me
though elsewhere mirth abounds;
hidebound I stand and try to think,
not sink still further down,
spellbound.

Their ecstasy astounds me,
though drunkenness compounds
resounding laughter into joy;
alloy such glee with beer and see
bliss found.

Originally published by Borderless Journal



Poems about Fathers and Grandfathers



Ultimate Sunset
by Michael R. Burch

for my father, Paul Ray Burch, Jr.

he now faces the Ultimate Sunset,
his body like the leaves that fray as they dry,
shedding their vital fluids (who knows why?)
till they've become even lighter than the covering sky,
ready to fly...



Free Fall
by Michael R. Burch

for my father, Paul Ray Burch, Jr.

I see the longing for departure gleam
in his still-keen eye,
and I understand his desire
to test this last wind, like those late autumn leaves
with nothing left to cling to...



Sanctuary at Dawn
by Michael R. Burch

I have walked these thirteen miles
just to stand outside your door.
The rain has dogged my footsteps
for thirteen miles, for thirty years,
through the monsoon seasons...
and now my tears
have all been washed away.

Through thirteen miles of rain I slogged,
I stumbled and I climbed
rainslickened slopes
that led me home
to the hope that I might find
a life I lived before.

The door is wet; my cheeks are wet,
but not with rain or tears...
as I knock I sweat
and the raining seems
the rhythm of the years.

Now you stand outlined in the doorway
―a man as large as I left―
and with bated breath
I take a step
into the accusing light.

Your eyes are grayer
than I remembered;
your hair is grayer, too.
As the red rust runs
down the dripping drains,
our voices exclaim―

'My father! '
'My son! '



Sunset
by Michael R. Burch

for my Grandfather, George Edwin Hurt Sr.

Between the prophecies of morning
and twilight's revelations of wonder,
the sky is ripped asunder.

The moon lurks in the clouds,
waiting, as if to plunder
the dusk of its lilac iridescence,

and in the bright-tentacled sunset
we imagine a presence
full of the fury of lost innocence.

What we find within strange whorls of drifting flame,
brief patterns mauling winds deform and maim,
we recognize at once, but cannot name.



Sailing to My Grandfather
by Michael R. Burch

for my Grandfather, George Edwin Hurt Sr.

This distance between us
―this vast sea
of remembrance―
is no hindrance,
no enemy.

I see you out of the shining mists
of memory.
Events and chance
and circumstance
are sands on the shore of your legacy.

I find you now in fits and bursts
of breezes time has blown to me,
while waves, immense,
now skirt and glance
against the bow unceasingly.

I feel the sea's salt spray―light fists,
her mists and vapors mocking me.
From ignorance
to reverence,
your words were sextant stars to me.

Bright stars are strewn in silver gusts
back, back toward infinity.
From innocence
to senescence,
now you are mine increasingly.

Note: Under the Sextant's Stars is a painting by Benini.



Salat Days
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandfather, Paul Ray Burch, Sr.

I remember how my grandfather used to pick poke salat...
though first, usually, he'd stretch back in the front porch swing,
dangling his long thin legs, watching the sweat bees drone,
talking about poke salat―
how easy it was to find if you knew where to look for it...
standing in dew-damp clumps by the side of a road, shockingly green,
straddling fence posts, overflowing small ditches,
crowding out the less-hardy nettles.

'Nobody knows that it's there, lad, or that it's fit tuh eat
with some bacon drippin's or lard.'

'Don't eat the berries. You see―the berry's no good.
And you'd hav'ta wash the leaves a good long time.'

'I'd boil it twice, less'n I wus in a hurry.
Lawd, it's tough to eat, chile, if you boil it jest wonst.'

He seldom was hurried; I can see him still...
silently mowing his yard at eighty-eight,
stooped, but with a tall man's angular gray grace.

Sometimes he'd pause to watch me running across the yard,
trampling his beans,
dislodging the shoots of his tomato plants.

He never grew flowers; I never laughed at his jokes about The Depression.

Years later I found the proper name―'pokeweed'―while perusing a dictionary.

Surprised, I asked why anyone would eat a ****.
I still can hear his laconic reply...

'Well, chile, s'm'times them times wus hard.'



All Things Galore
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandfathers George Edwin Hurt Sr. and Paul Ray Burch, Sr.

Grandfather,
now in your gray presence
you are

somehow more near

and remind me that,
once, upon a star,
you taught me

wish

that ululate soft phrase,
that hopeful phrase!

and everywhere above, each hopeful star
gleamed down
and seemed to speak of times before
when you clasped my small glad hand
in your wise paw

and taught me heaven, omen, meteor...



Attend Upon Them Still
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandparents George and Ena Hurt

With gentleness and fine and tender will,
attend upon them still;
thou art the grass.

Nor let men's feet here muddy as they pass
thy subtle undulations, nor depress
for long the comforts of thy lovingness,

nor let the fuse
of time wink out amid the violets.
They have their use―

to wave, to grow, to gleam, to lighten their paths,
to shine sweet, transient glories at their feet.
Thou art the grass;

make them complete.



Be that Rock
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandfather George Edwin Hurt Sr.

When I was a child
I never considered man's impermanence,
for you were a mountain of adamant stone:
a man steadfast, immense,
and your words rang.

And when you were gone,
I still heard your voice, which never betrayed,
'Be strong and of a good courage,
neither be afraid...'
as the angels sang.

And, O! , I believed
for your words were my truth, and I tried to be brave
though the years slipped away
with so little to save
of that talk.

Now I'm a man―
a man... and yet Grandpa... I'm still the same child
who sat at your feet
and learned as you smiled.
Be that rock.



Of Civilization and Disenchantment
by Michael R. Burch

for Anais Vionet

Suddenly uncomfortable
to stay at my grandfather's house―
actually his third new wife's,
in her daughter's bedroom
―one interminable summer
with nothing to do,
all the meals served cold,
even beans and peas...

Lacking the words to describe
ah! , those pearl-luminous estuaries―
strange omens, incoherent nights.

Seeing the flares of the river barges
illuminating Memphis,
city of bluffs and dying splendors.

Drifting toward Alexandria,
Pharos, Rhakotis, Djoser's fertile delta,
lands at the beginning of a new time and 'civilization.'

Leaving behind sixty miles of unbroken cemetery,
Alexander's corpse floating seaward,
bobbing, milkwhite, in a jar of honey.

Memphis shall be waste and desolate,
without an inhabitant.

Or so the people dreamed, in chains.



Keep Up
by Michael R. Burch

Keep Up!
Daddy, I'm walking as fast as I can;
I'll move much faster when I'm a man...

Time unwinds
as the heart reels,
as cares and loss and grief plummet,
as faith unfailing ascends the summit
and heartache wheels
like a leaf in the wind.

Like a rickety cart wheel
time revolves through the yellow dust,
its creakiness revoking trust,
its years emblazoned in cold hard steel.

Keep Up!
Son, I'm walking as fast as I can;
take it easy on an old man.



My Touchstone
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandfather George Edwin Hurt Sr.

A man is known
by the life he lives
and those he leaves,

by each heart touched,
which, left behind,
forever grieves.



Joy in the Morning
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandparents George Edwin Hurt Sr. and Christine Ena Hurt

There will be joy in the morning
for now this long twilight is over
and their separation has ended.

For fourteen years, he had not seen her
whom he first befriended,
then courted and married.

Let there be joy, and no mourning,
for now in his arms she is carried
over a threshold vastly sweeter.

He never lost her; she only tarried
until he was able to meet her.

Keywords/Tags: George Edwin Hurt Christine Ena Spouse reunited heaven joy together forever



Poems about Mothers and Grandmothers



Dawn
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandmothers Lillian Lee and Christine Ena Hurt

Bring your peculiar strength
to the strange nightmarish fray:
wrap up your cherished ones
in the golden light of day.



Mother's Day Haiku
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandmothers Lillian Lee and Christine Ena Hurt

Crushed grapes
surrender such sweetness:
a mother’s compassion.

My footprints
so faint in the snow?
Ah yes, you lifted me.

An emu feather ...
still falling?
So quickly you rushed to my rescue.

The eagle sees farther
from its greater height:
our mothers' wisdom.



The Rose
by Michael R. Burch

for my grandmother, Lillian Lee, who used to grow the most beautiful roses

The rose is—
the ornament of the earth,
the glory of nature,
the archetype of the flowers,
the blush of the meadows,
a lightning flash of beauty.

This poem above is my translation of a Sappho epigram.



The Greatest of These ...
by Michael R. Burch

for my mother, Christine Ena Burch, and the grandmother of my son Jeremy

The hands that held me tremble.
The arms that lifted
fall.
Angelic flesh, now parchment,
is held together with gauze.

But her undimmed eyes still embrace me;
there infinity can be found.
I can almost believe such infinite love
will still reach me, underground.



Arisen
by Michael R. Burch

for my mother, Christine Ena Burch

Mother, I love you!
Mother, delightful,
articulate, insightful!

Angels in training,
watching over, would hover,
learning to love
from the Master: a Mother.

You learned all there was
for this planet to teach,
then extended your wings
to Love’s ultimate reach ...

And now you have soared
beyond eagles and condors
into distant elevations
only Phoenixes can conquer.

Amen

Published as the collection "Love Poems by Michael R. Burch"

Keywords/Tags: love, Eros, ******, erotica, passion, desire, lust, ***, dating, marriage, romance, romantic, romanticism

Plastic bags are my super villain
and no I am not Aqua Man
I am Michael a normal male civilian
of some young-adult age,
whom is still willing to inconvenience himself.

Not so old, where holding multiple objects
sounds like an obstacle too acrobatic for the limbs to handle.
One can too many knock's off the balance of the elderly
and cast them off the trapeze of a sidewalk
into a net of asphalt, where being caught is a broken hip.

No that is not me, although it does remind me
of my grandma, because to her plastic bags are her life-savers.
It is a struggle to convince my grandma that I am a great trapezist
so we can leave these bags to their solitude
and finally defeat this enemy.

Although with plastic bags it is never so easy
they have plenty of goons who are willing to do the ***** work
forcing themselves upon us at any opportunity,
even those that don't make any sense, even for my grandma.

I Went to Best Buy and bought a brand new movie,"Unfriended"
and I got it for my grandma to watch, since she's a bit technophobic.
This movie will haunt her; for ghosts **** people through the internet.
What will haunt me is Destiny, the worker, handing me a plastic bag:
with a 13-ounce, smaller than a piece of paper Blu-Ray inside
...without even asking if I wanted a plastic bag.

they (yeah, the paranoid pronoun, esp. in how it's used for abstract coordinates, concretely? conformists) decided it was easier to fill a psychiatrist's gob with my presence, and for psychiatrists to pay the mortgage with someone who they termed schizophrenic, forgetting the fact that the person in question was bilingual - odd how humanists confuse bilingualism with schizophrenia, maybe a coin flip later and we'd get biphrenic? that's pushing it, but it just might work to describe an atom evolved into a human form... basically in two places at the same time: confederacy of archaeological theology - and by being in two places, behaving differently in each stated sphere of observation... that's it though! theology translates as archaeology in science, excavating the designation of the argument of the spider and the spiderweb, the perfect yoga instructor, one position fits all... because scientific positivism is dead... it's dead... we're experiencing a transition into scientific negativism, mainly because there's a plumber's conundrum of a blocked fact-machine... which turned out to be a fat-machine... we're just hearing the same ****, over and over again.

i never knew it, but when humanism was born
it came across the challenges of
Darwinism (Aristotle's footnote),
with all due respect for humanism
though,
             humanism gave us
the most apathetic formulation of
any faith at all...
and do you see a rebellion happening
anywhere concerning this?
i see a bunch of ****-naked Amazonian
nomads singing the huh? huh?! song...
esp. when they see safety-hats and
tractors... me? i live in the
outer suburbs of a Greek city-state...
when you're walking down the
street and see a bare chested driver
of a tractor, and a loser (me) drinking beer
while the police pass by in their cruiser
and don't give a ****... well...
welcome to the Fe (iron) Fe Fe feral land...
(almost a sneeze, but not quiet)
metro-****** pinkies anywhere?
no... root that **** into your brains
you urban wankers... stay there,
rot... keep up the debauchery of
Beckton's recycling centre...
oh sure, keep the theatres open,
with Simon & Garfunkel applause of song...
like ballerinas and fat operas needed
an exercise regime...
Darwinism is brutal enough,
it's brutal, it's not pretty,
looking at it from a creationist perspective
you'll only get brutality from it,
only an Zimbabwe born englishman would
care to champion it... oh look!
a monkey ******* a ferret!
i cried today... my female cat was inspired
when a squirrel started doing gymnastics
on my garden fence, one paw tucked against
its chest... i haven't seen a squirrel in my
garden for a while, i've shown her a hedgehog
once, but a squirrel? try catching a squirrel!
it's like catching the ******* of a mosquito
wearing boxing gloves... or Zeno...
i cried my eyes out, by a squirrel...
acrobatic rats that hate throngs...
the simplest of things bring the greatest of joys,
and a consistency in thinking about
death make the simple assurances of mortality
so much more appreciated...
of course i think about death... why wouldn't
i? so this homeless man has a tent...
they're dragging them in, he says:
i haven't done anything wrong...
the military-industrial complex isn't secular at all...
psychiatrists are the complex's priests...
they're looking for subjects to ensure they earn
while giving oral *** to pharmaceutical companies...
and that's the *cul de sac truth -
no, wait... humanism's religious doctrine is
Darwinism, can't deviate from that,
keep a kettle and a sun on the same timescale,
i'm Caribbean lazy though...
you with beer and joint, me with beer and another
and another beer and an Apache echo impression
of echoing-yawn,
we have evolved past mating calls of animals...
all we have are warring calls... la la la for simplicity...
or in verse of new Zealander Haka:
                           ****, have no funny lyrics...
where was Darwinism when mating calls became
subtle and we exchanged mating calls for warring chants?
where was Darwinism then?
you telling me i have to own a watch, a mansion,
a nice car and enough money for a child's private
education to make one at all? pretty subtle
and all the more less colourful... you can ask me:
where was god when the Holocaust happened...
i'd reply: where was a decent joke?
apparently Moses died from laughter...
now i'm stuck with having to proof read
the first print of my book... that's going to be
agonising... i hate rereading my work...
and aren't we in a standing still position,
on an escalator, or the journalists are gullible,
i mean they're worse than pigs, they're eating
regurgitated facts... they're the ones that always
end up saying: if it ain't broken, break it...
that's their magnum opus fixation, and
the recycling bin... that's what they're there for,
i bet you a hundred quid that Putin's tears
would have turned into diamonds if they fell
on St. Basil's onion domes...
all these ****-incubating-real-emotion
calculators of the English parliament are worth
a psychiatric sketch show... punchline?
you ain't ever ever getting out, ha ha!
Darwinism is cruel, and people sort of like
the whips of a static history, sometimes they come back
to the 17th century and make a television program,
sometimes they have a chance encounter
to cite something from the only century that can
be experienced with anatomical dissection skill:
namely the 20th, or to be accurate, the 2nd half
of the 20th century... most of the time they haven't
the foggiest about history these days,
they're either electron-clouds of electron-orbits,
ping-pong between these two conceptions...
they're always pro-neutral (proton-neutron
centre) - and indeed the tetragrammaton invested
in Ke$ha... ka-ching! sz sh sharpener of wit...
got to love tactical pop, or the caveman ontological
obituary of buying alkaline batteries...
i bought alkaline batteries last year,
which technically makes me a caveman...
compact disks make me a caveman...
books make me a caveman... i'm a ******* caveman!
drag my woman by her hair...
what a great Darwinism provides,
we're all comparatively stone-age...
i love how we just made all history between that
into cf. snippets, and how the caveman attitude
is supposedly a ****** pill to supercharge our
attitudes into beastly thumps and gurgles and
elbows up the **** thrills...
Darwinism is cruel, Darwinism is currently the
theology of humanism... but once upon a time
the religious aspect (or in humanism's behaviour prescription)
was ascribed to one hour on Sunday...
now we're sorta stuck in a church, 24 / 7...
now we're all our own ritual makers...
we have the holy communions of buying a certain
type of coffee in a shop, or it's called curry Friday
and Saturday takeaway randomisation,
gathering the ready-meals Sunday to Thursday...
everyone having the busiest of lives...
if religion is dead, then i must be a nun.
i don't think Darwinism actually attacked theology...
some people are proper pranksters with
the notion that Darwinism attacked theology,
some get to play Jesus in some biblical theme park...
what i think Darwinism damaged, primarily,
is history... if journalists keep spanning
historical references from here & now and
that greatest ontological excuse: caveman once,
Chanel model no. 2, we'll surely sell many
more shaving equipment tools and sanity pills as we go
along into 24h / insomnia society...
me? i'm out... i'll be keeping my imagination
honed toward the Faroe Islands, along with my sanity.

You are the velvet to my lace, the freckles on your face, the rocket to outer space when i’m forgetting why my feet need to hit the ground.


You are three seconds away from a sunrise when I desperately need the light, you are a cup of tea and wisdom, and you are a giggle at just the right moment while the blood exchanges ideas between my wide-eyed fanatic manic panic mind and my static acrobatic heart.

You are love and a smile when everything around has fallen dark. We fall down the seasons, each leaf turned to green as the time is subjective as valued.

we fall down the winter of broken glass and torn kneecaps and into the summer of understanding and patched hearts.

We fall down the stairs of the boy who was the blank slate and into the arms of the boy who painted his stone happy.

You are the living room of my soul, where all the pictures make us smile just to look at them and the quilt on the couch is beautiful enough to make up for the small tear in the corner. Where the cups of tea sipped are innumerable as the curls on your head and the watercolor windows open past our souls and into our worlds.

Someday we’ll be able to keep track of our socks and get enough sleep but right now I’m still figuring it out. I’m still trying to connect the sky to the tree to the earth to the tesseracted interaction theatrical statement of who I am and what I will be. We will become.

Diagonal insertion of myself into this room we call the present moment
its never gonna go to collections baby, obviously checked it in for a week
we found static in the interruption caused by your radio towers and traps
and what you say, is not true- i see whose driving the hearse, shotgun
appeal to the old me. satisfy my hungering for those other things please

and tho i told you not to bother to call her, you did and just to say you did
don't blame you because you are a good time, perforated into tiny fragments
its not legal but this pedestal fits me like a glove, too much for the initiation
but our doubts, are all left in yesterday. how i follow you home after ever show
come help me hack off the vines and roots after every night of this spilling myself

skips on the record, please don't forget me, i won't forget you, how could i
youre just a missed cherry ash falling on my leg, burning me holes through
saying what you want to say, sorry that i don't reply, see me in the morning
shuddering on my favorite words, while screaming death to the secretion !
first we go spinning out                  then go smashing painted stained glass !

The revolutionary ardent
Bordering on a prophet
For democracy's advent,
Up on grabbing
The rein of power,
With a superb
Acrobatic bent,
For a tyranny
An example set
For political thugs to emulate!

She handles the **** with a commanding presence
Has it standing at attention when she’s gripping
Flipping her tongue giving my **** acrobatic lessons
Treating my ***** like wine when she’s sipping
Got me calling for god when she’s delivering my blessing.

You
Are untamed
Reckless blood and wit intertwined
A twisted, brazen
 mind.

Your mind
Is so clearly different
It leaps and soars, so acrobatic
And your thoughts appear to me so hazy and enigmatic
Your mind is simply not pragmatic
Yet your perception knows no bounds.
You have thoughts that come close to insanity
That sometimes flow in the form of profanity.
  
Your spirit
Is either very high or very low
Up and down, to and fro
There is no in between for you
Some say you are stupidly crazy
The dull ones say that, the ones too lazy
To see beyond the rugged surface.
The subdued and vapid ones
Will never understand the magnetism
Of your sweet, exquisite devilry.

On your face you often wear
A fierce and restless stare
A wan, discontented expression
As though you're always awaiting
Something bigger,
Something better.

You
Are fluid, swaying fire
And I will never tire
Of watching you burn
I can see you brain boil and churn
As it reels into into areas of
 madness and chaos.

Your psyche
Is an endless field of dark reverie,
Of fear and vagary.

I know your night terrors
Your savage dreams of death
Screams and bated breath
Unutterable visions
The grotesque world of horror thats spins itself out
And dribbles into your drawings
All those creatures, skeletons gnashing and clawing...

You
Are gentle and thoughtful
Yet you are terrified
Of this dark thing that sleeps within you.

Your eyes - they’re stunning
They’re tempestuous,
Wild, like some fierce animal peering out of a rusted cage
Oh, your eyes
They are something beautiful, but annihilating
Like Autumn crocus flowers, innocently poisonous
Lids splaying delicately like its violet leaves.

You are tall and strong
And uncontrollable,
And your smile
Is the biggest paradox I've ever encountered
Childlike
And fatal.

You are not
A creature of the commonplace
You are not a slave of the ordinary
You are not a mindless drudge of the mundane
You are free.
Or bewitched, what's the difference

Poems about Leaves and Leave Taking (i.e., leaving friends and family, loss, death, parting, separation, divorce, etc.)


Leave Taking
by Michael R. Burch

Brilliant leaves abandon
battered limbs
to waltz upon ecstatic winds
until they die.

But the barren and embittered trees
lament the frolic of the leaves
and curse the bleak
November sky.

Now, as I watch the leaves'
high flight
before the fading autumn light,
I think that, perhaps, at last I may

have learned what it means to say
"goodbye."

Published by The Lyric, Mindful of Poetry, There is Something in the Autumn (anthology). Keywords/Tags: autumn, leaves, fall, falling, wind, barren, trees, goodbye, leaving, farewell, separation, age, aging, mortality, death, mrbepi, mrbleave

This poem started out as a stanza in a much longer poem, "Jessamyn's Song," which dates to around age 14 or 15, or perhaps a bit later. But I worked on the poem several times over the years until it was largely finished in 1978. I am sure of the completion date because that year the poem was included in my first large poetry submission manuscript for a chapbook contest.



Autumn Conundrum
by Michael R. Burch

It's not that every leaf must finally fall,
it's just that we can never catch them all.

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, this poem has since been translated into Russian, Macedonian, Turkish, Arabic and Romanian.



Something

for the children of the Holocaust and the Nakba

Something inescapable is lost—
lost like a pale vapor curling up into shafts of moonlight,
vanishing in a gust of wind toward an expanse of stars
immeasurable and void.

Something uncapturable is gone—
gone with the spent leaves and illuminations of autumn,
scattered into a haze with the faint rustle of parched grass
and remembrance.

Something unforgettable is past—
blown from a glimmer into nothingness, or less,
which finality swept into a corner... where it lies
in dust and cobwebs and silence.

Published by There is Something in the Autumn, The Eclectic Muse, Setu, FreeXpression, Life and Legends, Poetry Super Highway, Poet's Corner, Promosaik, Better Than Starbucks and The Chained Muse. Also translated into Romanian by Petru Dimofte, into Turkish by Nurgül Yayman, turned into a YouTube video by Lillian Y. Wong, and used by the Windsor Jewish Community Centre during a candle-lighting ceremony



Leaf Fall
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever winds encountered soon resolved
to swirling fragments, till chaotic heaps
of leaves lay pulsing by the backyard wall.
In lieu of rakes, our fingers sorted each
dry leaf into its place and built a high,
soft bastion against earth's gravitron―
a patchwork quilt, a trampoline, a bright
impediment to fling ourselves upon.

And nothing in our laughter as we fell
into those leaves was like the autumn's cry
of also falling. Nothing meant to die
could be so bright as we, so colorful―
clad in our plaids, oblivious to pain
we'd feel today, should we leaf-fall again.

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



Herbsttag ("Autumn Day")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go.
Lay your long shadows over the sundials
and over the meadows, let the free winds blow.
Command the late fruits to fatten and shine;
O, grant them another Mediterranean hour!
Urge them to completion, and with power
convey final sweetness to the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, never will build one.
Who's alone now, shall continue alone;
he'll wake, read, write long letters to friends,
and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down,
restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend.

Originally published by Measure



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

It is the nature of loveliness to vanish
as butterfly wings, batting against nothingness
seek transcendence...

Originally published by Hibiscus (India)



Less Heroic Couplets: ****** Most Fowl!
by Michael R. Burch

"****** most foul! "
cried the mouse to the owl.

"Friend, I'm no sinner;
you're merely my dinner! "
the wise owl replied
as the tasty snack died.

Published by Lighten Upand in Potcake Chapbook #7



escape!

for anaïs vionet

to live among the daffodil folk...
slip down the rainslickened drainpipe...
suddenly pop out
the GARGANTUAN SPOUT...
minuscule as alice, shout
yippee-yi-yee!
in wee exultant glee
to be leaving behind the
LARGE
THREE-DENALI GARAGE.

Published by Andwerve and Bewildering Stories



Love Has a Southern Flavor

Love has a Southern flavor: honeydew,
ripe cantaloupe, the honeysuckle's spout
we tilt to basking faces to breathe out
the ordinary, and inhale perfume...

Love's Dixieland-rambunctious: tangled vines,
wild clematis, the gold-brocaded leaves
that will not keep their order in the trees,
unmentionables that peek from dancing lines...

Love cannot be contained, like Southern nights:
the constellations' dying mysteries,
the fireflies that hum to light, each tree's
resplendent autumn cape, a genteel sight...

Love also is as wild, as sprawling-sweet,
as decadent as the wet leaves at our feet.

Published by The Lyric, Contemporary Sonnet, The Eclectic Muse, Better Than Starbucks, The Chained Muse, Setu (India) , Victorian Violet Press and Trinacria



Daredevil
by Michael R. Burch

There are days that I believe
(and nights that I deny)
love is not mutilation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There are tightropes leaps bereave—
taut wires strumming high
brief songs, infatuations.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were cannon shots’ soirees,
hearts barricaded, wise . . .
and then . . . annihilation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were nights our hearts conceived
dawns’ indiscriminate sighs.
To dream was our consolation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were acrobatic leaves
that tumbled down to lie
at our feet, bright trepidations.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were hearts carved into trees—
tall stakes where you and I
left childhood’s salt libations . . .

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

Where once you scraped your knees;
love later bruised your thighs.
Death numbs all, our sedation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.



The People Loved What They Had Loved Before
by Michael R. Burch

We did not worship at the shrine of tears;
we knew not to believe, not to confess.
And so, ahemming victors, to false cheers,
we wrote off love, we gave a stern address
to things that we disapproved of, things of yore.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

We did not build stone monuments to stand
six hundred years and grow more strong and arch
like bridges from the people to the Land
beyond their reach. Instead, we played a march,
pale Neros, sparking flames from door to door.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

We could not pipe of cheer, or even woe.
We played a minor air of Ire (in E).
The sheep chose to ignore us, even though,
long destitute, we plied our songs for free.
We wrote, rewrote and warbled one same score.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

At last outlandish wailing, we confess,
ensued, because no listeners were left.
We built a shrine to tears: our goddess less
divine than man, and, like us, long bereft.
We stooped to love too late, too Learned to *****.
And the people loved what they had loved before.



Talent
by Michael R. Burch

for Kevin Nicholas Roberts

I liked the first passage
of her poem―where it led
(though not nearly enough
to retract what I said.)
Now the book propped up here
flutters, scarcely half read.
It will keep.
Before sleep,
let me read yours instead.

There's something like love
in the rhythms of night
―in the throb of streets
where the late workers drone,
in the sounds that attend
each day’s sad, squalid end―
that reminds us: till death
we are never alone.

So we write from the hearts
that will fail us anon,
words in red
truly bled
though they cannot reveal
whence they came,
who they're for.
And the tap at the door
goes unanswered. We write,
for there is nothing more
than a verse,
than a song,
than this chant of the blessed:
"If these words
be my sins,
let me die unconfessed!
Unconfessed, unrepentant;
I rescind all my vows!"
Write till sleep:
it’s the leap
only Talent allows.



Davenport Tomorrow
by Michael R. Burch

Davenport tomorrow ...
all the trees stand stark-naked in the sun.

Now it is always summer
and the bees buzz in cesspools,
adapted to a new life.

There are no flowers,
but the weeds, being hardier,
have survived.

The small town has become
a city of millions;
there is no longer a sea,
only a huge sewer,
but the children don't mind.

They still study
rocks and stars,
but biology is a forgotten science ...
after all, what is life?

Davenport tomorrow ...
all the children murmur through vein-streaked gills
whispered wonders of long-ago.



Desdemona
by Michael R. Burch

Though you possessed the moon and stars,
you are bound to fate and wed to chance.
Your lips deny they crave a kiss;
your feet deny they ache to dance.
Your heart imagines wild romance.

Though you cupped fire in your hands
and molded incandescent forms,
you are barren now, and―spent of flame―
the ashes that remain are borne
toward the sun upon a storm.

You, who demanded more, have less,
your heart within its cells of sighs
held fast by chains of misery,
confined till death for peddling lies―
imprisonment your sense denies.

You, who collected hearts like leaves
and pressed each once within your book,
forgot. None―winsome, bright or rare―
not one was worth a second look.
My heart, as others, you forsook.

But I, though I loved you from afar
through silent dawns, and gathered rue
from gardens where your footsteps left
cold paths among the asters, knew―
each moonless night the nettles grew

and strangled hope, where love dies too.

Published by Penny Dreadful, Carnelian, Romantics Quarterly, Grassroots Poetry and Poetry Life & Times



Ordinary Love
by Michael R. Burch

Indescribable—our love—and still we say
with eyes averted, turning out the light,
"I love you," in the ordinary way

and tug the coverlet where once we lay,
all suntanned limbs entangled, shivering, white ...
indescribably in love. Or so we say.

Your hair's blonde thicket now is tangle-gray;
you turn your back; you murmur to the night,
"I love you," in the ordinary way.

Beneath the sheets our hands and feet would stray
to warm ourselves. We do not touch despite
a love so indescribable. We say

we're older now, that "love" has had its day.
But that which Love once countenanced, delight,
still makes you indescribable. I say,
"I love you," in the ordinary way.

Winner of the 2001 Algernon Charles Swinburne poetry contest; published by The Lyric, Romantics Quarterly, Mandrake Poetry Review, Carnelian, Poem Kingdom, Net Poetry and Art Competition, Famous Poets and Poems, FreeXpression, PW Review, Poetic Voices, Poetry Renewal and Poetry Life & Times



Are You the Thief
by Michael R. Burch

When I touch you now,
O sweet lover,
full of fire,
melting like ice
in my embrace,

when I part the delicate white lace,
baring pale flesh,
and your face
is so close
that I breathe your breath
and your hair surrounds me like a wreath...

tell me now,
O sweet, sweet lover,
in good faith:
are you the thief
who has stolen my heart?

Originally published as “Baring Pale Flesh” by Poetic License/Monumental Moments



At Tintagel
by Michael R. Burch

That night,
at Tintagel,
there was darkness such as man had never seen...
darkness and treachery,
and the unholy thundering of the sea...

In his arms,
who is to say how much she knew?
And if he whispered her name...
"Ygraine"
could she tell above the howling wind and rain?

Could she tell, or did she care,
by the length of his hair
or the heat of his flesh,...
that her faceless companion
was Uther, the dragon,

and Gorlois lay dead?

Originally published by Songs of Innocence, then subsequently by Celtic Twilight, Fables, Fickle Muses and Poetry Life & Times



Isolde's Song
by Michael R. Burch

Through our long years of dreaming to be one
we grew toward an enigmatic light
that gently warmed our tendrils. Was it sun?
We had no eyes to tell; we loved despite
the lack of all sensation—all but one:
we felt the night's deep chill, the air so bright
at dawn we quivered limply, overcome.

To touch was all we knew, and how to bask.
We knew to touch; we grew to touch; we felt
spring's urgency, midsummer's heat, fall's lash,
wild winter's ice and thaw and fervent melt.
We felt returning light and could not ask
its meaning, or if something was withheld
more glorious. To touch seemed life's great task.

At last the petal of me learned: unfold
and you were there, surrounding me. We touched.
The curious golden pollens! Ah, we touched,
and learned to cling and, finally, to hold.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



The Wild Hunt
by Michael R. Burch

Near Devon, the hunters appear in the sky
with Artur and Bedwyr sounding the call;
and the others, laughing, go dashing by.
They only appear when the moon is full:

Valerin, the King of the Tangled Wood,
and Valynt, the goodly King of Wales,
Gawain and Owain and the hearty men
who live on in many minstrels' tales.

They seek the white stag on a moonlit moor,
or Torc Triath, the fabled boar,
or Ysgithyrwyn, or Twrch Trwyth,
the other mighty boars of myth.

They appear, sometimes, on Halloween
to chase the moon across the green,
then fade into the shadowed hills
where memory alone prevails.

Originally published by Celtic Twilight, then by Celtic Lifestyles and Auldwicce



Morgause's Song
by Michael R. Burch

Before he was my brother,
he was my lover,
though certainly not the best.

I found no joy
in that addled boy,
nor he at my breast.

Why him? Why him?
The years grow dim.
Now it's harder and harder to say...

Perhaps girls and boys
are the god's toys
when the skies are gray.

Originally published by Celtic Twilight as "The First Time"



Pellinore's Fancy
by Michael R. Burch

What do you do when your wife is a nag
and has sworn you to hunt neither fish, fowl, nor stag?
When the land is at peace, but at home you have none,
Is that, perchance, when... the Questing Beasts run?



The Last Enchantment
by Michael R. Burch

Oh, Lancelot, my truest friend,
how time has thinned your ragged mane
and pinched your features; still you seem
though, much, much changed—somehow unchanged.

Your sword hand is, as ever, ready,
although the time for swords has passed.
Your eyes are fierce, and yet so steady
meeting mine... you must not ask.

The time is not, nor ever shall be.
Merlyn's words were only words;
and now his last enchantment wanes,
and we must put aside our swords...



Northern Flight: Lancelot's Last Love Letter to Guinevere
by Michael R. Burch

"Get thee to a nunnery..."

Now that the days have lengthened, I assume
the shadows also lengthen where you pause
to watch the sun and comprehend its laws,
or just to shiver in the deepening gloom.

But nothing in your antiquarian eyes
nor anything beyond your failing vision
repeals the night. Religion's circumcision
has left us worlds apart, but who's more wise?

I think I know you better now than then—
and love you all the more, because you are
... so distant. I can love you from afar,
forgiving your flight north, far from brute men,
because your fear's well-founded: God, forbid,
was bound to fail you here, as mortals did.

Originally published by Rotary Dial



Lance-Lot
by Michael R. Burch

Preposterous bird!
Inelegant! Absurd!

Until the great & mighty heron
brandishes his fearsome sword.



Truces
by Michael R. Burch

We must sometimes wonder if all the fighting related to King Arthur and his knights was really necessary. In particular, it seems that Lancelot fought and either captured or killed a fairly large percentage of the population of England. Could it be that Arthur preferred to fight than stay at home and do domestic chores? And, honestly now, if he and his knights were such incredible warriors, who would have been silly enough to do battle with them? Wygar was the name of Arthur's hauberk, or armored tunic, which was supposedly fashioned by one Witege or Widia, quite possibly the son of Wayland Smith. The legends suggest that Excalibur was forged upon the anvil of the smith-god Wayland, who was also known as Volund, which sounds suspiciously like Vulcan...

Artur took Cabal, his hound,
and Carwennan, his knife,
    and his sword forged by Wayland
    and Merlyn, his falcon,
and, saying goodbye to his sons and his wife,
he strode to the Table Rounde.

"Here is my spear, Rhongomyniad,
and here is Wygar that I wear,
    and ready for war,
    an oath I foreswore
to fight for all that is righteous and fair
from Wales to the towers of Gilead."

But none could be found to contest him,
for Lancelot had slewn them, forsooth,
so he hastened back home, for to rest him,
till his wife bade him, "Thatch up the roof! "

Originally published by Neovictorian/Cochlea, then by Celtic Twilight



Midsummer-Eve
by Michael R. Burch

What happened to the mysterious Tuatha De Danann, to the Ban Shee (from which we get the term "banshee") and, eventually, to the druids? One might assume that with the passing of Merlyn, Morgause and their ilk, the time of myths and magic ended. This poem is an epitaph of sorts.

In the ruins
of the dreams
and the schemes
of men;

when the moon
begets the tide
and the wide
sea sighs;

when a star
appears in heaven
and the raven
cries;

we will dance
and we will revel
in the devil's
fen...

if nevermore again.

Originally published by Penny Dreadful



The Pictish Faeries
by Michael R. Burch

Smaller and darker
than their closest kin,
the faeries learned only too well
never to dwell
close to the villages of larger men.

Only to dance in the starlight
when the moon was full
and men were afraid.
Only to worship in the farthest glade,
ever heeding the raven and the gull.



The Kiss of Ceridwen
by Michael R. Burch

The kiss of Ceridwen
I have felt upon my brow,
and the past and the future
have appeared, as though a vapor,
mingling with the here and now.

And Morrigan, the Raven,
the messenger, has come,
to tell me that the gods, unsung,
will not last long
when the druids' harps grow dumb.



Merlyn, on His Birth
by Michael R. Burch

Legend has it that Zephyr was an ancestor of Merlin. In this poem, I suggest that Merlin was an albino, which might have led to claims that he had no father, due to radical physical differences between father and son. This would have also added to his appearance as a mystical figure. The reference to Ursa Major, the bear, ties the birth of Merlin to the future birth of Arthur, whose Welsh name ("Artos" or "Artur") means "bear." Morydd is another possible ancestor of Merlin's. In Welsh names "dd" is pronounced "th."

I was born in Gwynedd,
or not born, as some men claim,
and the Zephyr of Caer Myrrdin
gave me my name.

My father was Madog Morfeyn
but our eyes were never the same,
nor our skin, nor our hair;
for his were dark, dark
—as our people's are—
and mine were fairer than fair.

The night of my birth, the Zephyr
carved of white stone a rune;
and the ringed stars of Ursa Major
outshone the cool pale moon;
and my grandfather, Morydd, the seer
saw wheeling, a-gyre in the sky,
a falcon with terrible yellow-gold eyes
when falcons never fly.



Merlyn's First Prophecy
by Michael R. Burch

Vortigern commanded a tower to be built upon Snowden,
but the earth would churn and within an hour its walls would cave in.

Then his druid said only the virginal blood of a fatherless son,
recently shed, would ever hold the foundation.

"There is, in Caer Myrrdin, a faery lad, a son with no father;
his name is Merlyn, and with his blood you would have your tower."

So Vortigern had them bring the boy, the child of the demon,
and, taciturn and without joy, looked out over Snowden.

"To **** a child brings little praise, but many tears."
Then the mountain slopes rang with the brays of Merlyn's jeers.

"Pure poppycock! You fumble and bumble and heed a fool.
At the base of the rock the foundations crumble into a pool! "

When they drained the pool, two dragons arose, one white and one red,
and since the old druid was blowing his nose, young Merlyn said:

"Vortigern is the white, Ambrosius the red; now, watch, indeed."
Then the former died as the latter fed and Vortigern peed.

Published by Celtic Twilight



It Is Not the Sword!
by Michael R. Burch

This poem illustrates the strong correlation between the names that appear in Welsh and Irish mythology. Much of this lore predates the Arthurian legends, and was assimilated as Arthur's fame (and hyperbole)grew. Caladbolg is the name of a mythical Irish sword, while Caladvwlch is its Welsh equivalent. Caliburn and Excalibur are later variants.

"It is not the sword,
but the man, "
said Merlyn.
But the people demanded a sign—
the sword of Macsen Wledig,
Caladbolg, the "lightning-shard."

"It is not the sword,
but the words men follow."
Still, he set it in the stone
—Caladvwlch, the sword of kings—
and many a man did strive, and swore,
and many a man did moan.

But none could budge it from the stone.

"It is not the sword
or the strength, "
said Merlyn,
"that makes a man a king,
but the truth and the conviction
that ring in his iron word."

"It is NOT the sword! "
cried Merlyn,
crowd-jostled, marveling
as Arthur drew forth Caliburn
with never a gasp,
with never a word,

and so became their king.



Uther's Last Battle
by Michael R. Burch

When Uther, the High King,
unable to walk, borne upon a litter
went to fight Colgrim, the Saxon King,
his legs were weak, and his visage bitter.
"Where is Merlyn, the sage?
For today I truly feel my age."

All day long the battle raged
and the dragon banner was sorely pressed,
but the courage of Uther never waned
till the sun hung low upon the west.
"Oh, where is Merlyn to speak my doom,
for truly I feel the chill of the tomb."

Then, with the battle almost lost
and the king besieged on every side,
a prince appeared, clad all in white,
and threw himself against the tide.
"Oh, where is Merlyn, who stole my son?
For, truly, now my life is done."

Then Merlyn came unto the king
as the Saxons fled before a sword
that flashed like lightning in the hand
of a prince that day become a lord.
"Oh, Merlyn, speak not, for I see
my son has truly come to me.

And today I need no prophecy
to see how bright his days will be."
So Uther, then, the valiant king
met his son, and kissed him twice—
the one, the first, the one, the last—
and smiled, and then his time was past.



Small Tales
by Michael R. Burch

According to legend, Arthur and Kay grew up together in Ector's court, Kay being a few years older than Arthur. Borrowing from Mary Stewart, I am assuming that Bedwyr (later Anglicized to Bedivere)might have befriended Arthur at an early age. By some accounts, Bedwyr was the original Lancelot. In any case, imagine the adventures these young heroes might have pursued (or dreamed up, to excuse tardiness or "lost" homework assignments). Manawydan and Llyr were ancient Welsh gods. Cath Pulag was a monstrous, clawing cat. ("Sorry teach! My theme paper on Homer was torn up by a cat bigger than a dragon! And meaner, too! ")Pen Palach is more or less a mystery, or perhaps just another old drinking buddy with a few good beery-bleary tales of his own. This poem assumes that many of the more outlandish Arthurian legends began more or less as "small tales, " little white lies which simply got larger and larger with each retelling. It also assumes that most of these tales came about just as the lads reached that age when boys fancy themselves men, and spend most of their free time drinking and puking...

When Artur and Cai and Bedwyr
were but scrawny lads
they had many a ***** adventure
in the still glades
of Gwynedd.
When the sun beat down like an oven
upon the kiln-hot hills
and the scorched shores of Carmarthen,
they went searching
and found Manawydan, the son of Llyr.
They fought a day and a night
with Cath Pulag (or a screeching kitten),
rousted Pen Palach, then drank a beer
and told quite a talltale or two,
till thems wasn't so shore which'un's tails wus true.

And these have been passed down to me, and to you.



The Song of Amergin
by Michael R. Burch

Amergin is, in the words of Morgan Llywelyn, "the oldest known western European poet." Robert Graves said: "English poetic education should, really, begin not with The Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin." Amergin was one of the Milesians, or sons of Mil: Gaels who invaded Ireland and defeated the mysterious Tuatha De Danann, thereby establishing a Celtic beachhead, not only on the shores of the Emerald Isle, but also in the annals of Time and Poetry.

He was our first bard
and we feel in his dim-remembered words
the moment when Time blurs...

and he and the Sons of Mil
heave oars as the breakers mill
till at last Ierne—green, brooding—nears,

while Some implore seas cold, fell, dark
to climb and swamp their flimsy bark
... and Time here also spumes, careers...

while the Ban Shee shriek in awed dismay
to see him still the sea, this day,
then seek the dolmen and the gloam.



Stonehenge
by Michael R. Burch

Here where the wind imbues life within stone,
I once stood
and watched as the tempest made monuments groan
as though blood
boiled within them.

Here where the Druids stood charting the stars
I can tell
they longed for the heavens... perhaps because
hell
boiled beneath them?



The Celtic Cross at Île Grosse
by Michael R. Burch

"I actually visited the island and walked across those mass graves of 30, 000 Irish men, women and children, and I played a little tune on me whistle. I found it very peaceful, and there was relief there." - Paddy Maloney of The Chieftans

There was relief there,
and release,
on Île Grosse
in the spreading gorse
and the cry of the wild geese...

There was relief there,
without remorse
when the tin whistle lifted its voice
in a tune of artless grief,
piping achingly high and longingly of an island veiled in myth.
And the Celtic cross that stands here tells us, not of their grief,
but of their faith and belief—
like the last soft breath of evening lifting a fallen leaf.

When ravenous famine set all her demons loose,
driving men to the seas like lemmings,
they sought here the clemency of a better life, or death,
and their belief in God gave them hope, a sense of peace.

These were proud men with only their lives to owe,
who sought the liberation of a strange new land.
Now they lie here, ragged row on ragged row,
with only the shadows of their loved ones close at hand.

And each cross, their ancient burden and their glory,
reflects the death of sunlight on their story.

And their tale is sad—but, O, their faith was grand!



At Cædmon's Grave
by Michael R. Burch

"Cædmon's Hymn, " composed at the Monastery of Whitby (a North Yorkshire fishing village), is one of the oldest known poems written in the English language, dating back to around 680 A.D. According to legend, Cædmon, an illiterate Anglo-Saxon cowherd, received the gift of poetic composition from an angel; he subsequently founded a school of Christian poets. Unfortunately, only nine lines of Cædmon's verse survive, in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Whitby, tiny as it is, reappears later in the history of English literature, having been visited, in diametric contrast, by Lewis Carroll and Bram Stoker's ghoulish yet evocative Dracula.

At the monastery of Whitby,
on a day when the sun sank through the sea,
and the gulls shrieked wildly, jubilant, free,

while the wind and time blew all around,
I paced those dusk-enamored grounds
and thought I heard the steps resound

of Carroll, Stoker and of Bede
who walked there, too, their spirits freed
—perhaps by God, perhaps by need—

to write, and with each line, remember
the glorious light of Cædmon's ember,
scorched tongues of flame words still engender.

Here, as darkness falls, at last we meet.
I lay this pale garland of words at his feet.

Originally published by The Lyric



faith(less), a coronavirus poem
by Michael R. Burch

Those who believed
and Those who misled
lie together at last
in the same narrow bed

and if god loved Them more
for Their strange lack of doubt,
he kept it well hidden
till he snuffed Them out.



Habeas Corpus
by Michael R. Burch

from “Songs of the Antinatalist”

I have the results of your DNA analysis.
If you want to have children, this may induce paralysis.
I wish I had good news, but how can I lie?
Any offspring you have are guaranteed to die.
It wouldn’t be fair—I’m sure you’ll agree—
to sentence kids to death, so I’ll waive my fee.



Villanelle: Hangovers
by Michael R. Burch

We forget that, before we were born,
our parents had “lives” of their own,
ran drunk in the streets, or half-******.

Yes, our parents had lives of their own
until we were born; then, undone,
they were buying their parents gravestones

and finding gray hairs of their own
(because we were born lacking some
of their curious habits, but soon

would certainly get them). Half-******,
we watched them dig graves of their own.
Their lives would be over too soon

for their curious habits to bloom
in us (though our children were born
nine months from that night on the town

when, punch-drunk in the streets or half-******,
we first proved we had lives of our own).



Happily Never After (the Second Curse of the ***** Toad)
by Michael R. Burch

He did not think of love of Her at all
frog-plangent nights, as moons engoldened roads
through crumbling stonewalled provinces, where toads
(nee princes) ruled in chinks and grew so small
at last to be invisible. He smiled
(the fables erred so curiously), and thought
bemusedly of being reconciled
to human flesh, because his heart was not
incapable of love, but, being cursed
a second time, could only love a toad’s . . .
and listened as inflated frogs rehearsed
cheekbulging tales of anguish from green moats . . .
and thought of her soft croak, her skin fine-warted,
his anemic flesh, and how true love was thwarted.



Haunted
by Michael R. Burch

Now I am here
and thoughts of my past mistakes are my brethren.
I am withering
and the sweetness of your memory is like a tear.

Go, if you will,
for the ache in my heart is its hollowness
and the flaw in my soul is its shallowness;
there is nothing to fill.

Take what you can;
I have nothing left.
And when you are gone, I will be bereft,
the husk of a man.

Or stay here awhile.
My heart cannot bear the night, or these dreams.
Your face is a ghost, though paler, it seems
when you smile.

Published by Romantics Quarterly



Have I been too long at the fair?
by Michael R. Burch

Have I been too long at the fair?
The summer has faded,
the leaves have turned brown;
the Ferris wheel teeters ...
not up, yet not down.
Have I been too long at the fair?

This is one of my earliest poems, written around age 14-15 when we were living with my grandfather in his house on Chilton Street, within walking distance of the Nashville fairgrounds. I remember walking to the fairgrounds, stopping at a Dairy Queen along the way, and swimming at a public pool. But I believe the Ferris wheel only operated during the state fair. So my “educated guess” is that this poem was written during the 1973 state fair, or shortly thereafter. I remember watching people hanging suspended in mid-air, waiting for carnies to deposit them safely on terra firma again.



Insurrection
by Michael R. Burch

She has become as the night—listening
for rumors of dawn—while the dew, glistening,
reminds me of her, and the wind, whistling,
lashes my cheeks with its soft chastening.

She has become as the lights—flickering
in the distance—till memories old and troubling
rise up again and demand remembering ...
like peasants rebelling against a mad king.

Originally published by The Chained Muse



Success
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

We need our children to keep us humble
between toast and marmalade;

there is no time for a ticker-tape parade
before bed, no award, no bright statuette

to be delivered for mending skinned knees,
no wild bursts of approval for shoveling snow.

A kiss is the only approval they show;
to leave us―the first great success they achieve.



Sappho's Lullaby
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

Hushed yet melodic, the hills and the valleys
sleep unaware of the nightingale's call,
while the pale calla lilies lie
listening,
glistening . . .
this is their night, the first night of fall.

Son, tonight, a woman awaits you;
she is more vibrant, more lovely than spring.
She'll meet you in moonlight,
soft and warm,
all alone . . .
then you'll know why the nightingale sings.

Just yesterday the stars were afire;
then how desire flashed through my veins!
But now I am older;
night has come,
I’m alone . . .
for you I will sing as the nightingale sings.

NOTE: The calla lily symbolizes beauty, purity, innocence, faithfulness and true devotion. According to Greek mythology, when the Milky Way was formed by the goddess Hera’s breast milk, the drops that fell to earth became calla lilies.



Piercing the Shell
by Michael R. Burch

If we strip away all the accouterments of war,
perhaps we’ll discover what the heart is for.



Premonition
by Michael R. Burch

Now the evening has come to a close and the party is over ...
we stand in the doorway and watch as they go—
each stranger, each acquaintance, each unembraceable lover.

They walk to their cars and they laugh as they go,
though we know their forced laughter’s the wine ...
then they pause at the road where the dark asphalt flows
endlessly on toward Zion ...

and they kiss one another as though they were friends,
and they promise to meet again “soon” ...
but the rivers of Jordan roll on without end,
and the mockingbird calls to the moon ...

and the katydids climb up the cropped hanging vines,
and the crickets chirp on out of tune ...
and their shadows, defined by the cryptic starlight,
seem spirits torn loose from their tombs.

And I know their brief lives are just eddies in time,
that their hearts are unreadable runes
to be wiped clean, like slate, by the Eraser, Fate,
when their corpses lie ravaged and ruined ...

You take my clenched fist and you give it a kiss
as though it were something you loved,
and the tears fill your eyes, brimming with the soft light
of the stars winking sagely above ...

Then you whisper, "It's time that we went back inside;
if you'd like, we can sit and just talk for a while."
And the hope in your eyes burns too deep, so I lie
and I say, "Yes, I would," to your small, troubled smile.

I vividly remember writing this poem after an office party the year I co-oped with AT&T (at that time the largest company in the world, with presumably a lot of office parties). This would have been after my sophomore year in college, making me around 20 years old. The poem is “true” except that I was not the host because the party was at the house of one of the upper-level managers. Nor was I dating anyone seriously at the time. Keywords/Tags: premonition, office, party, parting, eve, evening, stranger, strangers, wine, laughter, moon, shadows



Survivors
by Michael R. Burch

for the victims and survivors of 9/11 and their families

In truth, we do not feel the horror
of the survivors,
but what passes for horror:

a shiver of “empathy.”

We too are “survivors,”
if to survive is to snap back
from the sight of death

like a turtle retracting its neck.



Child of 9-11
by Michael R. Burch

a poem for Christina-Taylor Green, who
was born on September 11, 2001 and who
died at age nine, shot to death ...

Child of 9-11, beloved,
I bring this lily, lay it down
here at your feet, and eiderdown,
and all soft things, for your gentle spirit.
I bring this psalm ― I hope you hear it.

Much love I bring ― I lay it down
here by your form, which is not you,
but what you left this shell-shocked world
to help us learn what we must do
to save another child like you.

Child of 9-11, I know
you are not here, but watch, afar
from distant stars, where angels rue
the evil things some mortals do.
I also watch; I also rue.

And so I make this pledge and vow:
though I may weep, I will not rest
nor will my pen fail heaven's test
till guns and wars and hate are banned
from every shore, from every land.

Child of 9-11, I grieve
your tender life, cut short ... bereaved,
what can I do, but pledge my life
to saving lives like yours? Belief
in your sweet worth has led me here ...

I give my all: my pen, this tear,
this lily and this eiderdown,
and all soft things my heart can bear;
I bring them to your final bier,
and leave them with my promise, here.



The Locker
by Michael R. Burch

All the dull hollow clamor has died
and what was contained,
removed,

reproved
adulation or sentiment,
left with the pungent darkness

as remembered as the sudden light.



Tremble
by Michael R. Burch

Her predatory eye,
the single feral iris,
scans.

Her raptor beak,
all jagged sharp-edged ******,
juts.

Her hard talon,
clenched in pinched expectation,
waits.

Her clipped wings,
preened against reality,
tremble.



Day, and Night
by Michael R. Burch

The moon exposes pockmarked scars of craters;
her visage, veiled by willows, palely looms.
And we who rise each day to grind a living,
dream each scented night of such perfumes
as drew us to the window, to the moonlight,
when all the earth was steeped in cobalt blue―
an eerie vase of achromatic flowers
bled silver by pale starlight, losing hue.

The night begins her waltz to waiting sunrise―
adagio, the music she now hears;
and we who in the sunlight slave for succor,
dreaming, seek communion with the spheres.
And all around the night is in crescendo,
and everywhere the stars’ bright legions form,
and here we hear the sweet incriminations
of lovers we had once to keep us warm.

And also here we find, like bled carnations,
red lips that whitened, kisses drawn to lies,
that touched us once with fierce incantations
and taught us love was prettier than wise.



To the boy Elis
by Georg Trakl
translation by Michael R. Burch

Elis, when the blackbird cries from the black forest,
it announces your downfall.
Your lips sip the rock-spring's blue coolness.

Your brow sweats blood
recalling ancient myths
and dark interpretations of birds' flight.

Yet you enter the night with soft footfalls;
the ripe purple grapes hang suspended
as you wave your arms more beautifully in the blueness.

A thornbush crackles;
where now are your moonlike eyes?
How long, oh Elis, have you been dead?

A monk dips waxed fingers
into your body's hyacinth;
Our silence is a black abyss

from which sometimes a docile animal emerges
slowly lowering its heavy lids.
A black dew drips from your temples:

the lost gold of vanished stars.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: I believe that in the second stanza the blood on Elis's forehead may be a reference to the apprehensive ****** sweat of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. If my interpretation is correct, Elis hears the blackbird's cries, anticipates the danger represented by a harbinger of death, but elects to continue rather than turn back. From what I have been able to gather, the color blue had a special significance for Georg Trakl: it symbolized longing and perhaps a longing for death. The colors blue, purple and black may represent a progression toward death in the poem.



Komm, Du ("Come, You")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

This was Rilke’s last poem, written ten days before his death. He died open-eyed in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium, of leukemia and its complications. I had a friend who died of leukemia and he was burning up with fever in the end. I believe that is what Rilke was describing here: he was literally burning alive.

Come, you—the last one I acknowledge; return—
incurable pain searing this physical mesh.
As I burned in the spirit once, so now I burn
with you; meanwhile, you consume my flesh.

This wood that long resisted your embrace
now nourishes you; I surrender to your fury
as my gentleness mutates to hellish rage—
uncaged, wild, primal, mindless, outré.

Completely free, no longer future’s pawn,
I clambered up this crazy pyre of pain,
certain I’d never return—my heart’s reserves gone—
to become death’s nameless victim, purged by flame.

Now all I ever was must be denied.
I left my memories of my past elsewhere.
That life—my former life—remains outside.
Inside, I’m lost. Nobody knows me here.



This is my translation of the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Rilke began the first Duino Elegy in 1912, as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea.

First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Who, if I objected, would hear me among the angelic orders?
For if the least One pressed me intimately against its breast,
I would be lost in its infinite Immensity!
Because beauty, which we mortals can barely endure, is the beginning of terror;
we stand awed when it benignly declines to annihilate us.
Every Angel is terrifying!

And so I restrain myself, swallowing the sound of my pitiful sobbing.
For whom may we turn to, in our desire?
Not to Angels, nor to men, and already the sentient animals are aware
that we are all aliens in this metaphorical existence.
Perhaps some tree still stands on a hillside, which we can study with our ordinary vision.
Perhaps the commonplace street still remains amid man’s fealty to materiality—
the concrete items that never destabilize.
Oh, and of course there is the night: her dark currents caress our faces ...

But whom, then, do we live for?
That longed-for but mildly disappointing presence the lonely heart so desperately desires?
Is life any less difficult for lovers?
They only use each other to avoid their appointed fates!
How can you fail to comprehend?
Fling your arms’ emptiness into this space we occupy and inhale:
may birds fill the expanded air with more intimate flying!

Yes, the springtime still requires you.
Perpetually a star waits for you to recognize it.
A wave recedes toward you from the distant past,
or as you walk beneath an open window, a violin yields virginally to your ears.
All this was preordained. But how can you incorporate it? ...
Weren't you always distracted by expectations, as if every event presaged some new beloved?
(Where can you harbor, when all these enormous strange thoughts surging within you keep
you up all night, restlessly rising and falling?)

When you are full of yearning, sing of loving women, because their passions are finite;
sing of forsaken women (and how you almost envy them)
because they could love you more purely than the ones you left gratified.

Resume the unattainable exaltation; remember: the hero survives;
even his demise was merely a stepping stone toward his latest rebirth.

But spent and exhausted Nature withdraws lovers back into herself,
as if lacking the energy to recreate them.
Have you remembered Gaspara Stampa with sufficient focus—
how any abandoned girl might be inspired by her fierce example
and might ask herself, "How can I be like her?"

Shouldn't these ancient sufferings become fruitful for us?

Shouldn’t we free ourselves from the beloved,
quivering, as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that in the snap of release it soars beyond itself?
For there is nowhere else where we can remain.

Voices! Voices!

Listen, heart, as levitating saints once listened,
until the elevating call soared them heavenward;
and yet they continued kneeling, unaware, so complete was their concentration.

Not that you could endure God's voice—far from it!

But heed the wind’s voice and the ceaseless formless message of silence:
It murmurs now of the martyred young.

Whenever you attended a church in Naples or Rome,
didn't they come quietly to address you?
And didn’t an exalted inscription impress its mission upon you
recently, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa?
What they require of me is that I gently remove any appearance of injustice—
which at times slightly hinders their souls from advancing.

Of course, it is endlessly strange to no longer inhabit the earth;
to relinquish customs one barely had the time to acquire;
not to see in roses and other tokens a hopeful human future;
no longer to be oneself, cradled in infinitely caring hands;
to set aside even one's own name,
forgotten as easily as a child’s broken plaything.

How strange to no longer desire one's desires!
How strange to see meanings no longer cohere, drifting off into space.
Dying is difficult and requires retrieval before one can gradually decipher eternity.

The living all err in believing the too-sharp distinctions they create themselves.

Angels (men say) don't know whether they move among the living or the dead.
The eternal current merges all ages in its maelstrom
until the voices of both realms are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, the early-departed no longer need us:
they are weaned gently from earth's agonies and ecstasies,
as children outgrow their mothers’ *******.

But we, who need such immense mysteries,
and for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's progress—
how can we exist without them?

Is the legend of the lament for Linos meaningless—
the daring first notes of the song pierce our apathy;
then, in the interlude, when the youth, lovely as a god, has suddenly departed forever,
we experience the emptiness of the Void for the first time—
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and aids us?



Precipice
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

They will teach you to scoff at love
from the highest, windiest precipice of reason.

Do not believe them.

There is no place safe for you to fall
save into the arms of love.
save into the arms of love.



Love’s Extreme Unction
by Michael R. Burch

Lines composed during Jeremy’s first Nashville Christian football game (he played tuba), while I watched Beth watch him.

Within the intimate chapels of her eyes—
devotions, meditations, reverence.
I find in them Love’s very residence
and hearing the ardent rapture of her sighs
I prophesy beatitudes to come,
when Love like hers commands us, “All be One!”



Keywords/Tags: Rilke, elegy, elegies, angels, beauty, terror, terrifying, desire, vision, reality, heart, love, lovers, beloved, rose, saints, spirits, souls, ghosts, voices, torso, Apollo, Rodin, panther, autumn, beggar

Published as the collection "Leave Taking"

Upon the arboreal dozed and limb,
Extended coccyx serpentine loose,
Throne of inspection, tenet and dumb
Stillness hunts akin stealthy Mongoose;

Except for the natal locomotive
Soft deep sufficiently immense purr
Emanating from some industry; effective
In the cover of the thick supple fur.

The lord of his unconquered empire,
Thrives on flesh and quenches on milk,
Wintering unperturbed reading the fire
That flickers, gleaming his bed of silk.

Ever landing on appendage quadruple
Acrobatic athlete not soiling once his back
Consummating in strict concealment marble
Couch of perpetual indulgence buried black.

THE RAVE DAYS

                          THC
                          H20
   ­                       Ecstasy

       Recreational            Dreaming
       And                         And
       Very                        Yes
       Excessive                Screaming

      HAVE LEFT AN AMBIENT HAZE

        Heavenly                  Limbo
        Acidic     ­                  Elation
        Velocity                    Futuristic
        Er­ratic                       Trance

       Acrobatic                   Artificial
       Nonchalance              Manipulating
                           ­               Bass
                                          Intelligence
         ­                                 Eternal
                        ­                  Narcotic
                                      ­    Temptations
                          
                      ­    Hacienda
                          Astoria
                  ­        Zoo
                          Enclosure

standing straight at pond's edge, cattails—
brown corn dogs on ***** blonde stalks
several with cream colored bursting guts
hang below sky waiting on sail
there, a red-wing black bird clings
as Cirque du Soleil actor's acrobatic feat
trilling its own musical accompaniment

other cattails tilt triangle shapes
reflected side, angle, side complexion
over water's bottomless mirror
colored autumn, by shore's tree leaves,
mallard ducks, and brooding clouds
while black headed chickadees splash out
ripples of Impressionist pigments weave

-cec

Gaping voids attached
at velvet hems reveal
An oscillating, silky shrine
of serpentine appeal

A sacellum of spit
where crimson vipers preach
A sermon dispossessed of words
on biting without teeth

Two lithe reptilian wrestlers
in acrobatic trance
To recompose the primal theme
from the procreating dance

They sway in mirrored unison
as heaven’s gates converge
They twist in tongues of tactile prose
and gustatory tones emerge

In this bacchanal of senses
where feelings taste of spoken sights
The serpents molt beyond their essence
onto a plane of new delights

There they share a sounding vision
muscles blink in harmony
Hissing iridescent rhythms
At last, the panting cyclopes

Reach the Art

of seeing eye to whispering eye
through the instrument of speech.

The city arrives peels
of silvered bird laughter
Acrobatic chords frost
death train November in
Girl Pure Sugar and
Day of the Dead lavender

The streets are burning
The names of ghosts curl
on tortured papers

Beyond the slithering ruin of
the skull etched Yucatan
ball court
Your voice burns in my
pulse as I hunt
The jaguar

BULL   FIGHTING
(WITH A CLASSICAL TOUCH)
                  * By Raj Nandy*
(I)
The Minoan Civilization of ancient Greece,
Was well centered in the Aegean island of Crete;
And around 1600 BC this civilization had peaked!
Seeing their frescoes, and paintings on potteries
and vase,
Scholars concluded that ‘bull-jumping’ was
perfected as a gallant art!
Those jumpers grabbed the bull’s horns, -
And receiving momentum from its violent
head-****,
Vaulted over its back in a somersault,
To land on both feet to break their fall!
I was spell bound by Minoans courage and agility,
Their acrobatic feats performed with such
dexterity!
Those bulls were not killed and no blood was shed,
Some acrobats might have been injured instead!
What a shame for our bull fighters of date!

(II)
Today bull fighting has become a popular sport,
Where the bull gets slaughtered amidst loud applaud!
I recall those Roman amphitheaters that remained
jam-packed,
When the Gladiators performed their fatal acts!
But even those Gladiators had a chance to survive,
Our cornered bull has no place to hide!
Friends, to see blood is an age old thrill,
But none would like to see their own blood spilled!

(III)
Our Matador today is like a popular Rock Star,
While the bull becomes a martyr in the pit by far!
The bull’s mighty horns are sharp and strong,
Can lift up a man like a rag doll!
But when the Picador lances the bull’s ****,
The bull never gets a fair deal and jumps!
Next the Matador waves his ‘muleta’- a red cape,
The bull makes a final charge but cannot escape!
I wonder if the bull sees red!?
The Matador then amidst much pomp and applaud,
Spikes the neck severing the bull’s spinal cord!
He is greeted by flowers and cheers of ‘Ole’! ‘Ole’!
Let us learn from those Ancient Minoans, -
That's all I have got to say!
                           - by Raj Nandy

A tropical paradise island is Hawaii that conjures a feeling of sheer joy,
It’s very mention evokes thoughts of vacationing one can really enjoy,
Location-wise one can state that it is “ far from the madding crowd”,
It is like heaven on earth, meant for visitors to be wowed

Waikiki in Honolulu is the hub for most hotels with proximity to the beach,
It’s just a 16-minute cab ride from the airport and thus quick to reach,
That the closest State to Hawaii is California - a 2500-mile sector,
Just shows how travel time from elsewhere, involves jet lag to factor

Located in the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii is quintessential if one may say so,
It is the only U.S. state outside North America that is an archipelago,
As the only state geographically located in the tropics,
It is a tourist haven, with always an abundance of optics

The word "Aloha" is commonplace in signages and on everyone's lips,
As a form of greeting it implies hello and welcome - a very useful tip,
The locals are very effusive when they greet visitors with Aloha,
One cannot but express delight by silently exclaiming, Aha!

"Mahalo" is another word that visitors get used to hearing frequently,
It means "thank you" - a gracious acceptance of the locals' hospitality,
The infectious warm welcome to visitors has an air of spontaneity,
Syncing with the embracing pervasive Hawaiian culture in it's entirety

The inevitable fresh flower "lei" welcome awaits visitors checking into hotels,
Lei is a symbol of hospitality, love, respect and aloha in which Hawaii excels,
A lei made from sea shells is an alternative option that one can have by choice,
Irrespective of the form of lei offered, wearing it is surely a matter to rejoice

Honolulu is the capital of Hawaii on the island of Oahu's south shore,
It is the largest city and gateway to the U.S. island chain and much more,
As one of the main eight islands in Hawaii, Oahu is the most populous,
It is also the business hub of the Aloha State and hence very famous

Also known as "The Gathering Place", Oahu aptly lives up to it's name,
As home to the majority of Hawaii's diverse population, it has a lot to gain,
There's the fusion of East and West cultures resulting in a delicate balance,
Rooted in the value and cultures of Native Hawaiian people, with no imbalance

The popular bustling and vibrant Waikiki neighborhood within Honolulu city is unique,
It is the epicenter for eclectic restaurants, nightlife and designer fashion boutiques,
Waikiki is also reputed for its white sandy beach that is a whole 2-mile stretch,
Where visitors throng throughout the day, as if there's little else the mind can fetch

Waikiki in Hawaiin means "spouting waters" and is replete with a gamut of water activities,
Surfing, snorkeling, swimming, canoe paddling and boogie boarding are typical beach proclivities,
With matching stunning views of the landscape, visitors can be seen lazing in total relaxation,
It is little wonder that the beach is always crowded and a famed getaway vacation destination

Friday night fireworks by Hilton Hawaiian Village along Waikiki Beach is a must-watch attraction,
The colorful display evoking delightful oohs and aahs from onlookers though, is of short duration,
The razzle-dazzle of the show skillfully transmits joy & happiness through the art of pyrotechniqes,
A feeling of bliss envelops one and all, on witnessing the sound-and-light show marvel mystique

Dole Whip is a popular non-dairy pineapple ice cream and, in Hawaii, is a cult-status confection,
A key ingredient is unsweetened coconut milk that adds creaminess and flavor to the selection,
Fresh lime bumps up the flavor and adds extra zing to the taste of the final Dole Soft Serve swirl,
Savoring the heavenly refreshing unique taste allows the hedonist's squeal of delight to unfurl

A visit to Oahu or any other Hawaii island is never complete without attending a traditional luau,
Luau represents a gathering meal of food, music and dance and is integral with Polynesian milieu,
It is a party like no other with continuous foot-tapping live music accompanied by Hawaiin dancing acts,
While the compere regales guests with anecdotes of Polynesian traditions laced with interesting facts

Hawaii is also famous for it's sensuous mimetic hula dance - traditionally, a form of communication,
Ancient hula, or "kahiko" with undulating gestures to instruments and chant was an original creation,
Transformed under Western influence to "auana", it now involves sinuous movement of limbs and hips,
The accompanying peppy music involves storytelling or place description well in tune with the scripts

The fitting finale to Hawaii luauas is generally the famed Samoan fire knife ceremonial dance,
A knife, partially exposed & wrapped in oil-soaked cloth is set alight for the performer's stance,
Incredible acrobatic stunts involve twirling, tossing and catching the knife to the fast beat of music,
The appreciative response of the audience builds up the momentum, reaching a crescendo almost seismic

Sauntering in the beach, one can watch people meandering about with gay abandon,
The inescapable feeling of blissful relaxation is typical of a destination-Hawaii vacation,
The days fly by, making you wish at the end that the stay could have been a tad longer,
While treasuring joyful memories in the interim, your thoughts go to similar places yonder

i must be some sort of permanently exhausted pigeon;
claws clinging to the telephone wire
drearily blinking my way through
the morning meeting of the aerial acrobatic society.

i am a seagull swarmed
amongst the chirpy conjecture
of these early birds;
and my soul caws an honesty,
a wail, a howl, the truth.

i am a tainted swan
grittily paddling myself through the marsh
we call this world,
a lone observer of the acrobats,
the stickiness of my feet keeping me
flightless.

and you are a swallow;
redbull wings migrate you to warmer climates.
you hear the seagulls
but listen to the pigeons.
you notice the swan
but her murky shallows are too icy
for your liking.

and you are a chicken;
blind beyond your own free-range vicinity.
you catch the pigeons as jet planes,
and the seagull's whisper is alien.
you don't know miss swan.

Can't you feel my screaming heart?
I feel all yours and it's unbearable
To know everyone's intention may seem ineffable
Though my passion is emotion and empathy my art

Dwelling silent in a crowded room
To the right a pursuit of lust
And my left a lack of trust
Empty grins with their facade and doom

Another item has been stolen
My peers in an unknowing uproar
I see the culprits guilt pour
From his weary eye and coven

The ***** swoons the love of an unworthy patron
She gazes at me with a tempting question
Attempting to construct my envy and affection
My will is stronger than that seducing notion

The lonely man makes a joking inquisition
All the rest see it as a laughable gesture
I look with sad eyes to see his slouching posture
He wants to die in his pathetic position

The muscle bound dunce smacks his lips
Glorified as the acrobatic conversationalist
Strapped men in shackles and girls can't resist
His compensated shortage of yays and yips

A quiet smile looks on with a perfect mask
Playing pretend with an inglorious burden
Faking a life inside of her chaotic garden
Of hollow theatrics in which she basks

There goes the lad with his flippy hair
The little ladies want a picture with the fellow
Oh you're so rad the flocking lasses bellow
And, you wonder why I don't seem to care?

Upon the arboreal dozed and limb,
Extended coccyx serpentine loose,
Throne of inspection, tenet and dumb
Stillness hunts akin stealthy Mongoose;

Except for the natal locomotive
Soft deep sufficiently immense purr
Emanating from some industry; effective
In the cover of the thick supple fur.

The lord of his unconquered empire,
Thrives on flesh and quenches on milk,
Wintering unperturbed reading the fire
That flickers, gleaming his bed of silk.

Ever landing on appendage quadruple
Acrobatic athlete not soiling once his back
Consummating in strict concealment marble
Couch of perpetual indulgence buried black

They leave Jerusalem, with the acrobats from Shiraz. They were ghosts of poetry, wine, roses and fireflies; they were conjuring the path of the twelve camels to the intersection with the Cenotaph, where King David with the Cherubs of Kafersesuh will stay. They were Epi ghosts, basking in camelid footsteps. They went in all the intermittences of the bent nails and plants of the areas of the marquee of the other four ghosts that accompanied him. They were the jumpers with water wheels, wheel scales with tutelary cords, some with stilts of gold disgrace from the coins of Judas Iscariot and the last propelled by a caper that ruled all the others on the wings of the Fireflies. Withdrawn from the road that leads to the Kidron valley, 2,500 years of clay tablets from Persepolis fall on all of them, they were phonetized with the plaintive nightmare of Tirazis's one-eyed poem; which is currently Shiraz, in this way these ghosts escorted the Hexagonal Birthright, they were exiled from their ghostly cities for not paying the tribute of obedience to destroy and rebuild. As they began to be with them in the cove, the ghosts of the acrobats boiled with the eagerness to prevent everyone from being saddened by the departure from the orchard, which was falling further and further behind their footsteps, dancing with their pirouettes along the way, they told little stories. in the ears of travelers.

Hydro Saltimabanqui: “I come from Roknabad (also known as Aub-e Rokní), an underground canal that carries spring water to the city from a mountain located ten kilometers northeast of Shiraz. Here I have to mend the propellers and water ropes to do my acrobatics on the water, with greater songs in the poems of the Poet Hafiz. When we bite our tongues, we repair it with Hafiz's verses from the Koran; there are three hundred creeds, three hundred hectares to irrigate with my wheel the sadness of those who cannot have the gift of the rivalry of Montenegro and Monteblanco, to overestimate the liveliness of the caravan trembling with uncertain doubts on its way to Jaffa. "

Saltimbanqui of Bacule: "We are Epi ghosts, the reverie with tutelary ropes, to jump through the trapeze of the photometric units of the heavy Almería of the highest Mirror of the Sea. Here we look; from here we will board the barge that will take them from back to Limassol. Curiously, the same ship from Lepanto that sleeps in the swings of the sea and in the arms of Anaximander, in a new awakening from the lethargy of the super-string theorization, here is the intrinsic speculation of science, since this is not just to research purely empirical. "

Says Anaximander: “First…, we have no proof that string theory is not ultimately correct and in the future in any verifiable way. Second, we propose a project of the order of string theory, which is necessary for science and its importance, going even beyond the scientific to also project itself on the metaphysical and the religious, right here in this order of greater what to do together with the rope that leads me to Patmos.

Saltimabanqui of Bascule responds: “metaphysical and religious legitimacy, here we are tying knots in the rope that inaugurates a new masonry in the observable futuristic look. Here is the original fiction of continuing to raise the necks of the ants over our optics. We will jump on these ropes, but we will fall on intervals of placental physical dens, which were born from the new embryo in the twelve caves of Gethsemane, in a primitive late germinal process. The micro phonetic vibrations will lift us up from the hunger to follow and leave King David in his cenotaph, gored on his hips by the Cherubim, marking his holy antlers that become entangled in the blunting of the cuneiform scratches of his epigram.

In the middle of the magical theorists exotically as associativity of substance causally of the poetic and multiverse song, believing in the ghosts of Shiraz, as dreams injected to sublimate the Aeneids that they lamented on the bottom stones, even though they were independent of their material origin. Multi universes, multi paraphrase for who has to dress the word “Rosa in her noble long dress to the cliff of Ebdara when Vernarth acclaims his brother Etréstles, he comes with the Auriga from Messolonghi. Rested and determined to head to Tel Gomel, he comes with his horse Kanti to keep him company on this crusade. Kanti defied the Cliffs of Crete, he was servile to Markos Botsaris, 1821 (Royal Hero of the Liberation of Greece in the Turkish Invasion, Koumeterium Messolonghi - Palibrio USA), until in the afternoon he approached from a herd of beautiful places of steeds to him. This was heard by Etréstles and he seized His horse to have more than a Life from his company, more than a lost and lost aroma of his natural mother, to reach the one who would treasure it”.

The ghosts attribute quantitative passages from before leaving King David, and then continuing on the road to Jaffa and advancing on the ship back to Cyprus; Limassol. All were hyperkinetic bowls leveraged by the terrain that was on the **** of the acrobatic histrion foreshadowing the contours of the temporal filigree, which in each one made them smile at the carriage with oxidizing wheels, still being immaterial beings, but alive in its marvel gases, wading the serious bile that emerged from the glasses in his allegories. His footsteps and his undulating phonetic figures did not stop over the caravan, which had already passed Jerusalem. They were already undaunted by themselves and overshadowed by the foreboding modulation and encryption of the rehearsals they were doing, over the heavy atmosphere that seized and begged a small piece of the attention of those who did not celebrate their Shiraz pirouettes.
The areas, volumes, and lengths were fully encompassed by the Ghosts of Shiraz, the acrobats ran along the banks of Ramallah, it was already winter, the city received them with winds and rains from the southwest alternating with cold and dry winds from the northeast. The acrobats went like master geometricians to condone the fuss of the caravan, devising a dodexagesimal system. (Twelve centuries of ultra-nocturnal geometry and shipwrecks at the Alexandria lighthouse)

Positioning as a base the number 12, to measure times and angles that they needed to avoid the voluminous rains that hit the caravan.  Incredibly, the volumetric position of the plantar legs of the camels seemed like wheels that rotated without stopping in any anti circumferential radius, making some clouds a shutter that enclosed them like a trapezoid of God's flock in the high semicircle of the waters that tried to fall. , like axiomatic staves of Euclid's beard tempering his elemental construct.

The linear position of each one of those who were mounted was a perfect ergonometric based on the Muladhara pressing the four red petals on pressing the Achilles heel of Vernarth, which was dimensioning the Ramallah triangulation, with the fungi that were housed in its Xifos sword in the jet tip that carried the dodexagesimal cartography. In the same position, the Apostle Saint John seemed, he carried the rosary in his left hand in geometry that elongated his nose and feet in an adonis triangle, thirsty for one hundred and twenty degrees of the sextant that broadened its spectrum to align with this Birthright. Thus the stars and planets are positioned as celestial spheres with the gravitation of the Olivos Berna, revolutionizing curved and flat equations that intuited to go beyond the crossed pirouettes that the acrobats did all the way, even further than those of the withered path of oil, purposely of the axiomatic systems that the Ghosts of Shiraz intended to establish.

Shiraz  Ghosts

These Persian Epi ghosts, axiomatized abstract and ideal entities relating models of austerity and lyricism, which fluctuated in the lines and planes of movements of the clouds with the counterpoint of the legs of the Gigas, leaving marks in the sand like a point Morse, straight and flat, until the fifth step that tried to cross the lines of Ramallah, for the parallelism that the centuries that asked Vernarth to reorder the geometric geography of time and the positions that were added as a delay effect in the Garden, essentially of a hyperbolic vision, to appropriate the entities of the Ghosts that grasp with their little finger the strings of the times associated with Gaugamela in his palatial sovereignty with the footsteps of Vernarth and in the phylogeny of a world that is born behind the confines of religious micro- genetics , from whose space is born in another and would accommodate a circular bijective function, to attract the aerosisms of Ein Kerem in the new life signs of J Joshua in the reborn One-dimensional Beams.

Vernarth diluted his bones to sit near the tarsus and accommodate it at the end of the vertebra of the Muladhara (Chakra of 4 petals), making a sub-technical geometric function to preserve the figures of darkness that were also diluted, to arrive at night close to of Jaffa, in the surroundings the isometric fire existing in each one and in two dimensions…, but born of a common one. Raeder and Petrobus wore their floating eyelashes full of dusty and dense manias on their faces, with splinters gum that they had released from one of the pirouettes of one of the mountebanks when colliding with the basic postulates of the Ghosts of Shiraz, deducing undulating spaces like snakes within the isometric fire that dazzled them with the burning senses of humor of the last drops of the Shemesh codifying themselves in an absolute intuitive measure, beyond all dimensions, which is Consciousness destroying the planes and spaces that multiplied among themselves as members of another geometric conscious dimension.

Arriving at the Ben Shemen crossing, everyone undergoes collective hypnosis; the ghosts manage to embody each of the components of the Birthright but omitting a great factor. They relegated the Hexagonality of the genetics of this caravan, not raising the ghosts when calculating the area of once they were being intracorporeal within the members, thus having to abandon before the last ray of Shemesh threw them on their faces ashes of the Gehenna, for this supposed reason to leave them condemned to recycle the human species, for the purpose of reproducing sacred human beings, but being subservient to the cravings beyond the immortality of the miscalculation that led them to the citadel of Karim Khan, surprised with its stamp of thick stone walls and circular towers in the heart of Shiraz. This gave them a warrior aspect contrary to their fame and history: this was a city famous for two thousand years for its culture, with its gardens and its poets, now if in a conspiracy by this beautiful odalisque ruse that attracted the guide of the ecstatic ghosts, in a bad moment of extradition to a bad context of epi ghosts not yet defined in their pockets of apprentices boasting on the laurels of weak and doubtful ideas, which still swarmed within his white heart, trying to reach Vernarth's as former commander Hetairoi, now a servile mystic. In such a way, the complicated as ghosts like "Sufi", being, in reality, the genetic soul of the double ax that carries the double edge of today ..., of the sacrament of Medea in Abdera.

Pro says a ghost from Shiraz (embarrassed):

"The Universe is a sea that longs for dry shores,
without sea and without other wet longings ...,
no possible maiden could
Try to dry it with your star hands ...
Who calms the crying of the Universe ...
even so ..., simile remains floating as a verse between his dreams "

"How can I make my dreams another dimension of the universe?
if he is quiet and does not make me float in his sea ...
How can I make it possible for the tips of its stars
fill the spaces that have revealed it ...
and that have made circular shores without a sea in the mists "

"I walk alone and nobody sees me ...
so I don't wake up the candles that smile and accompany me ...
between days that turn into mornings on the shore
of the solitude of the universe, that nobody embraces him ... "

“Now the days tremble from almost falling on themselves,
They come out alive from their own loneliness of exhaustion and fullness ...of whoever appreciates them in the mists ...
being able to surrender their attention in Ben Shemen ”.
As the Ghost of Shiraz expires in Ben Shemen, he escapes all for nothing in the triad of hypnotizing conventions that still resided in the shameless air that engulfed him, all over the stationary enclosures of the entertainment spaces caused by the acrobats and epi ghosts. That seduced the indecisive beings that sailed over the limbs that made them doubt where to refrain from continuing, outside the radius of the caravan or beyond the skies that did not cease to be in good spirits, of the universe passing through the white hearts, six on the inside and six on the outside in their traveling artist folds.

The lands that are accommodated by the time of parapsychological hypnosis tremble again, as a separation from the physical magnitude of Gethsemane.  Creating a sequence that bends the heads of the ghosts, filling their translucent physiognomies between a cold past and a frozen future, from a classic mechanic, which from now on would depend on the dice thrown by the Third Phantasm of time. Here a relativism would be opened to those who want to see the past in the orchard in an unstable particulate present, leaving far from splitting both parts of the archetype of today, like a subdivided clash of several times that allowed integrating the remaining phantasmagorical spectra, taking over a story on a pluriaxial axis that prevailed in the time of a supposed numerical line from a vector, aligning itself towards the compass of the distance that shines between both northern hemispheres in the minutes that go to the right and the solid-gas seconds that burst almost in the walls of their own liberated beings. The four ghosts of Shiraz, had time differentials before this event with the caravan, verifying the simultaneous prop between the two pairs of ghosts between four dissimilar, but poetic ones that made them here at this point obviate and cancel between two relative nomenclatures of physical structure. The durability and classification of these micro-times of the phantom epi would make the database that St. John the Apostle and Vernarth will accumulate with their eyes closed, each one surpassing himself from the debatable areas, which concern to estimate in occupying the spaces physical in some of them at will so that one of them could embark to Limassol. This simultaneous and relativistic multi-active line, encloses events and squares of spaces in the cinematographic time of the parapsychological regression, as a link of physical images slowed down in the evolutionary and cognitive memory, passing from the conduit of expectation memorization events towards the set of absolute figures. not pigeonholed, but approaching the universe in grasping scales of those who value them. This elucidates even the very conception of conceiving oneself as a ghost, rather in what is called "Epi Ghosts", of absolute belonging of the identical ..., outside of oneself "Being with them and not, as a tacit phase of a dragged story with the seconds that were not lived ... "

This scaling conception will allow them to reside a few millimeters from the consciences of the caravan that was advancing automated along the tracks that already made time and distance in front of the absolute, in a jiffy, having in their faces Rizhon Lezion, who was made of images more than a marked and concrete story in a mechanics that kept the body as part of a large volume in all, to the rhythm of the plantar areas of the Camels Gigas, dividing as a stream of water that would flow fragmented between past, present and future, but as a starting pattern to the future as the only "today" for the time of the times. This unified three-dimensionality would mark the mathematical space of the attempts towards the future of the contiguous camelids of the ghosts of Shiraz, for the ownership of time between all with a single identity that cries out for the univocal will to rearm, even if the winds are very strong. Of the partition,  which separates the world from God and the believing observer into the future with a believer from a historical past in obscurantism, leaving and entering a new world whose notion is to spend connected and bound in a systematization dependent on the great causes, although the static feels isolated from the dynamics, inquiring probative to unite between the ghosts and others, even though they are inferior forces under the line of the generous gaze and the parallelism of the attentive spectator, which suggests more openness to receive and delegate the circumstances of all physical, emotional, spectral and mental-spiritual dimensions, flexing the emotional states hierarchical night and day. Everyone falls asleep hugging on cushions of lamb saddlebags, making it possible to get closer to them too, close to the Ghosts and sleep next to them hugging with the decanted strength of the frames that hang from their faces showing the emotion of being favorite children of the Mashiach, absorbed in the Kidron Valley.

The frontier of the future will be the pre-act of not traveling too much of the physical love to the touch that only awaits the love of the sleeping of a Cherub, this may occur when the sheep climb the hill of our consciences, and manage to be perceived as the simultaneous harness of satisfaction, who lack the vision that would speak to them of a past belonging immobile, to this ethereal topology that will have to biodegrade the molecules of the seconds that sleep in the sheep-man wool saddlebags, at a higher speed than it would last to go back near from the palisade, where it crosses the path to the immemorial arcades of the Mashiach, spinning around all creation at a speed that determines a verse in its soul around the orthogonal of Shemesh, quadrupled and cloistered in its self-consciousness scattered like iceberg down the back in the submissive thoughts that long to be tied to more precious time.

Our lord has us more tied to an absolutist past and future, looking at his calendar divided in such a way that it always fits the day that hurts the shadows of a sharp past, so that it always smiles in us, as the best luminous sign, of whom and with whom to repair the damage of various wounds that travel through the times of time, always wounded, to and from the borders of an anachronistic past. The ghosts, always fast tetra, marginalize themselves to the sound of greater diligence, they fled in Rizhon Lezion, to wake up a little further away from the rays of the stationary Sun, which from now on always surfaced in the degraded dark circles of the mountebank, prowling around the festivities of who knows how to wait, to make a toast under the pretext of faith and hope that exempts the cardinal turned into a flower in white attire.

Shvil from the Angels

The fast epi phantom tetra was emaciated, they lost their north and since they could not walk, they were not energized by the radiosities of the earth, which dominates those who lend divine graces if their feet rested on the tapestry of those who threw their footsteps in winter already near Jaffa. The Shvil Angels were angels that were on the route that cordoned off the pilgrimage of Vernarth and Saint John the Apostle, they were full of flowering Berne Olive Trees that made trunks of floral arches at the entrance of this ancient port. They were three when they walked, they were always distributed so fast that they seemed to be six, but they ended up averaging the quantum of three for each of the components of the Birthright, which from today would be the great circumcision event of the Universe, to make it part of those who one day will have to caulk the rhombuses of the fragmented light beams on the path of heaven so high, in the name of the phrases that never tire of looking at the incautious years that are of our father by the exogalaxies in the total company of the invisibility and relativity of cautious time.

This Semitic seashore beauty indicates and invites us to reach its salty Hebrew waters of Yofi, reinforcing the phonetics that runs madly through the border hills with its heart in hand, when foreigners appear in the name of plausive phylogeny. That brings him a piece of bearable land from the Universal Flood, this is why the ancient Canaanites have to receive them with the table set, to entertain them with winter flowers in Jaffa. The Hellenistic tradition relates the name to Iopeia, which is Cassiopeia herself, mother of Andromeda. After Pliny the Elder the name is connected with Joppa, who was the daughter of ******, god of the wind. Where Vernarth locked his Aspis Skolié shield so that it would shine in the bilges of the Eurydice, under the pentagon’s of the bronze layer of his shield, every time he approached the Dodecanese when the Auriga descended from Andromeda on the back of a punished rower by the storms taking him away from his mother galaxy.

Thousands of years BC Its merchants glorified themselves with their baskets full of belongings and merchandise, for its inhabitants, who today pretended to be pharaohs who paid tribute to the marine corners through the coast that today seemed to open up with more new waters that were reborn from the capering of the swells, founding thus the omens of embarking to attempt and submit to the omens of sovereignty between Judah and the Hellenic lands, to work with noble trees in their armories and utensils, of which they played an honorable part after the maintenance of the emblem of the last portion, of the shaft of the libertarian triumph of Alexander the Great over the Phoenicians in Tire. In the New Testament, it is related how Peter resurrected the believer Tabitha (Dorcas, in Greek, gazelle) in Joppa (Jaffa) and, later, how near this city he has a vision in which Yahweh told him that he should not distinguish between Jews and Gentiles while ordering the removal of ritual (kosher) food restrictions followed by Jews.

The Shvil of the angels distanced themselves from the desire of this station without reaching them and not making them drink salty water from Jaffa, therefore they resorted to Petrobus who a few meters before reaching the port, summoned a large number of Dodecanese Pelicans who were waiting in great celestial flocks, which hovered happily above the sky welcoming them. The pelicans levitate from a risky juggling act, over the caravan and headed to the high seas, collecting saltwater, then they went along the initiation path of Shvil and reconvert the saltwater into sweet with hazelnuts so that they would have holy water, to insolate it and pour it into the canteens of the temple guards of the Canaanites who were waiting for them, to distract them, making them believe they were other Syriac lands such as those of Ashera, which in this act, perhaps it would be good for them to sponsor the Hexagonal Birthright.

But the paths of the angels have confederated before the noisy crowds and Ptolemaic lemurs, who were incorporated into the empty spaces that remained. Faced with this gravesite, Vernarth shouted to the sky with the force of Falangist tradition to himself, and acclaimed heaven, for the sake of freeing them from their definitive income to Jaffa, summoning the Hypatists; elite warriors and spearmen, for them to gather at the portal of the ante entrance of Jaffa, for others who never came from nowhere and nowhere, only blocking it from its perfect plan of memorial and theological heritage conservation, upon return from the exit Judah, to embark with destiny through the sulphurous point that  will boil them in temporary waters, towards the Cyclades and then the Dodecanese, triumphing in inhabiting them wherever whoever was and whoever arrived with foreign promise.

As dusk falls in its first nubile shadows, the  Shvil presents itself to you with these three angels dressed in ivory white, each with a book in each hand and in the other a candelabrum, giving signs of ultra-interpretive catechesis, allying with silica. In combination, after the vision of the charms of the knowledge spread. Earth and sky in the second angel, washing the Semitic dew of anguished Jaffa, with teachings of sleeping well and awakening, to walk in the lands that want to seize the senses, of those who are called not to be oppressed, behind the bars of the Morbid and illiterate pan-vision of the angles of hasty entertainment of the angels when they were called by the Angel Regent, simply relaying information easy to carry to their hearts, in faint powers and poetic lessons, before falling into a thorny forest, burning their tongues in furrows of afflicted human positions, to later redeem them fervently with the judicious power of God.

Vernarth, is distressed by matters of seeing them so tender and so fragile, allowing them to crawl toward him gently. Finally, on these three rules of the Shvil, Hanael introduces herself; "Speaking of hindrances stuck in the literary cabal of grateful compliments for all".   Alluding to Vernarth, a subject desensitized and also distant from any Sub Yóguica disciplinary doctrine. This led him to stand behind San Juan, protecting himself and scared of everything around him, he was seeing in front of him, on the upper left side itself, that Zebedeo was, San Juan's own father calling him!

Saint John the Apostle says: “Justice, at this time, allows us to alleviate ignorance, if the riddles allow us only to look for the answer, God will not be here…, it will only be emotional catharsis, through a merely ideological  Shvil or passage, which moves our meaningless sentences, definitely leading us to the coffers that rearm one after one, after the mistake. We are faithfully interpreted by them, but we detest our regencies with the Escaton, when we all pretend to follow his light of thunderous density towards the sky, prophesying to follow him without losing ourselves in him ..., held on his shoulder glossary. On the claws that are released from the dazed angelic prey, correcting its wavering vision, unraveling the living presence of condemnations or salvation, in Eden with your bare feet or in hell with no departure time”

Inexplicably, some Praetorian soldiers of Domitian appear, who would be restricting the departure of the tretacontero to Limassol, curiously they were the same ghosts from Shiraz that continued to represent such a bad event, just as when he was expelled to Patmos by Domitian in 95 BC, in size was the scandal that the Shvil angels produced with their impractical ideologies, who opposed such spectral imagery, in such a way that they replaced their figure with that of another Hellenic man who wanted to embark for Patmos, the other members were fully incorporated to the ship, which frolicked on the pranks as it proudly carried them to a new ocean. Around the last drops that jumped in Jaffa on the coastal rocks, others appeared when the last divided and scattered drops were going to shine the navigation temples, thus it is possible to board in the same ship that brought the principle from Limassol to Judah that transited from Lepanto.

The chapel of ministers reappears offering a ceremony, which would return the messianic remora to the Angels of Shiraz, to return to their former positions within the paths of biblical characters, who tend to commit adultery in the game of loss of consciousness of the Escaton, probably requiring that everyone have to make pilgrimage routes for all humanity secluded and liberated by themselves. The Saltimbanqui finally manage to jump into the boat to sail to the Dodecanese, but the Shvil of the Angels stayed where other celebrities will require them to reroute the Shvil Escaton.

all i'm saying is that the tetragrammaton was lying about in full view, an umbrella on the train; the tetragrammaton was just there for the taking, in english... and no jew noticed it, or picked it up.

poetic proliferance comes at a price designated the role
of anti-oratory - imagination and memory
are scattered narratives, thought the prime of the three,
an animal is bombarded  with sensual impressions,
a feline pet is the ultimate unit of fighting against
this constant bombardment  of sensual impressions,
before us, the ultimate leisure  activity, albeit without us
actual engaging in it personally; we created such utensils
as memory and imagination to counter-act the vacuum
of unnecessarily narrating a sunset and a sunrise, a comet's
flight. pro life interference - a snake shedding its skin, e.g.
non-oratory, even anti, poetry for bookshelves, for dust,
migraines, moths and bookworm larvae;
for shrapnel ego... for stances in aesthetics like:
run DMC's *it's like that, countered
with... 'and i thought disco polo was bad.'
cheap thrills, scribbles on toilet paper,
marquis de sade made an inkwell from
his wrist, blood on white:
Boabdil gives the Granada key to Ferdinand and Isabella
v. kazimir MALEVICH's red square,
                                painterly realism of a peasant woman
in two dimension -
a Faustian gamble... mental retardation...
no curly curves on pillars, no mention
of Pompeii... mythical Atlantis with its sea-monkeys
agile in water but hardly acrobatic on earth
(exceptions due to Russian Lolitas)...
no regime, no rigour, too much jealousy surrounding
the Renaissance art-schools, jealousy, greed,
fat parasites invoking their name, say, Raphael
as useful as the noun tree, hammer, ship tried to be...
hell the mad dog without a KA GA NIEC
and off the leash... you really can't expect more
abstracts... but art follows science,
what with anti-matter, subatomic particles,
art will see less beauty and science more complications,
both will be working on abstracts...
enter the art critics with their narratives...
also due to the fact that calculators replaced our
natural ability to process arithmetically...
hence a lost technique of arithmetic and a more
sensual engagement in the motto: precipitating
toward a MALEVICH black cross, black square etc.
was the art movement cubism - unravelling
the cube post-scriptum in it all... *******
this ultra-modern fascination with Python-gruesome-oraz
(oraz translated as: also) -
come the critics and their narratives
of triangles without a thinking-do-d'ah suggesting
trigonometry or a squared + b squared
equates to c square (or a hypotenuse...
likewise with hippopotamus i'm dyslexic to mind the
matter too much... honest to god,
i'm dyslexic with certain words - mainly because
it's hardly a scene in a pub: 'pint of ale my good man'),
and added to the chaos of lack of diacritic
in english, you tend to be chaotic with punctuation,
and the words stemming from the latin
æ grapheme (graphite, the tertiary carbon representation)
simply coagulate into a rancid custard of
non-differential puzzles via sūdoku - now repeat
after me, the sharp Japanese HI! sù doku!
HI! HI! well, aye, but it's sùdoku! HI! HI!
si sense... and there's the roundabout.
i'm probably the first poet of darwinism,
i got a blank in my head and i just allow the poem
to evolve... why sù and not sú?
you aim to repress, insert a quasi pause, stress
the would be associated categorisation of sù
as prefix... the doku comes as an suffix -
in culinary terms that's representative of
a hunchback leaning over a *** of sauce and
invoking a movement, a whiffing to get the scents
ticking the nostril fibres - wave in, entice - so indeed
the Japanese punctuation omitted in universal
encoding: - (the hyphen), the sharp impromptu
HI! (HIGH... *******, they're one and the same!)
sùdoku hin ji roo shika! that's samurai for:
i said sharpen my samurai sword like a mathematical
rubric of the 2 times table: 2 x 1, 2 x 2, 2 x 3... etc.

ząb... or tooth... zęby... or teeth... the lesser Ezra in me is more bewildered by the non-existent strain of either vowels or consonants in English, than the Chinese ideogram... i agree: you must have an idea when reading Chinese, and a population of over a billion... and subsequently a well-known linguistic complexity, a thrice-over Chinese wall in the eye and off the tongue, to later precipitate into an ease in making the mathematic tongue acrobatic... but then have no theoretic procession to study the complexity, or hear a xylophone... i'm the membrane mid-way between burying the Latin anecdote Beijing... and asking to kiss the hand of Marco Polo... had he wrote the Quran... i'm just simply juiced for one reason, this is my take on the corner-stone rejected... ******* the crucifix, and tickling the feet of the crucified one... as anti-jew as i can be... well: volk zu γoλγoθα... or volk zu γoλγoφα... compass! mein kompaß! alter: volk zu ßιναι! oh look... quantum physics... it behaves gleiche y = w, ~i, >ł.... and into a p.s., as γ = Υ (upsilon contra gamma)... once more, the lesser Ezra in me is bored with the Chinese ideogram, it's translated plain and simple, perfécto arithmetic! and the billion-strong populace... applause to the Chinese politicians... democracy as an pure English export is not wanted... it's decadent, and ripe for only decay... please, god or yoga no... we can do without it! this is the lesser Pound... i could be fascinated with the Chinese ideogram, but i'm frankly occupied with addressing the English encryption.... mind you, that translates as: you missed a spot... and they did keep their language so diacritic-free in order to form the global empire... which can only mean that mad geniuses and other akin stipend students will ever appreciate... but my fascination with diacritical marks, or their lack, is akin to Ezra Sr.'s fascination with the complexity of the Chinese ideogram, or rather the syllable form of not enraging the trinity, therefore concise, xi (ξ), chi (χ), chow (χω) mein (μεjn / μει - gagging ιota: main... mejn... replaced by additional curvature of j), kfu mang thu! kuchi kuchi, kat(h)mandu.. gucci gucci... rattler... or pinky on the black key in a piano concerto... the odd number... thus the english siamese of i and j, the only letters with diacritical marks, beginning with ιota being the one under-dressed... and they are indeed there, for clear syllable intake, as a way to pave for the architecture of punctuation, and what could be later described in the real world, as a punctured rubber tire, or a sewing technique, in the guise of tartan to a cayleigh whirl / orthodox scot that's: ceilidh... ****** me, god's a pauper, leaving him out in the cold of nonsense when man just asks for kejl i, p.s. dogged out hound harking grammaton, and some random number outside of tetra.

pst! look in the woods! you might find him there!
music always overpowered my
need for women, i always found music to
be antidote
  to ensure women exist -
               dunno, dough]nut -
or dunno, it just happened...
      CENSOR MR. CENSOR!
HELLO?!
                  LOSER. HTML
IS INFECTED.... now i'll come off as paranoid...
    but then i am typing in paradox
  land...
                my keyboard is ******...
a case of etymology... *wargi - and
pysk - or usta, and buzia -
one's kiss kiss,
      Tarkan style...
  but i wonder why when i listen to
  in extremo's rotes haar...
i imagine dwarfs dancing,
        but then the prancing pony of
hedningarna's vargtimmen -
       which might    
mean *******, but
then it might mean something
in Finnish... vargtimmen: meaning: close your lips...
in Finnish; so bound to the word trim...
trim your lips.
even though the people didn't move,
a lot of ******* children made Poland their
home... for example wargi, which
means usta... add a p to usta
and you'll end up saying: she's empty, barren.
no wonder the transgender movement
occurred in english... words have no
feminity or masculinity... so ***...
they're asexual, apathetic...
   a male can't own a table
in the Freudian sense of signifying a phallus...
stupid me blaming St. Thomas' gospel,
when the problem lay within the realm of per se...
       i have to add: it's a bit foggy where i'm right
now... and my html is a bit bonkers...
     but it still stands as Finnish and Polish
versus English non-mythical when sniffing
the **** crack of America...
          fog ought to be enough, apparently it isn't,
you need to care to
economise and work to an ethic of working
so hard throughout the year for a 2 week holiday,
   and then end up throwing away your food produce
and then feel irritated by a homeless person...
   so yeah... you're grand!
          i mean i am...
the we is automatically bewildered...
i couldn't pet a woman, women are much more
than cats, and i pet two cats and hate them...
     not having women means i am resistible...
if i were irresistible i'd be insane...
      the magnetism of prefix convergence...
   re- means again, not against...
   and in- can also mean a-,
          every time i speak the scandi tongue
like i might found saying the lazy way an english
man says ****-,
               i feel like jumping up and down...
hed- -nin- -garna!
      hey hey **! jump you mo fo!
                     and i live in england and i care to
take to escaping english, that's really messed up...
i can't listen to the tongue... a bit like my russian
girlfriend said to me: Polish is just static,
sh sh sh sh ch ch ch ch... i mean, the best
***** in the universe are done by the people that
really hate your ethnicity,
they love you as a person, and the person they
love to ****, but then the collective unconscious
comes along, and they say the most horrid
things in between the orchestra of vowels during
the ******... babe, you drowning? i know
i am.
            if a yiddish man would come along,
he'd write yzwz... because that's how h became
z in the grapheme sz and ch...
                 and paradoxically: it's not the smallest
sound... and if the Latin grapheme continued its
existence... and was regarded as the smallest
linguistic unit, it has to mean that
    two names converged... it means that
the coliseum will overpower the church...
   which means that the Latin man had names for
his letters... and it was never all about music
and castratos... it was never a simple a when
the Greek said alpha, or it was never as simple
a b when the greek said beta...
vargtimmen! purse yer lips! ye gods, pout!
  duck-alliances throughout!
   yack yack yack... quack... ******* ponces
and narcissistic nuances...
yes, when w = v = w = ł -
               when it is meant to invoke the ugly duckling,
and a swan, and a łabądz -
my soul is already Scandinavian bound...
  like Frankenstein's Jr., to the fog, the snow, the frost...
      if Spinoza is the prince, then i'm the king,
the tetragrammaton just drops out like
a birth of an antelope - it just drops out of language,
but it only drops out, once you have used
a language associated with diacritical marks...
knowing solely English or Russian Cyrillic won't
help you... it really does just drop out from
the ****** of nothing like an antelope on the savannah
plain... but given there's no diacritical
distinction in it... being born into a language that
uses diacritical markings to ensure there are
distinctions, makes studying the tetragrammaton
all the more fascinating...
English uses no diacritical marks, neither does Cyrillic...
the Greeks are cosmos (polish slang reference
to them being on l.s.d.) with their niqab of
diacritical usage when English Latin remains
slap-stick naked... come on! put on a ******* bow-tie
that might be at least the french acute over
e!         éh?!           knowing the lazy sod, he won't!
but such is the joy of experiencing etymology
with music... to associate
vargtimmen... a Finnish compound word,
with the English word trim...
         or the word dimmed...
           and the Polish clear-denotative word
for lips... i.e. wargi... or usta...
  timmen might also mean: to bite...
  warga is the singular of wargi, i.e. bottom lip,
    to bite the bottom lip...
            does the music in hedningarna's expression
say much? no it doesn't...
   poetry can be the least musicological
         when analysing music...
             the best poetry can attest to is:
gauging your eyes out with it's bewilderment that
it has become such a primitive art,
   compared to the etchings in the caves of
Lascaux...  how that's really said?
                 obviously las-cow...
                  or proper: lascau(x)...
            the two tier of language... those who live
off it as noun-to-noun... and those who live
off it as hand-to-mouth... solely verb in action...
    it's actually a great shame that i should be writing this
and having a father who perfected the craft of roofing...
  i feel more an imbecile, and even more a rooster
in a wheelchair...
        so much for having a russian girlfriend for a summer
and an egyptian friend for no reason;
don't worry, you won't write a biography about me,
  such nuances of language with a personal twist
can remain where they are, in the archeological
dept. of nowhere.

Perfected form of hurting someone in a graceful matter
performing butterfly kicks
and acrobatic spins and flips
call it martial Arts

A simplfied and universal way to write the language i speak
with nouns being a base for connecting the verbs
and adverbs and pronouns i read
call it language Arts

knowing the law and how to debate it as a citizen
so when i in trouble I can prove the officer
wrong or right before i get thrown into prison
call it liberal Arts

Drawing an interpretation of life, or an event or feeling into a picture that breathes life into a room,
adds beauty and awe to all who glance at it in 2 seconds
that causes an toddler to want to reach tiny hands at it, in order to grab
call it Art

manipulating words into a beautiful image
that can be interpreted into any meaning managed
that breathes life into the person as they imagine it into their mind
causes them to think about things they would've never thought of and evokes more than just feelings of awe
but awakens the personal space of their beings
let's call that Poetry

:)

I remember when the circus first came to town,
The village people eagerly came to see from all around.
Every wild animal on wheels was caged in tow, followed by colorful clad characters on foot sure to give a spectacular show.
I remember when I first entered beneath the great big tent and caught the grand act of the peculiar pink elephant.
Get Your Peanuts, Popcorn, and Hot Dogs Here!  The Concessionaire yells in a hearty cheer.

The taste of cotton candy, the sounds, smells and the sights,
Above me a man balances on a tight rope from a view of an incredible height.
For the kids, clowns twist and shaped balloons in all odd kind of forms,
And stuffed themselves in a tiny car with a toot, toot of a funny sounding horn.
The feathered ladies on horseback perform daring acrobatic stunts, as in place the horses prance and dance in a parade of extraordinary pomp.
All eyes are on the lion tamer in his tails and fancy top hat twirling a chair and cracking a whip at the growl of the big man eating cat.
Tigers jumped through flaming hoops, as human cannonballs towards  the sky their bodies shoot.
Little doggies do flips for their treats as acrobats fly through the air performing death defying feats,
Or what could be more delightful to see than a bear riding a unicycle or perhaps even three?

Finally, comes the grand finale, then soon it is time to go home, the tents have been folded the rides have been loaded the performers and the animals have all gone.
On their parents strong shoulder kids are carried off in their sleep with sweet dreams of, fun rides and toy prizes, and candy apple treats.
Ferris wheels and merry go rounds, the bearded fat lady weighing a hundred pounds.
I remember a ******* a wire, the boy that spits fire a man with his head in the jaws of a tiger.
Reminiscing of the time when the circus first came to town
And the village people eagerly came to see from all around.

Wake up, stare out your jagged window at the yellow-green, creeping mist that pours through the suburbs.  Taste darkness inside a spit shined, stream lined dank tank that your roommates call home.  Shower and be appalled at just how unshapely you have gotten, your body a testament to your diet of Wendy’s and alcohol.  Go to your dream crush, thankless job and stand at attention as the human flesh wave moves blankly through aisles and registers, even as they pretend that they are not the target market.  Watch as they consume ferociously violent DVDs and smart devices at discount prices.  Stand startlingly still and pray to God that they are like Tyrannosaurus and can’t see movement.  Realize you are a ******* idiot because you get your facts from movies.  Feel fear and dread make a shrapnel nest in your stomach when you understand that this might be the best that you can do.  Frame count with fellow claustrophobic agoraphobics and call that pointless perfection pursuit escape.  Desperately have twisted, quasi-acrobatic *** with every woman that is willing, but not so secretly wish they were that somewhat mousy, yet charming, grad student who makes your coffee every morning.  Try to shrink into her pocket, invisible, only an absent touch away.  Hope that someday you can intervene in her life positively so she notices you there.  Go to sleep and breathe in that yellow-green vapor that reacts with your cells and becomes a clean cancer.  Rinse, repeat and pray for that big break.

O cool baby, Smoking Lady
woman of elegance, lady of ease and poise
O Mysterious Lady
of charm from hair done
in style right down to concealed feet
O my wildest dreams are written
in the curls of the smoke you exhale
and for such Eastern finesse and dreams
I’d kiss each of your delicate fingers exposed…
O cool baby, Smoking Lady….
the zen of life is in your parted lips;
O you demonstrate the zen of smoking
and my desires are in the ocean of your clothes…
O Elegant Lady  
maybe we could smoke a peace pipe,
you smoke and I smoke
you pass it to me and I pass it back to you
and then peace blowing
could take us to where we could put mouth to mouth
and blow each into the other
all the smoke into each other
and we tumble over each other
and your hair will be as my wildest dreams of you
and your clothes almost meager
as befitting the heat of summer
and so discover each
the state of the lightness of smoke-*******  
O cool baby, Smoking Lady
woman of elegance, lady of ease and poise
my acrobatic thoughts float at the sight of you
like the curls of smoke you send up to the gods

you are all of the mind’s dirtiest trick:

a weathered image of Magdalena,
a sleight of hand and a swirl of skin.
                        defying the laws of inebriation like a culprit
      set loose, or the pallor of the moon excreting its habiliments.
the old rancor of the tree from its spurious beating. vestal buds of autumn
    frugal hands of drizzle in April, prostitutes pirouetting, pried open,
   dissected in faces of the tabloids (their almost acrobatic supremacy on centerfolds)

   all mangled like the unclear, yet certain picture of a 1990s havocked
      retrospect.

you are all of the mind’s filth: a putrid modal-jazz entrapment
   and I am that sad fellow at the elbow room of some dislimned establishment
       falling as lithe as poppies in spring

  only when my mind starts to sing freely, a clenched, harmonic framework
  will my bones start to unloose in the ether, death with its ammoniac perfume,
   closes in like an unwanted visitor with a bounty of silence drowning everything.

i imagine you anything but     lustrous this evening.
     there are certain points in the pressures of your gravity
that levitate to mere intersections of the finer points of ecstasy.

i imagine you    all soft   and plump  as a word   of salvage
   without the vigor   of   blandishments  when you start with   your
    own   way of  moving i imagine you  as blunt as   a dull  knife
     plunging   into   me – i imagine your  sidereal   satellites  fail  in their   coverage
   over impossibly the   blackest  of skies   in February,|

i imagine  you  anything  but clean
   and   all white and spruced up   with   the most
  drenched   light,   real   to the touch  and swiftly moving across  the afternoon
like  wishing you   all but   perverse  and   anomalous
    and   strikingly   beautiful.

Darling, you can be anything you want to be.

Just pick yourself like a chocolate. Admire the red foil that engulfs your small fingertips with that smile you do as the caramel swims between your rose tinted lips.

Pick yourself like a flower, like that snow drop the fairies plant every February under the apple tree, or that single rose that pricked your finger, the red one you once gave me.

Be an astronaut and bring me back a star. Wrap it up like fish and chips and we can watch it shine when the time comes for you to kiss me goodnight for the last time. And I will appear, my sweetheart, in the place from which you plucked it from in that velvet patchwork quilt we call a sky, and I will watch  you, always from afar.

Be a surgeon and find yourself the biggest heart. And when you do, let your darling love you and love your darling back. And when your darling hurts you, do not try to fix your broken heart with liquor or lust, but patience and promise, as your heart is the strongest ***** in your body. It keeps playing the most beautiful music when all else fails, and whatever God you choose my darling, he or she will listen to it always, even if that God you choose doesn't exist.

If neither these excite you, be an acrobatic swimmer and keep yourself afloat. Be a carpenter and build yourself a boat. Be an academic at Oxford and stand up and say 'I am a ******* academic at Oxford' and stick your finger up at Mrs Lewis down the road whose children have 'the potential' and gloat. Or be a mother like me, and know how to always make the world a whole better place with just a smile, a mothers grace.

But darling, if anything, just be you. As you are perfect. Not just perfect because you make the air dance with just a mere breath, or because you can sing the alphabet backwards, but because you are you.

I drive my bus
Full of grotty kids and lunatics
On the bitumen dream
Where middle aged mothers with boxers' eyes
Weep from the sidewalks of toy-trashed suburbs.

Driving my bus,
Through the unfolding flower of dawn
And through the tangled tears of night
Where the boisterous poor
Wilt in their gardens of excess.

Driving them home,
Driving lover to lover,
To their acrobatic fields of fire,
Driving the madman raging in his seat
And the girls with rainbows in their eyes.

Driving
Driving
Into the sorrow beyond the sky
And into the hollows of the lonely hearts
Who linger, speechless, at my ear,
As we drive, and drive.

Where the gutter ghosts rattle their dying coughs
Into the emptiness of night
And the half-cocked girls smoke toughness and cool
And the burning boys
Writhe in the furnace of desire.

The streets are crying in the pools of time
And the dogs are howling in the summers of their heat
While the ladies are waiting at the corners of our youth
With their handbag smiles,
And the faces we will never see again
Go sliding, Go sliding by.

hearing the
plaintive notes

I scan the
branches

but no flash
of yellow

or acrobatic
flits

hidden singer
wistful song

lesser goldfinch

who dared give you
that name


Tom Spencer © 2018