PASSION PLAY

Ayad Gharbawi




Location: Desert Shore, Bitterly Cold Night, next to strong waves from the ocean.
Characters: Man ((M) and his Lover, a Woman (W).

----------------------------------------


W: “Search as I forever do, in manifold ways unknown, I seek but to love thee, and the meagre goodness from Life, with steely ardour - my armour faithful.”
M: “Alone I may be, and still, yes I love thee; these days heavy are and beset I am by burdensome trivialities, but I remain trusting, though my corner so narrow remain.”
W: “My Love! Your speech I hear aloud and thine lips I live within and yet, my Love, all Solitude I am. Man! I am unaided! In this journey of sinful thorns, my love, in this unforgiving journey, this blurred odyssey, I stand alone”.
M: “This trial you speak of, but I do know of it well; so, listen then: within the strength of trusted togetherness we can plough on, though everlasting harm shall do its spiteful tricks, warm to our united truth shall we remain.”
W: (Surprised) “O! My love! This thought I cannot hear! My life, my destiny, is but mine. And all have their own solitary roads of jagged rocks to embrace, like it we or not. We heartbreaking earthly sad beasts, either fiercely clutch at integrity, or we do let it go to perish away.”
M: (Confused) “My Love! I do hear, I do hear. But when Times decide on burdening us, what then can we achieve? To face Reality within the frail arms of solitude is to ignore, to refuse the severe threats of repulsive grins.”
(Silence)
M: (Passionately) “O! My sweet! Only in us, can we envelope, through joined, clasped warmth can we be as one united! The screams that so truly are meant to slice us off, only we, our Unity, can destroy. For mine eyes can only find sleep in your ears, and it is so - for otherwise nothing and no one can be.”
W: (Angry) “My Passion too is bubbling for thine bewildered ears. Am I not your soul? Do we not suffer as one? Do we not reflect as one? Am I not your lover true? Is not our warmth not weighty to our fickle bones?”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) “But, Lover, this much ought I to formally declare unto thee: For our eyes, and all eyes, envision unequally at one another. Till eternity, in its casual, indifferent flicker, snatches at us all wretched mortals, the gazes from lords to paupers remain veritably mismatched. O my passion! My woeful heart! These words I thunder forth defines love unfeigned, and what mine eyes do pour out unto thine ears is authenticity true.
(Silence)
W: (Passionately) “What joined mem’ries you choose to caress may possess thee, but your exactness for what love is to you, doth not dwell in mine mind. What tears, what weepings you do, fall stormily upon thine own soul’s wildernesses. You choose to be chained by changing visions and indefinite sentiments of light weight – though so poignant at the moment they veritably are?”
M: (Inquiring) “My love! I cherish thee; where hast thou been in thine mind, for now ye talk of that truth you relate to in your heart. Your pronouncements, what depths I do feel! Can it perchance be that my passion has strayed our winds far from me?”
W: “No, my love! Why is anger, I feel, lush on thine tongue?”
M: (Surprised and Frightened) “Anger! I am too distant from that affliction! But yes, I feel my words make only for unstable murmurs in my breath.”
W: (Quietly) “Then, do tell me, lover, who do your murmurs betray - myself or yourself then?”
M: (Quietly) “Perhaps so, perhaps so. But my anxiety wilfully demands of me to eradicate your vision.”
W: (Firmly) “You answer naught from my undemanding question. Or, are mine meanings too violent for you? What aches thee?”
M: (Passionately) “My sweet! In so many moments, I created mysterious planets for thee! Bizarre worlds of contrasts and opposites and musical words of antiquity and sensual ravines. My love! I, my soul, my life, my inner deepest breath, tempted as I am by Fates’ inscrutable cruelties to ashamedly yield, I have yet always expressed to mine eyes’ heart, though they be in bleak darkness, to faithfully fight without pause all shades of vice and still yet - with loving integrity; I have stood with arms of righteousness and love for thee up and never down! Yes, sincere good and venal ill remain joined in life for all to feel, but you knew it was not for me to disentangle them. And so, I pronounce unto thee, still, and yet ever and ever more, my love for thee, though still beholding a thousand mountains before me, I remain sturdy for thee; I remain undisturbed by burly laws, and by exotic dictums, I stand fierce and unhurt, save in your absence.”
W: (With Sadness) “My beloved, your vivid voice stabs the falsehoods for thee, and I say unto thee, unto thee your excessive and unreasonable chains, and for myself my unreasonable and extreme chains remain.”
M: (Shocked) “But I burden thee with no steely chains, nor verbal fetters! For naught I produce for thee save grace, passion and freedom to love for us both to be in Unity Sacred! Dost thou embrace my visions as ‘shackles’, then ‘tis better we agree to class that which we are as but madness! Hear me, for my tears now must truly change their colours!”
W: (Determined) “Your feverish hands clutch only upon mine erratic wings!”
M: (Anger) “Never! Never! For I clutch only to destroy all malevolence; as for thee, Lady of the purest, untouched, guarded, secluded Ponds, I seek to unshackle for you the scattered, scared shadows that yearn for thine sovereignty. And what is this ‘sovereignty’ but our Sacred Union? What curse deemest you I impose? Do you equal my purest passions with atrocities? Murmur unto mine ears, your clearest love for me.”
W: “Ah! You enquire of me my ‘sincerity’ for thee? What demands!”
(Silence)
M: “I see naught but heaving forests of love betwixt us, and yet, you discover my words being ‘demanding’?”
W: (Drily) “Perchance, your visions are indistinct and ever more blurred, through these years cannot be ignored.”
M: (Begging) “My love! All mine life, though it be lengthy, I fought most venal tyranny, and for this moment, you question my righteousness?”
W: (Indignantly) “I have been plunged into seas hostile and I have plunged in a thousand miles of inert minds troubled beyond conceivable comprehension and I have yet to have my Right for my own greedy, ravenous flesh to be vigorously and forcefully embraced by sensuality and serenity. Yes, I do love thee, and yet in our union, as in all unions, I have been adorned with naught, save snickering, gossiping scenes of festive *****, games, chatter and farewells, themselves festooned within silly and sincerely stupid smiles and frowns, and shallow tears and never ending ludicrous chatter unworthy of monkeys conversing. I have met programmed rows of pats, respect and all other so-called decent intents and gestures, but, where, lover that you are of mine, where does my personal heart, throb and manically vibrate, save in your heavenly imaginations?”
(Silence)
W: (Quietly but Determinedly) “My love! I truly thee love and with passions, I tell you, of proportions of precise exactitudes; in your eyes I have witnessed symphonies of exquisiteness; and, I of thee ask: where dwelleth your own love for myself in thine body?”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) “Do you recognise the changing structures that form this, that I name ‘My Love’? In my solitude eternal, I do evermore and always do pause, and be pensive, and be thinking of questions, such as ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘when’ ‘how’, and ‘which’ should be my path; I am forever and ever more searching, seeking the heavens of every corner, and the irritable tempests, within my changing self as they themselves do try to seek me, and we forever, through inconceivable murkiness, do try to assemble the everlasting entirety of these disorganized puzzles into some measure of comprehensible cohesion that ‘I’ am. That is how the ‘I’ you love is forever changing and thereby formulating itself, and within all these meandering passions, and endless errors, where am I to feel thee? Where? And where do you seek me? In which land? In which forest? You trivialise my beingness as you focus upon my lands as being that which so effortless to find, and yet, you are much too distant from an understanding of my conflicting, emerging civilisations.”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) If the utterance ‘Never’ is pathetic for thee, then allow me to introduce you to my latest heart: for it screams out that single, protracted utterance! Never! My love, these winds of raging wraths, both within and outside by flesh, must and can only be annihilated by mine own sincerities – were I not to play against my own self. My uncontrolled desires and, yes, thirsty manic passions can only be tempered and thoroughly satiated to the utter brim, by mine own loving, sources of pleasure, my own uncontrollable ecstasies. As for the rest of ****** pleasures, my own erroneous words, speeches and utterances can only be severed and sliced by my tranquillity.”
M: (Resigned) “I hear thine words. Do not abandon me. Do not destroy our civilisation of justice.”
W: “What we share, the bonds, are enjoyment. Listen though to mine lips: enjoyment is what - when it is to be compared with convulsive ecstatic quivers of satisfaction?”
M: (Puzzled) “And what of all our journeys to attain that unity? For all that, is it to be of mere insignificance? And if that be your truth, for what then did we toil and labour for unity of minds and bodies?”
W: (Laughing) “Did you understand from Life itself, that here it was, grandly to proclaim its furtive faces unto thine own awaiting face?! “
M: (Baffled) “It was so far too plain and vastly clear unto me these sceneries we faced before our loving bodies.”
W: “Yes, and I too, did see them with thee. Our four eyes, did see unity for that flicker of time. How true you speak! But, time clocked on, I saw you as you stood there, moving nowhere, unawares that it was your duty to squash onwards whatever vile breaths faced us.”
M: (Desperate) “And did I not? Did I abandon thee in these crushing paths?”
W: (Accusing) “No, you did not. Never, once did you abandon me. I ask of thee; for what sense do we feel a need for a continuation of these gruelling marches? For unity? For love? Or, is love unity? Was that and is this our reason for us to carry on with these shackles?”
M: “For assuredly, yes, and more yes, I tell thee! Toil and gruelling dawns, and unbearable evenings and the whitest of nights are all for the sacred attainment of that heavenly summit of joy I name as blessed ‘Love’.”
W: (Assured) “And, Sire, what if my nerves, blood and ****** hunger tell thee in truth that we, all of us, need no longer, and need never in truth, to undertake these paths, for we find naught that nourishes us at the blessed summit of your definition of what ‘Love’ is?”
M: (Confused & Sad) “So, I falter here and now upon understanding your speech; do I reason from thee that our loving days in unity are frivolously bygone now?”
W: (Calmly & Gracefully) “Do the wandering birds, and do the blind bats, and do the reckless storms, and do the blindly, raging waves and do the supremely arrogant oceans eternally march on in but one direction only with the savage passage of time within their particular lives? You did pronounce that you built planets for our unity; well then, did you not view how planets endlessly revolve along the same path?”
(Pause)
W: (Calmly & with Dignity) “For, Sire, I am not as a Planet - could you not feel that throughout our journeys? You endlessly query and question ‘who’ it is that ‘I’ am? Well, I speak this much on myself; I am as the birds, and the bats, and the storms and the waves and the oceans.”  
M: (Angry) “Woman! I can only then tell of thee that you are naught but feuding clutter and violent disarray!”
W: (Unconcerned) “Those are your words. Not mine. Speak for what you wish, Sire.”
M: (Angry) “And I stand here, before thee, in anger – nay, more, more! In fury!”
W: (Laughing) “For what? For the deeds that created but sticky, and grimy grains of sand for the undoubted pleasure our eyes?”
M: “And so you label our truths, our love so much! Fair indeed, you speak, Woman of Justice.”
W: (Arrogantly) “Man! Express your delights for your own delights. And, alas, there the circle and reality ends – and it ends only for you. That is one morsel of truth for you to ponder. What we ‘created’ and what we ‘loved’ was never and never, ever be the same for you as it is for me. Are you a sincere believer that your personal vision is the same sight all other seeing creatures envision?”
M: (Angry) “Woman, you enrage me! Your arrogance is drenching thine rags.”
W: (Sarcastic) “Tis the Man with no reason who allows his breath and words to be a veritable cesspool of fuming stenches!”
M: “But I, that I am, no longer can define your contours?”
W: (Pointedly) “Precisely, Man, precisely. Perhaps, now you have come closer to the vulnerable shores of reality!”
M: (Confused) “Do you express that you are ever varying and so for that reason there is not a one unified you?”
W: (Calmly) “For we are all ‘varying’, to borrow your word – if you do so allow me, Sire. There was never ‘unity’ of soul, nor mind, nor self, nor of any one personality. This, I desire, that you may understand.”
M: (Aghast) “Then if that be your truth and then, are we naught but multitudes of ever changing confusions, Lady of the Desert?”
W: (Calmly) “Yes and no! For those who are muscular and full of fertile vigour in their flesh, and in their intellects, and those that are severely and strictly scholastic, then they do need and they can succeed in time, in their never ending struggle to bring together the mutually antagonistic factions of that which constitutes our beingness. And, as for the dense brained soulless beings, then, it is equally veritably true that, a descent into madness can be rapidly produced, since from their erratic constituents, they cannot attract together these antagonistic and mutually-hating emotions in some vision of cohesion, and thus mayhem can be fashioned.”
(Silence)
M: (Calmly) “So, pray do tell me, where does Love and Justice and Truth and Morality stand in your universe?”
W: (Serenely) “That has been mine desire to hear the words being produced from your lips, Man!”
(Pause)
W: “So, now perhaps, your sight may be getting clearer, for your question is certainly apt. Foremost, we pathetic mortals, we the be are forever slimy specks of sand that  crumbles, must necessarily seek to survive and flourish within whatever forest, desert, meadow we find ourselves cast upon.”
M: (Startled) “At what cost, Woman? At the expense of Morality?”
W: (Rapidly) “Yes and no.”
M: (Shocked) “Horrendous! How can you spout out such filth?”
W: (Quietly) “Restrain your stupidities, and give more room to your intelligence, Sire.”
(Silence)
W: (Gracefully) “In times of trouble, what can Man do when he be forced to embrace evil, even though he finds the act of the embrace loathsome, but he does what he does for the truth of his vital existence to continue. Only when he need never embrace vile, and then allows himself to commit the act, then he is for certainty to incur the everlasting wrath of God. Evil is thus never one truth to be utterly rejected, perchance you may now see. ”
M: (Calm but Tired) “I follow your words and their ideas therein.”
W: (Gracefully) “When you talk to me on Man and everlasting, conflicting changes within that self-same creature, I tell you with all the earnestness that I possess, of what God has scattered and endowed upon me; for this beast, we all call in unity Man, this creature has far too many a numberless number of mutually self-contradicting, distrusting, loving, hating, inspiring and a never ending number of feelings and emotions that are in constant flow and change – as in any rapid river descending unto its eventual destination, which in its case, is the sea, while in our case, it is Death itself for sure.”
M: (Despair) “And how can this beast ‘love’ anyone within this welter of confusion?”
W: (Rapidly) “He cannot!”
M: (Rapidly, Begging) “But Man and Woman do love with bristling passions! Do you deny that, Woman?!”
W: (Calmly, eyes downwards looking) “Yes, and no. Since the beast has needs, based on his vastly intricate constituents, to ‘love’ his fellow beast, he imagines and believes

PASSION PLAY

Ayad Gharbawi




Location: Desert Shore, Bitterly Cold Night, next to strong waves from the ocean.
Characters: Man ((M) and his Lover, a Woman (W).

----------------------------------------



W: “Search as I forever do, in manifold ways unknown, I seek but to love thee, and the meagre goodness from Life, with steely ardour - my armour faithful.”
M: “Alone I may be, and still, yes I love thee; these days heavy are and beset I am by burdensome trivialities, but I remain trusting, though my corner so narrow remain.”
W: “My Love! Your speech I hear aloud and thine lips I live within and yet, my Love, all Solitude I am. Man! I am unaided! In this journey of sinful thorns, my love, in this unforgiving journey, this blurred odyssey, I stand alone”.
M: “This trial you speak of, but I do know of it well; so, listen then: within the strength of trusted togetherness we can plough on, though everlasting harm shall do its spiteful tricks, warm to our united truth shall we remain.”
W: (Surprised) “O! My love! This thought I cannot hear! My life, my destiny, is but mine. And all have their own solitary roads of jagged rocks to embrace, like it we or not. We heartbreaking earthly sad beasts, either fiercely clutch at integrity, or we do let it go to perish away.”
M: (Confused) “My Love! I do hear, I do hear. But when Times decide on burdening us, what then can we achieve? To face Reality within the frail arms of solitude is to ignore, to refuse the severe threats of repulsive grins.”
(Silence)
M: (Passionately) “O! My sweet! Only in us, can we envelope, through joined, clasped warmth can we be as one united! The screams that so truly are meant to slice us off, only we, our Unity, can destroy. For mine eyes can only find sleep in your ears, and it is so - for otherwise nothing and no one can be.”
W: (Angry) “My Passion too is bubbling for thine bewildered ears. Am I not your soul? Do we not suffer as one? Do we not reflect as one? Am I not your lover true? Is not our warmth not weighty to our fickle bones?”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) “But, Lover, this much ought I to formally declare unto thee: For our eyes, and all eyes, envision unequally at one another. Till eternity, in its casual, indifferent flicker, snatches at us all wretched mortals, the gazes from lords to paupers remain veritably mismatched. O my passion! My woeful heart! These words I thunder forth defines love unfeigned, and what mine eyes do pour out unto thine ears is authenticity true.
(Silence)
W: (Passionately) “What joined mem’ries you choose to caress may possess thee, but your exactness for what love is to you, doth not dwell in mine mind. What tears, what weepings you do, fall stormily upon thine own soul’s wildernesses. You choose to be chained by changing visions and indefinite sentiments of light weight – though so poignant at the moment they veritably are?”
M: (Inquiring) “My love! I cherish thee; where hast thou been in thine mind, for now ye talk of that truth you relate to in your heart. Your pronouncements, what depths I do feel! Can it perchance be that my passion has strayed our winds far from me?”
W: “No, my love! Why is anger, I feel, lush on thine tongue?”
M: (Surprised and Frightened) “Anger! I am too distant from that affliction! But yes, I feel my words make only for unstable murmurs in my breath.”
W: (Quietly) “Then, do tell me, lover, who do your murmurs betray - myself or yourself then?”
M: (Quietly) “Perhaps so, perhaps so. But my anxiety wilfully demands of me to eradicate your vision.”
W: (Firmly) “You answer naught from my undemanding question. Or, are mine meanings too violent for you? What aches thee?”
M: (Passionately) “My sweet! In so many moments, I created mysterious planets for thee! Bizarre worlds of contrasts and opposites and musical words of antiquity and sensual ravines. My love! I, my soul, my life, my inner deepest breath, tempted as I am by Fates’ inscrutable cruelties to ashamedly yield, I have yet always expressed to mine eyes’ heart, though they be in bleak darkness, to faithfully fight without pause all shades of vice and still yet - with loving integrity; I have stood with arms of righteousness and love for thee up and never down! Yes, sincere good and venal ill remain joined in life for all to feel, but you knew it was not for me to disentangle them. And so, I pronounce unto thee, still, and yet ever and ever more, my love for thee, though still beholding a thousand mountains before me, I remain sturdy for thee; I remain undisturbed by burly laws, and by exotic dictums, I stand fierce and unhurt, save in your absence.”
W: (With Sadness) “My beloved, your vivid voice stabs the falsehoods for thee, and I say unto thee, unto thee your excessive and unreasonable chains, and for myself my unreasonable and extreme chains remain.”
M: (Shocked) “But I burden thee with no steely chains, nor verbal fetters! For naught I produce for thee save grace, passion and freedom to love for us both to be in Unity Sacred! Dost thou embrace my visions as ‘shackles’, then ‘tis better we agree to class that which we are as but madness! Hear me, for my tears now must truly change their colours!”
W: (Determined) “Your feverish hands clutch only upon mine erratic wings!”
M: (Anger) “Never! Never! For I clutch only to destroy all malevolence; as for thee, Lady of the purest, untouched, guarded, secluded Ponds, I seek to unshackle for you the scattered, scared shadows that yearn for thine sovereignty. And what is this ‘sovereignty’ but our Sacred Union? What curse deemest you I impose? Do you equal my purest passions with atrocities? Murmur unto mine ears, your clearest love for me.”
W: “Ah! You enquire of me my ‘sincerity’ for thee? What demands!”
(Silence)
M: “I see naught but heaving forests of love betwixt us, and yet, you discover my words being ‘demanding’?”
W: (Drily) “Perchance, your visions are indistinct and ever more blurred, through these years cannot be ignored.”
M: (Begging) “My love! All mine life, though it be lengthy, I fought most venal tyranny, and for this moment, you question my righteousness?”
W: (Indignantly) “I have been plunged into seas hostile and I have plunged in a thousand miles of inert minds troubled beyond conceivable comprehension and I have yet to have my Right for my own greedy, ravenous flesh to be vigorously and forcefully embraced by sensuality and serenity. Yes, I do love thee, and yet in our union, as in all unions, I have been adorned with naught, save snickering, gossiping scenes of festive *****, games, chatter and farewells, themselves festooned within silly and sincerely stupid smiles and frowns, and shallow tears and never ending ludicrous chatter unworthy of monkeys conversing. I have met programmed rows of pats, respect and all other so-called decent intents and gestures, but, where, lover that you are of mine, where does my personal heart, throb and manically vibrate, save in your heavenly imaginations?”
(Silence)
W: (Quietly but Determinedly) “My love! I truly thee love and with passions, I tell you, of proportions of precise exactitudes; in your eyes I have witnessed symphonies of exquisiteness; and, I of thee ask: where dwelleth your own love for myself in thine body?”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) “Do you recognise the changing structures that form this, that I name ‘My Love’? In my solitude eternal, I do evermore and always do pause, and be pensive, and be thinking of questions, such as ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘when’ ‘how’, and ‘which’ should be my path; I am forever and ever more searching, seeking the heavens of every corner, and the irritable tempests, within my changing self as they themselves do try to seek me, and we forever, through inconceivable murkiness, do try to assemble the everlasting entirety of these disorganized puzzles into some measure of comprehensible cohesion that ‘I’ am. That is how the ‘I’ you love is forever changing and thereby formulating itself, and within all these meandering passions, and endless errors, where am I to feel thee? Where? And where do you seek me? In which land? In which forest? You trivialise my beingness as you focus upon my lands as being that which so effortless to find, and yet, you are much too distant from an understanding of my conflicting, emerging civilisations.”
(Silence)
W: (Passionate) If the utterance ‘Never’ is pathetic for thee, then allow me to introduce you to my latest heart: for it screams out that single, protracted utterance! Never! My love, these winds of raging wraths, both within and outside by flesh, must and can only be annihilated by mine own sincerities – were I not to play against my own self. My uncontrolled desires and, yes, thirsty manic passions can only be tempered and thoroughly satiated to the utter brim, by mine own loving, sources of pleasure, my own uncontrollable ecstasies. As for the rest of ****** pleasures, my own erroneous words, speeches and utterances can only be severed and sliced by my tranquillity.”
M: (Resigned) “I hear thine words. Do not abandon me. Do not destroy our civilisation of justice.”
W: “What we share, the bonds, are enjoyment. Listen though to mine lips: enjoyment is what - when it is to be compared with convulsive ecstatic quivers of satisfaction?”
M: (Puzzled) “And what of all our journeys to attain that unity? For all that, is it to be of mere insignificance? And if that be your truth, for what then did we toil and labour for unity of minds and bodies?”
W: (Laughing) “Did you understand from Life itself, that here it was, grandly to proclaim its furtive faces unto thine own awaiting face?! “
M: (Baffled) “It was so far too plain and vastly clear unto me these sceneries we faced before our loving bodies.”
W: “Yes, and I too, did see them with thee. Our four eyes, did see unity for that flicker of time. How true you speak! But, time clocked on, I saw you as you stood there, moving nowhere, unawares that it was your duty to squash onwards whatever vile breaths faced us.”
M: (Desperate) “And did I not? Did I abandon thee in these crushing paths?”
W: (Accusing) “No, you did not. Never, once did you abandon me. I ask of thee; for what sense do we feel a need for a continuation of these gruelling marches? For unity? For love? Or, is love unity? Was that and is this our reason for us to carry on with these shackles?”
M: “For assuredly, yes, and more yes, I tell thee! Toil and gruelling dawns, and unbearable evenings and the whitest of nights are all for the sacred attainment of that heavenly summit of joy I name as blessed ‘Love’.”
W: (Assured) “And, Sire, what if my nerves, blood and ****** hunger tell thee in truth that we, all of us, need no longer, and need never in truth, to undertake these paths, for we find naught that nourishes us at the blessed summit of your definition of what ‘Love’ is?”
M: (Confused & Sad) “So, I falter here and now upon understanding your speech; do I reason from thee that our loving days in unity are frivolously bygone now?”
W: (Calmly & Gracefully) “Do the wandering birds, and do the blind bats, and do the reckless storms, and do the blindly, raging waves and do the supremely arrogant oceans eternally march on in but one direction only with the savage passage of time within their particular lives? You did pronounce that you built planets for our unity; well then, did you not view how planets endlessly revolve along the same path?”
(Pause)
W: (Calmly & with Dignity) “For, Sire, I am not as a Planet - could you not feel that throughout our journeys? You endlessly query and question ‘who’ it is that ‘I’ am? Well, I speak this much on myself; I am as the birds, and the bats, and the storms and the waves and the oceans.”  
M: (Angry) “Woman! I can only then tell of thee that you are naught but feuding clutter and violent disarray!”
W: (Unconcerned) “Those are your words. Not mine. Speak for what you wish, Sire.”
M: (Angry) “And I stand here, before thee, in anger – nay, more, more! In fury!”
W: (Laughing) “For what? For the deeds that created but sticky, and grimy grains of sand for the undoubted pleasure our eyes?”
M: “And so you label our truths, our love so much! Fair indeed, you speak, Woman of Justice.”
W: (Arrogantly) “Man! Express your delights for your own delights. And, alas, there the circle and reality ends – and it ends only for you. That is one morsel of truth for you to ponder. What we ‘created’ and what we ‘loved’ was never and never, ever be the same for you as it is for me. Are you a sincere believer that your personal vision is the same sight all other seeing creatures envision?”
M: (Angry) “Woman, you enrage me! Your arrogance is drenching thine rags.”
W: (Sarcastic) “Tis the Man with no reason who allows his breath and words to be a veritable cesspool of fuming stenches!”
M: “But I, that I am, no longer can define your contours?”
W: (Pointedly) “Precisely, Man, precisely. Perhaps, now you have come closer to the vulnerable shores of reality!”
M: (Confused) “Do you express that you are ever varying and so for that reason there is not a one unified you?”
W: (Calmly) “For we are all ‘varying’, to borrow your word – if you do so allow me, Sire. There was never ‘unity’ of soul, nor mind, nor self, nor of any one personality. This, I desire, that you may understand.”
M: (Aghast) “Then if that be your truth and then, are we naught but multitudes of ever changing confusions, Lady of the Desert?”
W: (Calmly) “Yes and no! For those who are muscular and full of fertile vigour in their flesh, and in their intellects, and those that are severely and strictly scholastic, then they do need and they can succeed in time, in their never ending struggle to bring together the mutually antagonistic factions of that which constitutes our beingness. And, as for the dense brained soulless beings, then, it is equally veritably true that, a descent into madness can be rapidly produced, since from their erratic constituents, they cannot attract together these antagonistic and mutually-hating emotions in some vision of cohesion, and thus mayhem can be fashioned.”
(Silence)
M: (Calmly) “So, pray do tell me, where does Love and Justice and Truth and Morality stand in your universe?”
W: (Serenely) “That has been mine desire to hear the words being produced from your lips, Man!”
(Pause)
W: “So, now perhaps, your sight may be getting clearer, for your question is certainly apt. Foremost, we pathetic mortals, we the be are forever slimy specks of sand that  crumbles, must necessarily seek to survive and flourish within whatever forest, desert, meadow we find ourselves cast upon.”
M: (Startled) “At what cost, Woman? At the expense of Morality?”
W: (Rapidly) “Yes and no.”
M: (Shocked) “Horrendous! How can you spout out such filth?”
W: (Quietly) “Restrain your stupidities, and give more room to your intelligence, Sire.”
(Silence)
W: (Gracefully) “In times of trouble, what can Man do when he be forced to embrace evil, even though he finds the act of the embrace loathsome, but he does what he does for the truth of his vital existence to continue. Only when he need never embrace vile, and then allows himself to commit the act, then he is for certainty to incur the everlasting wrath of God. Evil is thus never one truth to be utterly rejected, perchance you may now see. ”
M: (Calm but Tired) “I follow your words and their ideas therein.”
W: (Gracefully) “When you talk to me on Man and everlasting, conflicting changes within that self-same creature, I tell you with all the earnestness that I possess, of what God has scattered and endowed upon me; for this beast, we all call in unity Man, this creature has far too many a numberless number of mutually self-contradicting, distrusting, loving, hating, inspiring and a never ending number of feelings and emotions that are in constant flow and change – as in any rapid river descending unto its eventual destination, which in its case, is the sea, while in our case, it is Death itself for sure.”
M: (Despair) “And how can this beast ‘love’ anyone within this welter of confusion?”
W: (Rapidly) “He cannot!”
M: (Rapidly, Begging) “But Man and Woman do love with bristling passions! Do you deny that, Woman?!”
W: (Calmly, eyes downwards looking) “Yes, and no. Since the beast has needs, based on his vastly intricate constituents, to ‘love’ his fellow beast, he imagines and believes

Look in the mirror. Let us both look.
Here is my naked body.
Apparently you like it,
I have no reason to.
Who bound us, me and my body?
Why must I die
together with it?
I have the right to know where the borderline  
between us is drawn.
Where am I, I, I myself.

Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines?  
In the hollow of the ***? In a toe?
Apparently in the brain. I do not see it.
Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right  
to see myself. Don’t laugh.
That’s macabre, you say.

It’s not me who made
my body.
I wear the used rags of my family,  
an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair  
after my grandmother, the nose
glued together from a few dead noses.  
What do I have in common with all that?  
What do I have in common with you, who like  
my knee, what is my knee to me?

Surely
I would have chosen a different model.

I will leave both of you here,
my knee and you.
Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body  
to play with.
And I will go.
There is no place for me here,
in this blind darkness waiting for
corruption.
I will run out, I will race
away from myself.
I will look for myself  
running
like crazy
till my last breath.

One must hurry
before death comes. For by then  
like a dog ****** by its chain
I will have to return
into this stridently suffering body.  
To go through the last
most strident ceremony of the body.

Defeated by the body,
slowly annihilated because of the body

I will become kidney failure
or the gangrene of the large intestine.  
And I will expire in shame.

And the universe will expire with me,  
reduced as it is
to a kidney failure
and the gangrene of the large intestine.

I thought about this and around this for a long time, so I guess it's time to write it down.

THE NATURAL ORDER.

There is a natural balance in Earths history and mankind's tentative balance along the scale.
  When humans began to band together and create communities, control of fire / light created a need for oil . Eventually settling on whale oil.
   So it was by the grace of whatever one might want to attribute it to,that let petroleum come into play at a time when whales are in danger of being annihilated and dead horses were clogging the streets of cities in the east, left dead or dying by the Cartmen who simply unstrapped the sick or dead animal and moved on.
  .Oil / petroleum led to the creation of the internal combustion engine.
   So again a hand stirred the ***.                
  Consider these improvements( if such they were )created rapid growth and burgeoning cities . Again Providence stepped in to create radio , telephone and airplanes, essentially at a time when growth of humanity was so great , that new ways of farming , new ways of seeing the world-  were  becoming more and more necessary to a shrinking world.
   Unfortunately, at a time when we, the American initiative creators of so many trends, ideas ,Innovations and inspirations around the world, were suddenly slammed a blow that at this point, 40 years later; it's very reverberations are still being felt.
   Consider if big oil and trickle-down had not ,for spiteful and greedy involution, taken down the solar panels from the White House roof, that Jimmy Carter had installed in 1977.
  How far ahead would we be now ,in clean energy and how much less damage to the ice cap and the atmosphere would have been done??  To date... my guess is that it is incomprehensible.
  So if nature does create a balance, it seems we are coming to a critical Junction.

Right now -metaphorically speaking- we are riding shotgun in a car with a driver ,who like us ,sees cars up ahead disappearing around the curve and all hitting  their brake lights. Now any reasonable driver at highway speeds is 65 - 80 miles an hour would at least take the foot off the gas in preparation of  tapping the brakes.
  So many politicians right now are refusing to accept the brake lights... see no reason to tap the brakes to interrupt cruise control, in all actuality, completely refusing to do anything except go around the curve at full speed.
   Around that curve we may find nothing but smooth sailing ,  or we may find a catastrophe in the making.
   Nature will accept the cruise Interruption now (maybe) brakes absolutely, but Full Speed Ahead will lead to the sickening crunch of seawater rising and  spilling salt water into the lands that are used for growing crops and food -  leading to millions , maybe billions of refugees with nowhere to go.

Or we will reach critical mass of sheer ignorant arrogance and nuke ourselves into a situation that does not have the technology or population to hammer at the planet so freaking hard.

Most likely the first scenario would instigate the 2nd and those of us who crawl up out of the ashes will start the evolution to revolution journey all over again.

Ain't nature Grand ???

I'm curious...

How did my ExxP parents
Give birth to two IxxJ children?

How did my 'ideal match' parents
Get such a ****** up marriage?

How does my T father
Really feel about and think of his F son?

How much does my ISFJ brother
Hate his INFJ sister for stunting his F growth,
Because our ESTP father, my shadow type, has annihilated mine?

How am I supposed to be able to predict
My ENFP mother's flip-flopping parenting,
Even if we're both NFs?

"silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.”* ― friedrich nietzsche

like poking the hornet's nest with a stick, you are a rose with stems and thorns so thick,
your skin is protection from oppression, keeping the world out of your private channels
like i'm AM and you're FM all of which are static with distorted voices only science can pry through your enigmatic cacophony on a molecular level, and any evidence of who you are, i couldn't find with years of knowledge, a indestructible ship could speak more evidence about
why it was annihilated, obliterated, disintegrated under the ocean for months at a time without
any current survivors, and the last person i could be described as would be Sherlock Holmes
every detail washes over my head like a flood of details that can't enter because a force field
surround my head like it's a crown being so clueless, but it feels like i'm wearing a dunce hat
and maybe i do realize that there will be a position where you will be put out into light
there is no way out of your mind, like a schizophrenic, if kryptonite killed superman,
can it **** the infectious virus spreading like wildfire through these veins, can you stop
worrying about when you will finally break down and open up to someone?
****

- kra

The haystack is the needle and the iceberg is compact
Scions of attrition tremble before the contract
Jaundiced world-weary tears lament the frailty of days and the evanescence of years
Senescence a cruel destruction, distracting garish comfort escorting the fears
Displaced and forlorn love beckons a second chance
Itinerant hopes know no commitment to simple embezzled parlance
Of dice and kin, nepotism’s high-roller antics are the linchpin
Frittered patience staking its bets on internecine dynamics of skin
Affirmative traction of disenfranchised hopes rests on fallow seasons
Traduced mirage tantalizes until the activation of regaled treasons
Shock wed with dismay appoints the tutelage of prestidigitation
Juggled triage aborts an unborn reason and anoints intimidation
Aliens flummox the borders to enlist a new world disorder
Trailblazers succumb to lawlessness and for every dollar gained we lose a quarter
Chaos checkmates as power rests from decrepit hands foisting the meretricious brand
Cattle scorched and sheep scattered as the broken hourglass can no longer count sand
Time toppled serenaded by applause canned
Toppled pyramids blind the eye of providence in the hour of unheralded prominence
The terror of history unfurls the efflorescence of piracy as ghosts work to subvert the invisible hand
Next dictums emerge that say supply on command, and entropy desecrates the land
Phone home to arm the putsch, clone home for aliens we push
Revisionism subverts the instruction of years and empowers the apotheosis of fear and the fourth ***** of George W. Bush
Dynasties envy the anonymity of a bald-eagle cabal of skinhead guffaw
Irascible genocide cavorts under the premise of shock and awe
The lullaby of morons is flinching assent to the supremacy of the unelected and unassailable tyrants
Discarding covenants on the principle of principality and counting on every knight to become errant
Pyrrhic victory of the perverted cross corrals the flock
Openly announced secrets enable the aliens to dock
At the port they are greeted as the victors and granted not only amnesty but indemnity
They brandish the unprecedented concept of an enumerated infinity
To amuse the zero-sum victory they author a new history of utilitarianism dethroning deontology
To the future readers they make contrite apologies
But when the races of men are annihilated by the evil Zen boasting of its utilitarian ken
The rubble of time cannot ascertain exactly how or when
But on the dreaded hour the virus will conspire to elect the most reproachable power
When panic reaches crescendo all the sugar in the world cannot but help to taste anything but sour
Abort the tyrannical machine no matter how convincingly it preens
No matter how much bunkum elevates the enchanting prevarication while concealing the affairs behind the scenes
Voting for balkanized splinters designed to weather the winter sustains the monopoly of sophistry
Ballyhoo saturates the airwaves and suddenly catcalling becomes gallantry
Tune out the pulpit, divest the culprit and impugn systemic venality
Dismantle the verisimilitude of shadows and hoist a giant mirror to reflect stark realities
Cue the curtains fall, the specters grow tall, and the clout is daunted by establishment doubt
The skeletonized truth severs the root but the behemoth armed to the teeth wages a bout
Cartels conspire with arms and fire and resurrect stodgy tenets to prowl like an army of vampires
To feed a fatuous superstition and to empower a censorship of convenience to enthrone a dark empire
Cunning preponderance enlists divisive shills to let the ghastly thriller exact its thrills
Occult obscurantism funds the vulnerable and tramples over the outspoken to actuate its will
Hopes dashed, stocks crashed and strife abundant
Generational dissonance revokes the incumbents
Chapter one of this unsung war come and gone
Stay tuned for the next addendum to see what is lost and who has won.

Innocence Molested
Innocence has been molested, thrown in dust bin
Just without any sin and just without any crime
The only sin of little girl was to get education to win
The laurels in days to come to serve in her prime

Morality has gone to dogs and dogs are but stray
Their masters are trying hard to save them for brutality
Shameless creatures are hidden in their ***** way
But this time they will not be safe for but heir hostility

Zainab was ***** and killed in the age of just seven
While her parents were on holy journey to Makkah
So sweet a girl being a martyr she embraced heaven
Her chastity purity were converted by rascals to saga

Criminals must be hanged till death for their ***** sin
Little girl be given justice with exemplary punishment
No more little girls be molested ,thrown but in dust bin
Corrupt elements be annihilated as declared and meant

Col Muhammad Khalid Khan
Copyright 2018 Golden Glow

Blinded by the sunlight that shines so brightly,
it proceeds to massage my spectacles,
rinsing the grime away from my eyes,
there lived mankind, buildings, plants, and animals,
but where was I, unaware of the planet I saunter,
I look in amazement, unborn to what to forecast,
but then I distinguished the dark side, somber and bleak,
impoverished skeletons walking hunchbacked, desperately
scrambling for silver, as so to purchase a bottle of liquor and a burger to indulge his vacancy that absents him,
as I trek my way further into this metropolis,
I hear a sudden commotion arising from the right direction,
it begins to steer me that way, luring me in deeply there was a mass of onlookers chanting on, of what seemed to be two individuals pummeling one another into a bloodbath, but then it escalated, the crowd began to all partake in the beating and it caused a mayhem, that was uncontrolled, I bolted the scene, protecting my mask from getting dismantled, as suddenly I hear a very deafening noise, it was a four wheeler wagon, that speedily amtrac it's way towards the locus in which we was in, everyone scattered the scene, as the people who dressed in uniform annihilated the scene, putting an outright stop to the madness that occurred, forestalling future procreation from the participants, my heart shriveled and I gasped for air, I ran aimlessly into a town that was lively and sunny, as I saw mankind playing sports, clubbing, riding nice convertibles, homes were futuristic, plants were vegetated, smiles and giggles were infectious, everyone was cheerful and amused enjoying this utopian I discovered, it was care-free, as folks walked in suit and ties, formal dresses, luggages entering and exiting, dialect as clear as caribbean sea, friendly animals chaperoned by their owner, "where am I?", "what was this strange but yet interesting soil I embark on?", ..... I don't know, but it closes me in like a maze and I'm forced to live as they.

Vernarth sequence

Prophecy I -  “Eighth month of sailing in systemic plenitude”

“Since they will not hunt us down in all our Itheoi cycles…
nor in other lapses from where the fine eye could have sewn the buttonholes of the shroud, where there will be life and if there will be a short time without life...
dragged by you for a long time where the sun is melted over the word, staying stored and locked in your pocket to collect it blushing,
tomorrow's jump without a yesterday declining..., without a tomorrow in the heat of a bonfire...
lamb in bait handled being the portal of those who have been slapped inside their cheeks… who will not shorten the cycle that transcends all the oblong sepulchral vaults or who abound in the nonsense of sanitizing nights of ***** despot life having to measure themselves in your flourishing duel by Aiónius of the cleanest dew of its solid stroke and announced delineation of the new one that has been retraced again being more than a brief syllable created again fertile, in the biosphere mouth so as not to see you omnipresent mist, meditating not having you and that dares to meditate on your future that will have to be reserved for yourself by professing it when you are cold in front of you and insinuating if in living followed by letters to be flooded pondering like a paralyzed sleeping part that wants not to be covered with feigned warmth and that does not fit in all the parts of me being who wants to be consul of some shelter with all those who sleep also half dreaming in the company of the lost afternoon that never ends serving Saint John in Katapausis here, perhaps Aiónius del Ibico 1 as a magnificent and net unit that sees the luminous truth when we all come out of a prophecy alive even if it's dark ".

"What a reckless job of losing value,
I am already in Katapausis in the eighth month...,
I entered as the light opened with my hand turned into the light...
being already a katapausis meaning in Sabbatarianism.
Quasi-unit method exhibiting cohesion to the rest motif
With levers in my hands and intra-sabbatism in his dissertation...
of an exegetical and theological nature that has transpired soft insomniac light, We are a people who do not have to fear or air to deposit for a future warehouse above the Sycamore or birds that guard all the Gold above my hands on the Sycamore…”

"Stay in my house, if I don't come back it will be yours
stay at home, it will belong to everyone even in the apocalypse...
that more reckless will be silent as a work of losing value,
Katapausis is the threshold where my life enters and leaves at once,
stay at my house, if I don't come back it will be yours...
Open windows by meekly closing them to that confronted obverse to you...

He comes from a den relativized on reliefs in weathered beads...
they will be soluble mineral beings convened moving away from the most distant and closest to the least distant…, from waters of underground siphons… there we will all be floating… like vertebrate invertebrate animals”

Vernarth, after not entering the grotto not having found Saint John, goes outside where he goes on a campaign for three months before he can be received by God's law. Here he meets with Reader and his pelican, as well as Eurydice.


Prophecy II -  “Seventh, Inter-synergy energy”

“Three months I have waited in the middle of this mountain,
symmetrically arranging the steps to be taken, not going backward
prana of life walking in oceans of life walking…
us and them… how much must separate us to reach us?
what I have not tried to separate…, what I have not been able to achieve…

I think I died early in the worlds that haven't risen yet,
I think I was reborn late among dense curves that overwhelm us with straight lines
soul, principle, matter, and material distinctive ontology
Ghost god of parallelisms beings and activities in affinity...
starvation body of low energy ceasing creatures in embryo
incessant firstborn to infuse other confining souls
trails demons slip where my ashes hands are sore
wounded doctrines to engender and doctrines to ulcerate...

As the prophecy uses the sea carrying messages resolved from shore to shore
close to a Virtual why in the twilight your Faith that must be glandular… matter of soul and body exposed to predisposing theological and chemical, in pursuit of the corruptible whole in vice versa if he does not burst with atheistic impatience.”

Eurydice takes a zither and sings tempting stormy actions to Vernarth, Raeder and Petrobus put their souls in line in the first linear principle, Together with the matter of corporeal fire proceeding to the definition where all the parts are confirmed without distinction dancing next to them creating the greatest bond of faith in body and soul, thus spending the three months in a few words of light of the sated fire.

"In the eighth-month katapausis, eight times your permanent peace must rest in
cited state; once it is translated into Sabbathisms and it will be the same state… When everyone finishes their dance in the cave and enters believing they have the courage to enter eight times in connection with rest…, plus eight times in connection without rest.
In some verses, the urgency of the entrance will be accentuated. The main issue “is that history will be repeating itself exactly where the Israelites were at Kadesh-Barnea. A related term either synonymous with Kadesh or referring to one of two sites, is Kadesh (or Qadesh) Barnea. Various etymologies for Barnea have been proposed, including 'wilderness of travel' but none have produced a broad consensus. What is the consensus? will we stop believing or lean on the shores of a preacher rain of Jehovah or lean on the shores of a preacher sinful waterfall or lean on the shores of a preacher confessing rain or lean on the shores of a preacher wet wind inquisitor...? where ever the aromas of its faithful winds served will go sacred to everything named before and many before the confessing rainy…, waterfalls in favor of the temperamental inquisitor wind”.

Astheneiais”, in Greek is and will be a weakness, in Hebrews a moral connotation and will mean not only physical weakness but a conscious weakness and trembling in temptation. Our Lord also understands us in this weakness because he was tempted in every way as we are. Since he himself was tempted he knows from experience what it means for us to be tempted. He was not tempted in all the particulars of our life, for example, He was not tempted as a husband or father, owner or employer or soldier, because he was none of these things. But he was tempted in all three areas of human susceptibility: body, soul, and spirit.

Prophecy III -  “Sixth, Resilience…”

“They were on the perimeter trying to keep me together at his command,
I go every day for its pantry, food, groceries, bookstore supplies and ink, oils, and other essences for the environment in continuous handwritten obedience, I have to leave for Skalá where some residents are waiting for me who have ordered to bring materials from Gricos and Psili Ammos to project your home,
If this has been written like this, it is because my pleasure in walking has written it, in the company of the one, he has written for the one who walks next to me the god Ibicus!

They always asked me why to mention why I have to do this for them… I will tell you that I used to serve leaders who consolidate the Hellenic geography,
without them, everything would have been invaded by unled foreign hands… in that rest, I have to attend to the verse that precedes it...
which says that we have already entered where I already intend to argue the following…

Resilience and exhortation that from the beginning I have taken since it began... now I will abide by and present your messages in a very predominant note, I was Hoplite Commander of the Falange and Hetairoi, now a Christian who does not dispute living a life of obedience to those who are not and are not without his martyrs...
like those people to whom God swore they will not enter my rest
whose amen will be preached in the passive voice verse!

Remain as the verb indicates with the real facts, the word
independent of the present, independent of who and when…
Saint Gabriel my Abrahamic angel will give me white strength and frolicking lilies like baskets of hermaphroditic lilies procreating only-begotten forests at the altar.

Stand tall over the Abrahamic fire without knuckles or shields,
rethink your beloved woman and take a sudden step to heal your wounds there is so much grass to cut and so much poetry to chew...
up the mountain towards Skalá at night after drinking wine
Epitrapezios Inos setting fire with innocuous saffron atmosphere
lips of fire and bread, for a good offensive fight.
Greek fire naphtha, cinnabar, and anthracite.

Wake up united with the deep disorder
Grant the color that deserves to have your day as a constellation
with the image that rests on your angular and calloused hands.
stopping spaces of loss more than all the centuries that waited for the minimum incense to a good warrior, sweet wine for open bleeding wound not his… the thunder that hides baptisms in all hearts empty of blood...

“While Vernarth was praying in the oracle he felt a thunderous supra sound As if the gates of hell had opened...
As if millions of seconds of angels were to be dispersed from the sky
To reduce more seconds of silence to the thinnest pleading eardrum

A few days ago I saw a ghost that was chopping wood...
I couldn't realize that he was really Him...,
I also saw him cutting thousands of volumes from a library...
Also, not realizing it, I saw several, like more than eighty manuscripts..., of breaths that still did not prosper in the hands of San Marcos...

A gigantic door slam is felt again...!
again it was the angels that came
at the wrong time in his return..., but now in his repatriation
they climbed through and into the Garden of Eden.”

Vernarth, evicted from the habit of the unknown, was apprehended by his craftsmanship of him, he was still attentive to be received by San Juan. The longer he waited to be arranged for an audience, he did not postpone what his memory pointed out to be more than an experience plotting capacities in the face of his own limitations. From that moment on, a gigantic gate slam is felt again! the angels who went back one after another with their polished golden-white cloaks relapsed..., but now making the Garden of Eden their own,... being theirs in what was theirs, that they would be in the house of a wise gardener of Eden perhaps being the same Katapausis manger at once!

Raeder says: hugging him profusely! time has to fly like little angels, having them by your side as companions of the time that is leftover on their wings, giving it all to your enjoyment of living and feeling it lost in you without finding it. ! khaire mi Vernarth!, I have some karidopitas with nuts and yogurt accompanied by baklava with nuts in delicious syrup from Kalymnos. Petrobus jumped for joy and fluttered like a hummingbird to steal a few pieces! Eurydice and Vernarth did the same. That night they told militia stories while they ate the morsels, so they fell asleep as if it had been the first time they had fought such a great menu. Euridice assists in the same with his fresh clean face, creating an atmosphere of conciliation to renew the dream of a day that will dawn close to his waking up far from the criminals. Vernarth takes the staff from him from then on and divides books and manuscripts into two portions so that he has time to take steps to really feel that he can walk close to Saint John.

Prophecy IV -  "Fifth, Nature, Manuscripts and Jophiel"

“Zeus wakes up trembling, full of headaches saturated with Herbs for headaches Jophiel speaking this time with the Kabbalistic language of the Torah...with golden commoner super zone of the Organikon Sorousliston Papadikon….age-old music that supplies Zeus with protein albumin, to make him more human…Zeus accepts Jophiel by placing his head about the house of Jophiel; a divine island to throw cards…brings the second ray to the Sahasrara at the crown of your head, pacifying love that is the suspicious and risky loser of everything risk in the head especially when a feeling is born!

Zeus turns his head and Jophiel twists it to the opposite side
about the ruined zeros that he did not count from the plasma of his dependency, Zeus feared having albumin at risk of human transmutation... happy to be able to cry he imagines slipping into the middle of a lake and he sees that he falls on Hera's poultry harming none, Zeus pours brimstone from his mouth and milks inelegant prose from the scythe…

Trina flame whose son bears glorious her bearer,
thousands of lives being clumsy for the wisest destitute
being what in the present you were more than past trine
when you harbor from Hanael's Blue Sodalite quarry
the imperfect perfects when you listen to your
body how it beats, how it breathes... you realize that it is perfect
as is Jophiel and discerns repairing the wisdom in the decisive punt
where gum rosin myrrh and multi urban frankincense go
towards the soul plane architecture of the human plane.
Hardened Zeus overflows glazed sallow emulsion of war
coagulated exhausting guarantor of everything is well,
books of the silent world of nails that do not sound sheets,
Hanael in massive books divides sounding with her iris gel-colored nails encrypted library manuscript of a thousand years, the voluptuous organism of a thousand years…
flapping unpredictable millennia and wiry hands,
colossal capstans…, annihilated with a thousand years…
a silly propeller that spins like a sickle rolling over a certain holistic tabernacle of the small portion of the next day when Zeus awoke to the diaphanous threatening light with sunless cloud waistband…
His face is seen with frowns and he looks at his face as well
without seeing folds…but in front of the Aiónius.

The geranium appears in the representation of the natural whole kicking the Sickle, much more here lost of our spiritual being
Zeus Jophiel's hardened shoulder heats up only to lean on Him...
light on his shoulders fires on both of them…
how long it takes to save us perhaps twenty times what supports us even tired and much more unwrapped than the treachery of him alone and without being followed without knowing
nothing more than a thousand-year-old shell through which he would drain…perhaps a tortoise-like millennial angel walked up to the omega! joy preparing to give you live hopeful,
that if it would be timely to give you more life...
Here is Aiónius reordering the world together with Zefian…
He shares everything eternal of all your life that floats in the sea,
miserable mix space where capo dastro separates the end
where all the wheres cannonade the hoarse fire...
cement that joins brick wall and plenary adobes
love without nature that castrates your beautiful woman
that hides her face without mascara looking for it...
let's go outside says Vernarth..., we still have a few seconds in his solvent... sensible, full, and arc well-being...
as if you were floating in the air floating more
also needed me to teach you before your limits limit you,
and make you angry from the miserable sense,... Don't listen to me anymore...!!”

Vernarth puts his first three fingers on the capo dastro roosters crow with his skin vibrating beyond the sleep of Raeder and Petrobus. Reader wakes up and says…; My Vernarth I will make fire and heat water. Petrobus runs with his wings to look for sacred wood. Eurydice comments…, I will prepare the praiseworthy sacred breakfast.

When they were preparing to do all this, Jophiel and Hanael appeared to him, joining in the breakfast that would feed all the days and millennia of the world. Unleavened fruit, honey, and milk multiply above all, satiating hunger with satiated satisfaction.

Prophecy V – Fourth, Limbus Necropolis

“From so far away…, so far away that I listen to your sacrosanct cries…!
from the Koumeterium of Messolonghi…, rocking my elbows and hurting myself
moving in rare pleasant crypt upon crypts disconsolate stones
not so far away..., keys held in the eighth cemetery...
Who is to open the heavy door now...?
I come from Messolonghi 555 km in linear figures to Patmos...,
narrowing concave… doubtful in extension, passion princess cloud
He must welcome me benevolently in the night nymph consort...
Limbus N cloud, Cloud Cemetery lofty lofty hypogeum
soul of Limbo, before seeing the nut that girds the face in the graceful Grim Reaper resurrecting restless…, sinning… grail sacrament without Being or being…?
Necropolis Cloud, expectant mortuary technology...
amaze me if there is a byte for me...
narrow conscience, unseemly to amaze me?

Here the lost mist of the Nothofagus God phoneme-photon vanishes with divine mass light to build the Áullos Kósmos. The Sacrament of Limbus will provide spaces and assemblages of meters for thousands of areas of infamous wandering the Ouranos, approaching the Áullos Kósmos to host him and rescue the children of the meter that was missing in the numeral rule of the Megaron acroteria before going up to the Necropolis Cloud. Vernarth, mere body formalizing principle...
extinct delicate evocation of the shadow of Elpenor;
Achaean warrior of Ulysses grandiloquent who even has otitis
and verse where flu spreads influenza
heartbreak from far away reverberating in the elite of lexicons…
arriving equidistant ... the last one arrives threatening with his Kantabroi staying neither divided nor captured, taking refuge in outright failure twilight of megahertz, farce propaganda surrendered fear will not fall even after …

Vernarth falls from the Koumeterium Mesolonghi in the Necropolis cloud privileging his status, he falls from this gloomy digital platform with a high alcoholic degree! from the high heaven after drinking hours he came in the carriage that was from Zilos, with the passion of heaven depriving his understanding stunned on some branches of will of Ziziphus…, stunned on branches of mercy….

Vernarth in a contrite accident with Elpenor, his psyche flies to the realm of the dead, Hades was remaining prisoner in that world taking the form of a Homeric icon or shadow. Vernarth was asleep after his binge, and Elpenor asks him if he wanted to join him with some concoctions. He was with blurred vision, a headache, and still lying down. But in the passionate horror of his drunkenness, he gets up quickly, saying to Elpenor: For me, it was one less pain to drink after having fallen from such a distance without being able to request and have had the grace of my mother's lullaby. For this reason, I hug you! They went together to the Cloud Necropolis to continue in the Limbus trying to alternate their physical body to gaseous liquid. At that moment Eurídice hits her with a piece of wood on her legs so that she wakes up from the bite of that nightmare that overwhelmed her to finally be able to wake up. Raeder had gone with Petrobus to Skalá to seek inputs of gnosis and his own inspiration for accents before the welcome in Katapausis to come in the blink of an eye of San Juan, necessary redaction for licenses and to be admitted to his library.

Prophecy VI - “Third, Rethymnon City and State”

“Vernarth heard the sound of a bouzouki, spoke of a 40-day fast that Greece celebrates before Easter, at the Rethymnon carnival they come from all over Greece to attend as a family during the week with animations, evenings and concerts, dances…theatre, floats with Venetian art in the picturesque old town and modern city, in this ancient city …

Rethymnon Political Ellipsis

“Like territorial extension, past-future organized infamous scene…Vernarth imagines being with Etréstles in immediate predictions
with years and thousands…, clan hobbies, Rethymnon manuscript…
while he thus deliberated…, thus rejoicing in the immaculate extramural grotto thus being as if it were comparable to a Neolithic village; being together lost with eagerness to appear from political power... palaces, kings, pro-organized religions..., rancorous superlative temple, priestly-eucharistic, nationalized sovereign citizen... commanding Parliament of the Hellenic politai people
the competent anti-value entity of the substratum political state…
sedentary-agricultural or nomadic-livestock culture…, vertical Hoplite culture!”

In Thessaloniki street, he would meet his brother head-on...Imagining how he would be...? Well-dressed-shiny, he would be in a passing tavern usually naming himself tradition and terms of questionable validity rather than those of a retro-linguistic family, in the remarkable urban-city dialogue called seditious inns with networks of political territorial extension, reaching the colossal size of multinational ideals of a complex stratification, social meeting place, future ministries to whom to delegate?. They would arrive at the tavern in Rethymnon in Crete, they order coffee, biscuits, and Mosaikó chocolates. In an unexpected moment, he suddenly wakes up from this deep, hallucinating, and futuristic imagination! His brother appears immediately, not in Rethymnon but in Katapausis with the goddess Lepidoptera!

End Ellipsis Rethymnon

“At the moment his imagination breaks just when they were preparing to toast… Etréstles in this same interval appear in Katapausis Reader and Petrobus coming in a singular pilgrimage from Skalá…this is how the syllabic song of the arcane ***** is heard emitting from the grotto…, yellow lights and saffron…. Saint John and the Gospel celebrating the Eucharist…Vernarth would believe for the first time that the hermit would come, but No…!
his brother was to be in the intervening yellow-white light
in front of him nothing more than Etréstles visiting him”

Likewise, they would no longer be in Rethymnon,
but the carnival would already begin in the region of Patmos...
eating delicacies, and the Sousta towards the circle of the Sun in the hands…They have been two months with the sweetened Moon and the Sun posing its mass of light in her… soft palm next to her waiting for him in the proximity of a Hebrew silence

Estretles says Khaire Vernarth! from Piacenza who did not see your joyous lux! I can see now to the sound of yourself the stoic zither...
countenance light, the orbit of your eyes, pale asthenia without photon without light, expectorant suppuration of your sacred Lynothorax, Absent in front of the long and fatal transverse lapse!
Raeder makes a speech to Zeus Photon Child Lux
Fulminant spends time where it remains greater than the minimum...
Patmos is the time of the Messiah…, retrograde years…
polis Helennic city-states.

Culture-state… state time chorus in tune
Philosophical poetic-epic Olympian Aiónius global leader
Homeric poems..., Raeder I am..., a naughty Politai...
you Vernarth are Politai Hetairoi militia
candy wasted by me Raeder… sweetened in my memory
polytheistic, cultured and declined…
theocratic referendum or democratic right,
Exciting porridge of my Kourabiedes cookies
butter, icing sugar, flour, eggs from the icy cliff
vanilla or Mastica resin, ***, Ouzo, mastica liquor…
or other alcoholic beverages…, which bubble on the underside of Aiónius soaked in my mouth with water from petal buds
coated for you with sugar on the tip of my tongue…
reflective cops in a wonderful dialogue of a tasty recipe...
It's time for everyone else to snack too!!

In that second Raerder was choking on a Kourabiede biscuit,
but there was the guardian of the Petrobus who piloted the
throwing hieratic water on the inside of his mouth,
forcing him to take heart from the buttress of his speech
shooing thick crumbs from his skinny dialogue spitted...
Gerakis, ray, tabletop oak bull, scepter for those who rule with him and not...My Zeus friend I invite you to play marbles,
I invite you to tell us that we are friends...
we're both fine… only Space-separated us…?

Raeder runs towards Zeus' thunderbolt from his right hand.
he jumps up and takes it from her, in exchange for this she gives him his marbles...The entire earth tilts over the Aegean..., the earth's axis tilts eight degrees, altering the cerebrospinal fluid of the Hellenic geopolitical conception..., with Zeus poly infarcted over descending magnitudes of inter-politics, millennia and headless governments...

“Apokalypsis lightning restarted, emerged from a New World”
Prophecy VII -. “Second, Alikanto Aion, Quantum”
"Kalymnos, golden tetra steed Alikanto was grazing under the metallic moon...
transiting its quantum physics…, golden legs…, four golden domes
the super host being in Apoika Andros next to the villagers,
commemorating troupe and advent…, Heraklion next period
celebrant anniversary, progeny bearer of Kanti Cretense,
close cycles of the sacred fire, domestic environment, and private zeal...
funerary hidden cult… streets in the hieratic family dwelling
fertile women… totalized and lustful ****…
productive longevity and harvests…, family Apoika
next successor belligerence…, funerary plexus…
culty predecessor…, treatise and imprecation of law, theme and legible religion domestic scene, family civic servant ceremony

Goddess Hestia austere, head with eight sacred candles dressed
Olympus lacking without gods…, only Goddesses embargo!
Feminine Hestia Domestic Goddess, an emanation of the female oval to ovulating…Pritaneo, the central decree of the political harvests… foreign exchange grains to be minted monetary stock exchange of Athens… Pritaneo ford on the rise, ford on increase Aion... hesitant dart swoop into eternity,
Alikanto Perpetual Aion…Speaks with both hands
synchronized and tilted tongue…
stutters and swallows, in six paranasal sinuses
saturated with fiery saliva..., and an Internal voice saying say...
what makes sense to feel and what does not turn off...
sleeping waves in the poison of love igniting
intra-Vernarth love…, billing infected holy blood
methodical coupled time…, Gaugamela the bronze extremity,
of a lost leader…, won leader!

If I had to run to rewrite retro Adhoc poems and chosen trova,
With a shy Trojan verse, I would dare today if I kissed her in front of me… she!
she would jump from the hyperesthetic-Ouranos…, inhuman to the Aion world
aurora celestina, bleeds big and defiant today in your star
In herself Ella…, pestiferous condemnation sweetness and aura between her…she just be, she herself be supported be…, Oh… Goddess Hestia on your opposite leg unbraced arm, meadow and vein braid… assaulted by lost and thirsty love written everything if she tempts…, everything wields darkly if it took you to our Olympus… at night loving you whole..., emptying everything with no inappropriate hand singing don vine fissure and intimate company, may it be exterminated... passion outside with nailed stake..., iron embedding..., nails wounding...exhausted supra lips supra yours…, mid sand writing full to her…
tip of my Xiphos… blood made written with written maiden mythology,
letter sword Spatha…, cyclamen balm made whole if I had you!

“To the loves of the world I say…, cover your ears fungus of boredom, your torn ears squander ignoring more than sordid saying...my blood kills, my blood revives! I **** my blood and I **** everyone, with your blood scattered, ***** blood scattered…!
do not leave me alone until nightfall… I only ask for holy water,
emptied from your mouth goddess Hestia who flies tons over me...
I only ask for a spatha romantic blood sharp, ******, and scattered...
to write to the love wars that I have lost...
to the wars of love that I have won, slicing the jugular of the
treacherous and wicked emperor"

“… Alikantus, he remembered the Hoplite commander in Gaugamela, he remembered when he dodged arrows with his head so that they would not hit his body or his pectoral. From such a present moment falling by surrendering to the evocation of him. He goes down to a stream and confines himself to the vanity quagmire, continues on his path reaching a suspicious lagoon, drinks sacred water, drinking again manages to perceive the effigy of Vernarth in the mirror of Aion's Hydor... calling him from Patmos! Law reminded his master how he died for everyone in the world just as the world would not let him bring more than agonizing for him because there was no more space said Aionius ... "

Alikantus then clenched his jaws too hard, falling out all his molars, he asked the Gods in front of Hestia to restore them fifteen days before arriving at the Ekadashi in Patmos where his master, thus loving all the lives of the world, as well as the hidden cries behind the Dypilons hiding the power of God… or laugh at gagged iris flashes and mummified sighs with lives that subsist!

Vernarth from Patmos called to him so that his eyes looked invigorated like the swarms of green and gray vanadium fire, of mood in the predictive table and close prediction. AlIkantus bids farewell to Kalymnos spraying sorrel and hyper-odoriferous flowers of the Apoika in Kalymnos loving from above, very close, flying, loving everything so much that he forgot to fly. He sometimes fell hard but recovered retried as a baby steed in the womb of a mother new species to be born again in Apoika!


Prophecy VIII -  "First of Aionius, "Eleusis Prophecy of Hamor"
“Aiónius received news of Hamor's prophecy; cosmic orgiastic order
tyrannical snake victim throwing herself into her abyss and purpose..., banishment as an objective void to be decreed, even so ending the world from another world,
discontinuous terse march, slurred arpeggio, speech by Aiónius
there is no world left but if extermination…, undone threshold…, provoke in delicate chaos…!

As a child, I ran to the supreme world herding lions... I called them and they ran to me..., they came alone, some didn't...! Being young, one day Aionius went to the farm and counted the lions... Some came others No... Aionius..., in such a hamorio he was locking an earring from his ears, he hung them again, which happened the next day relaxed..., he saw a maiden who laughed hypnotized…, he sighed when she turned around saying with her poor gestures… Destroy it! The afflicted turned away not knowing what was coming… destroying the desolate world vilifying silky physiognomies, chipped and dandruff face slipping from yours being captive and arid…, tempts to flow libertarian imprint in foreign praxis, origin, and end,
me from the slime being born in my eighth life in nothingness ataxia…

The beloved Victim surrounded by snakes moved the stump of her arms
eaten away by the serpent that took refuge in thorns of forged steel...
she kept walking…, Aiónius pointed at her and kissed her gestures escaping frightened towards the valley in farewells... not fitting itself in valleys that were never anything she paraded with the current of her last word, the beloved again moved her arms following her in front of her the beast was on her, Aiónius buried from fleeing and coming… with fiery phenotype, abrupt vocabulary, says: “Strapping and interludes, after beings of impiety, the world of impiety, Hamor of the first wit… towards other refuges I will depart about a Yes devouring bare ring on it…”
escape curve that cuts the pelvis of my beloved
destructive be your curved world that before had to destroy me...
ultra pre-hellenic nymph Harpé passion spread on me…
Hailed libertarian praise, aristocratic vermilion accent, minority ruling? Overwhelming rigor expended, prophetic Hamor, prophetic expansive arsenal! It must come from all the supreme worlds with strokes and silhouettes conquering...true dream, confused hypothetical oscillate sweeping imploring and contracting popular decision, management and space of my Sickle…, sometimes uncontained… worse avenues in its radius and dark mourning badly wounded shadow! The vertex that finally launches opens the dawn and his Hamada flees... Leaving with the untidy serpent, about touching and causing rangers in the stuck earth.

Demeter and Persephone; based on Eleusis in ancient Greece
mystery myth of the abduction of Persephone daughter of Demeter…
by the king of the underworld of Hades, Abrahamanica's offspring
cabal, life in the descent, the search and the ascent…
Ascent of Indra lightning Vahana and lightning from her right eye,
Persephone to the reunion with her beloved daughter ascending.

Zodiac and mysteries involved, visions and sleight of hand
that of an afterlife, rain of seven trunks, long-lived Airavata
elephant, Eleusis jump psychedelic mystery, incision, and coherent rites, ceremonies and experiences of cold winters and life on earth
plants in gestation under the gift of Elitíaen and beings that
they are about to germinate and be born, beings in a chain of genes...
vegetable running on the earth, vegetable in March in its glory
September in the jaws of the purified phrase and inaccurate acropolis I…

Sacred obscenities, deadly tributes with the death penalty...,
wandering nights without clothes with obese and badly fragrant meats point and taco dances praising the harvest in honor of a dead Thracian bull, libating priestly vessels and bullfighting heads in a deliberately defined and improper triweekly ritual, revealed in Demeter and Persephone.

Only Hamor in his venerable pyx lies locked up knowing he is unable to open inside this lustful bewitching sparkles, the mystery of emancipated disenchantment that awakens from his slow consciousness without knowing how to go on passing in the sum of all happenings of Aiónius. ”

This is how he defined himself from the syncretism of Indra and the mystery of Eleusis, from Demeter and his daughter Persephone from the vile kidnapped underworld. Of the divine Goddess Elitia and the annual records of children born within a year in the germinating seed of the mystery of love that would begin with this prophecy with the initial "H" of the underworld exclaimed Hades and Greek heritage in this event. Vernarth and his companions listened to this prophecy, almost falling asleep, it seemed to them sweet pallor-bitter, love-heartbreak in the previous day before diagnosing having a presence in the hermitage of San Juan Apóstol for the superior company of a later day that was approaching as the greatest daring of all up in the mountains while disposing of Vernarth's Apologist obverse of Aiónius's.

Epilogue Prophecies - “Eleusis, Isadora Duncan to the Parthenon”

“Vernarth and Eurydice indulged in the jargon of agitated diasporas
of inhabitants fleeing the Rite of Eleusis, crossed hands and feet
They dueled on olive trunks with Theban thunder, vague Insurrection of the ancient world, and consonants of barbarian Pleiades,
acclaiming predilection of the Eremita San Juan to appear...
in a breath of peace resurfacing... but seeing that Vernarth was accompanied of Eurydice hid in front of them leaving only her aura near from the stream of a chrysalis!
In the dizzying succession of myths, good news reaches her sacred ears, waking up her trend and her high quarterly price outside the walls... being later received in the grotto of the hermitage in growing expectation and a link of longing that weaves to remind him of being a crusade piece.

The kidnapping of his reverie feared and timid frivolous crushing blizzard, he was walking surrounded by Falangists on horseback pointing at him and threatening him, scrutinizing in the distance loneliness of his past lives,
his regressive life, concerning key to origins of his illustrative Existence, stranded at this moment..., Vernarth makes a pact with himself to detach himself..., of his spirit, detach from their lives under a hypnotic and compelling law..., like a suspended index in the Sistine Chapel, homologous ship Ave Maria Messiah!

From Eleusis Vernarth vanished in aerial horse-dreaming,
he crossed through the pavilions with himself persevering some wake
riding his Alikantus ******* and standing with him to pillage the Empyrium niche Persephone's trace of herself and her ******* ******* them...
with devoted passion, milky way, and milky syrup chin howling...
Vanishing dancer, Athenian acropolis, Dionysian sanctuary of the acropolis… Stepdaughter-patron in the dance of Zeus and Themis lopsided frame of the season's wildness of all creation and defiance of Eleusis looking for her daughter and her children, priestesses safely taking off their corset and their pictures…
raging chastity, oligo blood, Itheoi music, outraged dance complaining, Possessed expressing being seductive but also a native *******... the underworld in darkness, free daughter, and iconoclastic Greek mythologist
inconvenient Victorian mania, a courtesan from Olympus, courtesan undressed! Isadora, Demeter, and Persephone… flooded with Aphrodite foam!

She “prayed songs with plexus and feet, plotting gardens around the world… full of baseboard feet where everything created in brief Apokálypsis was dying! By desolate Parthenons dancing in Muscovite ruins, maenades sweaty enclave and also throwing back his head as if possessed by ecstasy in her Bugatti and Leonidas…, enchanted by Aiónius! intoxicated and exorbitant with beautiful rosy placebo eyes... Hair with headbands vine petioles, her Nebris tight skin was wearing... in her hand's bunches of barberries to Dionysus with torches and live snakes a chaste crook naming Thirsus; rod topped with Kashmar branches wrapped in borders, vines and ivy, allusive link…, morbid ecosystem! covering her crotch in the Temple of her Kopanos dancing from the eternal fire cremated and in a romantic dimension remembering Byron's meritorious…
Hellenic passionate, and of Hölderlin poeticizing together with Aiónius.

Rudiment wound … ruinous on value exciting in those
of the imagined and creative in her perdition, Sicalipsis e impudicias
torn fire in the Metelmi and her ***** we are twisted,
epic worthy of greek tragedy dancing like waves of fire
in the forge in terrifying death of her children Deirdre and Patrick,
submerged and injured in the Seine in Paris in 1913, falling into the
water in the car that was traveling with her wet nurse… before…!
saying goodbye to them in urgent social commitments,
I Aiónius take you to the Empyrium.

What a dire tribulation in the prevailing misfortunes by not postponing it, retain the fate of whose children is quite a story with the kidnapping of theirs and merits of fulfilling commitments committed to solicitous artists... support, crestfallen inside a dresser or Bolshoi dancing statue, dancing empty with bare feet, frigid anemone, frigid Sea…

Arriving at the dawn of her last prophecy, Isadora Duncan accompanies her in full life beyond all limiting borders with the borders of her dance, the flat field of Eleusis receives her presumptuously associating in around for the dressings...
And left-handed dalliance self-indulging…, advanced barefoot to the Parthenon…!naked towards the world and the orb dug out of her before her undressed.

Reader and Petrobus jumped on this steep stone, emulating the meteorites that shone in the sky of Patmos such a party of nocturnal lights, such emery detached from a fleeting planet in the largest Hellenic scene saying: "Well-being to the Hellenic World all calm, dance and immunity to the firmament where Isidora rests in the Kantabroi of Aionius”

The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned
To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,
And spread the roof above them,--ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication. For his simple heart
Might not resist the sacred influences
Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
Mingled their mossy boughs, and from the sound
Of the invisible breath that swayed at once
All their green tops, stole over him, and bowed
His spirit with the thought of boundless power
And inaccessible majesty. Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd, and under roofs
That our frail hands have raised? Let me, at least,
Here, in the shadow of this aged wood,
Offer one hymn--thrice happy, if it find
Acceptance in His ear.

                       Father, thy hand
Hath reared these venerable columns, thou
Didst weave this verdant roof. Thou didst look down
Upon the naked earth, and, forthwith, rose
All these fair ranks of trees. They, in thy sun,
Budded, and shook their green leaves in thy breeze,
And shot towards heaven. The century-living crow,
Whose birth was in their tops, grew old and died
Among their branches, till, at last, they stood,
As now they stand, massy, and tall, and dark,
Fit shrine for humble worshipper to hold
Communion with his Maker. These dim vaults,
These winding aisles, of human pomp or pride
Report not. No fantasting carvings show
The boast of our vain race to change the form
Of thy fair works. But thou art here--thou fill'st
The solitude. Thou art in the soft winds
That run along the summit of these trees
In music;--thou art in the cooler breath
That from the inmost darkness of the place
Comes, scarcely felt; the barky trunks, the ground,
The fresh moist ground, are all instinct with thee.
Here is continual worship;--nature, here,
In the tranquillity that thou dost love,
Enjoys thy presence. Noiselessly, around,
From perch to perch, the solitary bird
Passes: and yon clear spring, that, midst its herbs,
Wells softly forth and visits the strong roots
Of half the mighty forest, tells no tale
Of all the good it does. Thou hast not left
Thyself without a witness, in these shades,
Of thy perfections. Grandeur, strength, and grace
Are here to speak of thee. This mighty oak--
By whose immovable stem I stand and seem
Almost annihilated--not a prince,
In all that proud old world beyond the deep,
Ere wore his crown as loftily as he
Wears the green coronal of leaves with which
Thy hand has graced him. Nestled at his root
Is beauty, such as blooms not in the glare
Of the broad sun. That delicate forest flower
With scented breath, and look so like a smile,
Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,
An emanation of the indwelling Life,
A visible token of the upholding Love,
That are the soul of this wide universe.

  My heart is awed within me when I think
Of the great miracle that still goes on,
In silence, round me--the perpetual work
Of thy creation, finished, yet renewed
For ever. Written on thy works I read
The lesson of thy own eternity.
Lo! all grow old and die--but see again,
How on the faltering footsteps of decay
Youth presses--ever gay and beautiful youth
In all its beautiful forms. These lofty trees
Wave not less proudly that their ancestors
Moulder beneath them. Oh, there is not lost
One of earth's charms: upon her ***** yet,
After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies
And yet shall lie. Life mocks the idle hate
Of his arch enemy Death--yea, seats himself
Upon the tyrant's throne--the sepulchre,
And of the triumphs of his ghastly foe
Makes his own nourishment. For he came forth
From thine own *****, and shall have no end.

  There have been holy men who hid themselves
Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave
Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived
The generation born with them, nor seemed
Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks
Around them;--and there have been holy men
Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus.
But let me often to these solitudes
Retire, and in thy presence reassure
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,
The passions, at thy plainer footsteps shrink
And tremble and are still. Oh, God! when thou
Dost scare the world with tempests, set on fire
The heavens with falling thunderbolts, or fill,
With all the waters of the firmament,
The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods
And drowns the villages; when, at thy call,
Uprises the great deep and throws himself
Upon the continent, and overwhelms
Its cities--who forgets not, at the sight
Of these tremendous tokens of thy power,
His pride, and lays his strifes and follies by?
Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face
Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath
Of the mad unchained elements to teach
Who rules them. Be it ours to meditate
In these calm shades thy milder majesty,
And to the beautiful order of thy works
Learn to conform the order of our lives.

Fundamentals of madness
    wraps the skin around my brain
miter'd head splits wide open,
        like blue skies wanting to thunder
dark heart leapt out from under
          blinded burnish'd eyes
world looks annihilated
       from the validity of upside down
birds have severed vocal chords,
butterflies shed their wings
          there's no dance left, aside from
   ghost steps of a psychotic menacing waltz
          & one dark raven hauntingly swaying

Marielle indicates: “Your luminosity, Copernicus vibrating in Giordano Bruno, expresses hypotheses that they revive to Quentinnais from the third hour, from here now I am hospitalized and without light to line the end where I will put my feet evasive. Raymond Bragasse is here where I met him, and I saw him with his holy rosary on his necklace, and on Andrés Panguiette's claw. That you grumble, they excommunicate my sentences, which are that of the rooster that becomes gentle in a Corso, Sardinian or Roman Praetorian, in the leap I relegate to San Gabriel, with its magical art that excites the retentiveness of Saint George. Under what science do they moderate me by joining you, or what century will intuit us with its own splendor, whose obscurantism under his revolution mutes anyone in the darkness of the cave of Dionysius. The divinity postpones itself, to leave its daily chores where souls fly daily ..., they do not stop leaving with their spoils after the fairies that fly to purgatory. But many have passed over me, and I was wondering where to find you, I never thought that I should fly over a swarm of wasps to reach your divine lair, full of regulatory darkness for those who live against the light, and of an Elizabethan garment that dismisses my ring, where Its natural original magic is isolated from our semi-alive body, with brittle Egyptian suns that redoubled where I had to wait for you at the Pentecost bench. What retarding essence dries up who does not show any vital or symbolic avital sign, where the rough cyclicality does not allow me to chastise my hair in any vanity for you. Oh that Moral spellings referring to my commendation, if it is not apostasy! What else would I dare to speak, through the sky flying away from the lunar books of Vivencia, where it is sent from its orbit towards the cosmos free of all and of all with Wonthelimar free of me, confined of Marielle. I know that I am analogous **** of the Libri Dei Viventi, perhaps sackcloths or coats have to be spun in Parnassus, to gird myself to myself, and not Marielle cloistered in her solitude, who does not receive the Vivendi torpor of her paradisiac sacrilege when seducing a supposed daughter of Hecate, fortunately, I have to guess with a swarm, and stay in the nets of your cave. With the stanza that is invested in rhetorical values, I go crazy for love to which I am conjured, but from Marielle now or in hundreds of years that pester on my sackcloth, which will never be used for the liturgy with you, if I revive in the crisis of resurrection in the arms of Saint George in the stained glass window in Avignon, and in his forearm that passes through the worst emotional crypts of my author.

As I have to contest hostile votes that are netted in the puritanism of those who only wear sackcloth in the unstitched Mausoleums of Quentinnais, and in the strident leaves that move elected in his advent, where the subclavian of Luzbel stands. Unanimous I have to dare by asininity ...! Moderating threads of horror and silver light, which revives us in the beasts and in their perches, ad libitum in the lattices where it emerges from the conspiracy of our tragedy. Oh, what an impetuous incarnation of the anti-Christian verb has to express itself in your incarnations of light and restless shadow, in the apse of the discanted in Avignon, and in the acroteria shadow, suffering from cowardice by not wanting to see me angelic, universal predisposition, just to know fit and what to say with your soul lineage and twin life, who only knows how to love you. Our reincarnations are rescued, now that we go to Patmos intimidated, in the sound of shining the veiled Vernarth, reprimanded in his acquiescent morality under his own law and his glasses, born from his rib that ends in the exception of a foul dialogue. It is premature for me to say what I do not have to write, but the particles slowly fall through the beam of their adjective essences, reshaping exterminated historiographies that want to make green, in colloquia that draw the eyes of whoever wants to blind the profane cult, absorbed in sallow particles in four sciences and elements… What unresolved probe and mass can strike your heart poured into you Wonthelimar? You know when we get to Profitis I will go holding your hand in the morning, to adore you and kneel down, we will deal with why we lost ourselves, and why the sun has not stained me with so much fury, carrying me burned in tongues of its consumptive and guttural infinity. After taking the hand of dawn, I will sue the impossible quagmire and its Áullos Kósmos, weakened by theoretical openness, lacking unity, but not far from my vanistory, nor from the sessile fluff of my hair, waiting for you with your stormy return to hold me. Ayia Lavra will declare war on the eighth cemetery of Messolonghi, with solidity and sanctity that frees my chains in a single trident, paling in the rust of it, methodological treatise, and where the determination of veracity is annihilated.

Because I have to go to heaven when I want to offer myself to you, without any century that has received me with fewer wounds than those I had yesterday in its indolent septicemia, with miracles and incense burners that burn in imprecate, and provide a pagan theology of human filth. , not portraying biblical when your plurality dressed as a secular thirteenth, by referrals or Greco-Gallic that arise from the love that has no end or beginning in the autonomy of an incorruptible being, and even less when you wear sweets in its lavender lex. Genius Loci, or amplified reality, rather your idea of sticking with me when I have not been, and of attracting me when the future in the portal is made in the perfect symmetry of him, or whoever looms excited in his cabal. The body is no longer inscrutable, overworking with poetry to constrict my torn voice, running at great speed to seize the cosmetic that paints our faces, Selene and her luster aggravate punctuality and the status of science in creation. I have read volume VIII, and I saw that tears flowed by where I never thought ... !, for exchanges that marginalize an established authority, nor with more childish will I undone the garments of his self-description. Mime or jester in front of me in my catalog of the tragic actress with the anemic volume of her, pointing out uprisings in new waves, on seas that did not have them ..., loaded in new skeptical allegorical clouds, on truths that were already understood in the jealous name. It is incumbent on us to navigate with lamps that have to guide us through dark Ptolemaic hexahedra or henbane crusts, which do not manage to go over the sentry boxes of a divine gesture. How to dare to a final gesture of inflaming with you in factions and premises beyond an apocalypse, or of a Penelope that is gestated in a god, or becomes unknowable of a prevailing divine plan.

Charged with our dissidence, we will go far from the unknown burdens, that scripts are annexed in the new birth of our fiefdom and in their great expectation. Now four elytra have been born on my back, who hope to reveal to you the categories of the deleterious vanquished, reduced to only two Ptolemic emetics ..., you and I in a final judgment, which we already know well about, about the seventh eras that await us in the Southern Sporades, and in his final judgment in the eighth. O Jerusalem, I deprive my oldest sin by conceiving, but rather by confessing it with you. What insurgent dualism will make me get rid of myself and be reborn indestructible in its dizzying relish where the multi-chained temptation of redemption runs towards you? Wonthelimar…, I'm here, in this thunder slip writing for you. I have distanced my head united to yours so that it is not destroyed, for all thoughts, where although you are my diluted kingdom, I will beg You to leave me in the growing vertical anticipated flight from my body, but later in my consciousness which is what which will pre-exist with his Roman staff intertwining with his lusters, and in the syntagmas of Vernarth, which come from the Sporades of Patmos. As I honor and glorify Him in the southern part of him, my dear sackcloth has warmed away from my myopic eyes, already feeling your face breath on me, I will be able to vindicate narrated stories after we part before God!

The golden rays are all on ****** green.
And here I sit in a fix:
‘Which mask to choose for today?’
A smile of pretence,
Or a frown of reality;
Don’t panic; I’m a Chameleon.

Then I chose the smile.
For the malice in me told so.
Cause I met you this morning,
And I couldn’t show you my true face.
I chose to pretend to my best.
And see; I was successful in fooling you.
And I’m Chameleon, you know.

I said I was ‘sorry’,
Wonder even my lips meant that?
I changed my color from black to white.
You seemed fine and there I succeed.
For the fire burning in me,
Ignited me each second;
No offence, I’m a Chameleon.

In the process to demolish you,
I had annihilated myself.
When I stood before the mirror,
I couldn’t identify myself.
On my way to success,
I was successful in becoming a monster.
I succeeded to fool myself, not you.


I know; I shouldn’t panic as I’m a chameleon.
While changing color so often, I was transformed into a beast.
But no regrets, I’m a chameleon.
I have masks to hide my ugly self.
Have numerous colors to change.
Have a simple sweet sorry to tell.
I’ll be me; a proud shameless Chameleon.

No one born too far from Niedersachsen, said Oma,
ever quite captures their sing-song intonation.
Characterized by subtleties, like an umlauted vowel,
all non-native imitations sound inevitably as ******
as would a cry of “ello, guv’nah!” in a London coffee shop.

Her Plattdeutsch instincts neutered
by decades abroad, married to a son of Milwaukee,
her permanent, dormant longing for Salzgitter awakes only
to trigger hunger pangs of irreconcilable nostalgia
at the passing whiff of a Germantown bakery.

She taught me the word “sehnsucht” over lukewarm coffee
and a pause in our conversation: a compound word
that no well-intentioned English translation
could render faithfully.
It isn’t the same as just longing, she sighed— longing is curable.
Sehnsucht holds the fragments
of an imperfect world and laments
that they are patternless. How the soul
yearns vaguely for a home
remembered only in the residual ache
of incomplete childhood fancies;
futile as the ruins
of an ancient, annihilated people.
How life’s staccato joys soothe
a heart sore from the world,
yet the existential hunger, gnawing
from the malnourished stomach
of the bruised human psyche, remains—
insatiable, eternal.

Long enough ago, a reasonably-priced bus ride away
from the red-roofed apartment in which she babbled her first words,
a kindly old man in a pharmacy asked her
about her peculiar, exotic accent. Once inevitably prompted
with the question of where she was from, she responded only
that she was a tourist off the beaten track.

And when I pointed out, to my immediate regret,
that she gets the same question back here in Ohio,
I realized then that, not once, has she ever referred to the way
the people of her pined-for hometown spoke
as though she had ever belonged to it.

Why do I choose to suffer my freedom?
   Is it familiarity? A self-created religion?

I bind myself, to myself, using my own hands.
  I struggle to look through my own fingers.

Is it because I can't see? Am I in a dream?
  Where is the edge? Where is the seam?

I pretend to be distressed and myself believe
  Its all I've ever known, the stories of someone.

I carry on, holding tight, writing more lies
  A twisted *******, an inversion of life.

I catch glimpses of release, the gaps in my hands
  Yet as soon as I forget, I go back in.

How can you fight something you've created?
  How destroy the already annihilated?

Nothing but questions, answers are worthless.
  Nothing makes sense, not even these verses.

We don’t know whether every angel carries out the same tasks, or whether some of them specialize in certain areas. The Bible does speak about classes of angelic beings like cherubim (Ezekiel 1) and seraphim (Isaiah 6). We also know the names of two notable angels: Michael (Daniel 10:13; Jude 9) and Gabriel (Daniel 9:21; Luke 1:19,26).

The unnamed angels who appear most often in Scripture carry out a variety of tasks - all designed to serve God…

    Worship and praise - This is the main activity portrayed in heaven (Isaiah 6:1-3; Revelation 4-5).

    Messengers - They serve as messengers to communicate God’s will to men. They helped reveal the law to Moses (Acts 7:52-53), and served as the carriers of much of the material in Daniel, and Revelation.

    Guiding - Angels gave instructions to Joseph about the birth of Jesus (Matthew 1-2), to the women at the tomb, to Philip (Acts 8:26), and to Cornelius (Acts 10:1-8).

    Providing - God has used angels to provide physical needs such as food for Hagar (Genesis 21:17-20), Elijah (1 Kings 19:6), and Christ after His temptation (Matthew 4:11).

    Protecting - Keeping God’s people out of physical danger, as in the cases of Daniel and the lions, and his three friends in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3 and 6).

    Delivering - Getting God’s people out of danger once they’re in it. Angels released the apostles from prison in Acts 5, and repeated the process for Peter in Acts 12.

    Strengthening and encouraging - Angels strengthened Jesus after His temptation (Matt 4:11), encouraged the apostles to keep preaching after releasing them from prison (Acts 5:19-20), and told Paul that everyone on his ship would survive the impending shipwreck (Acts 27:23-25).

    Answering prayer - God often uses angels as His means of answering the prayers of His people (Daniel 9:20-24; 10:10-12; Acts 12:1-17).

    Caring for believers at the moment of death. In the story of Lazarus and the rich man, we read that angels carried the spirit of Lazarus to “Abraham’s *****” when he died (Luke 16:22).

    Executioners - Angels are sometimes used by God to punish sin. An angel of the Lord went forth and smote an Assyrian camp (2 Kings 19:20-34) “behold, they were all dead corpses.” The Assyrian army was annihilated. A destroying angel was sent, but later withheld, to punish David for his vanity in taking a census of the great number of his people. At the time of Moses and the Exodus, the Egyptian firstborn where killed by an angel of death.

Sunset
by Michael R. Burch

Written for my grandfather, George Edwin Hurt Sr., on the day he departed this life.

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.

Published by Contemporary Rhyme, New Lyre, The Chained Muse, Age of Muses, Poetry Life & Times, ArtVilla, Motherbird and Word Bird



Spring Was Delayed
by Michael R. Burch

Winter came early:
the driving snows,
the delicate frosts
that crystallize

all we forget
or refuse to know,
all we regret
that makes us wise.

Spring was delayed:
the nubile rose,
the tentative sun,
the wind’s soft sighs,

all we omit
or refuse to show,
whatever we shield
behind guarded eyes.

Originally published by Borderless Journal



Defenses
by Michael R. Burch

Beyond the silhouettes of trees
stark, naked and defenseless
there stand long rows of sentinels:
these pert white picket fences.

Now whom they guard and how they guard,
the good Lord only knows;
but savages would have to laugh
observing the tidy rows.



Polish
by Michael R. Burch

Your fingers end in talons—
the ones you trim to hide
the predator inside.

Ten thousand creatures sacrificed;
but really, what’s the loss?
Apply a splash of gloss.

You picked the perfect color
to mirror nature’s law:
red, like tooth and claw.



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
but lost in these drifts at each unexpected turn.

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



Less Heroic Couplets: Questionable Credentials
by Michael R. Burch

Poet? Critic? Dilettante?
Do you know what’s good, or do you merely flaunt?



Less Heroic Couplets: Less than Impressed
by Michael R. Burch

for T. M., regarding certain dispensers of lukewarm air

Their volume’s impressive, it’s true ...
but somehow it all seems “much ado.”



The Humpback
by Michael R. Burch

The humpback is a gullet
equipped with snarky fins.
It has a winning smile:
and when it Smiles, it wins
as miles and miles of herring
excite its fearsome grins.
So beware, unwary whalers,
lest you drown, sans feet and shins!

Published by Lighten Up Online



Don’t ever hug a lobster!
by Michael R. Burch

Don’t ever hug a lobster, if you meet one on the street!
If you hug a lobster to your breast, you’re apt to lose a ****!
If you hug a lobster lower down, it’ll snip away your privates!
If you hug a lobster higher up, it’ll leave your cheeks with wide vents!
So don’t ever hug a lobster, if you meet one on the street,
But run away and hope your frenzied feet are very fleet!



The Unregal Beagle vs. The Voracious Eagle
by Michael R. Burch

I’d rather see an eagle
than a beagle
because they’re so **** regal.

But when it’s time to wiggle
and to giggle,
I’d rather embrace an angel
than an evil.

And when it’s time to share the same small space,
I’d much rather have a beagle lick my face!



Resemblance
by Michael R. Burch

Take this geode with its rough exterior—
crude-skinned, brilliant-hearted ...

a diode of amethyst—wild, electric;
its sequined cavity—parted, revealing.

Find in its fire all brittle passion,
each jagged shard relentlessly aching.

Each spire inward—a fission startled;
in its shattered entrails—fractured light,

the heart ice breaking.



Less Heroic Couplets: Midnight Stairclimber
by Michael R. Burch

Procreation
is at first great sweaty recreation,
then—long, long after the *** dies—
the source of endless exercise.



Elemental
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

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 get her.
But that never would do!
Beth, as you embrace the storm,

so I embrace elemental you.



What Immense Silence
by Michael R. Burch

What immense silence
comforts those who kneel here
beneath these vaulted ceilings
cavernous and vast?

What luminescence stained
by patchwork panels of bright glass
illuminates drained faces
as the crouching gargoyles leer?

What brings them here—
pale, tearful congregations,
knowing all Hope is past,
faithfully, year after year?

Or could they be right? Perhaps
Love is, implausibly, near
and I alone have not seen it . . .
But if so, still I must ask:

why is it God that they fear?

Published in The Bible of Hell



Lay Down Your Arms
by Michael R. Burch

Lay down your arms; come, sleep in the sand.
The battle is over and night is at hand.
Our voyage has ended; there's nowhere to go ...
the earth is a cinder still faintly aglow.

Lay down your pamphlets; let's bicker no more.
Instead, let us sleep here on this ravaged shore.
The sea is still boiling; the air is wan, thin ...
Lay down your pamphlets; now no one will “win.”

Lay down your hymnals; abandon all song.
If God was to save us, He waited too long.
A new world emerges, but this world is through . . .
so lay down your hymnals, or write something new.



Bittersight
by Michael R. Burch

for Abu al-Ala Al-Ma'arri

To be plagued with sight
in the Land of the Blind,
—to know birth is death
and that Death is kind—
is to be flogged like Eve
(stripped, sentenced and fined)
because evil is “good”
in some backwards mind.



Golden Rue
by Michael R. Burch

Love has the value
of gold, if it’s true;
if not, of rue.

“Golden Rue” is a pun on “golden rule” and the fact that rue (regret) is seldom seen as golden.



Why the Kid Gloves Came Off
by Michael R. Burch

for Lemuel Ibbotson

It's hard to be a man of taste
in such a waste:
hence the lambaste.



Siren Song
by Michael R. Burch

The Lorelei’s
soft cries
entreat mariners to save her ...

How can they resist
her seductive voice through the mist?

Soon she will savor
the flavor
of sweet human flesh.



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.



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.



Musings at Giza
by Michael R. Burch

In deepening pools of shadows lies
the Sphinx, and men still fear his eyes.
Though centuries have passed, he waits.
Egyptians gather at the gates.

Great pyramids, the looted tombs
—how still and desolate their wombs!—
await sarcophagi of kings.
From eons past, a hammer rings.

Was Cleopatra's litter borne
along these streets now bleak, forlorn?
Did Pharaohs clad in purple ride
fierce stallions through a human tide?

Did Bocchoris here mete his law
from distant Kush to Saqqarah?
or Tutankhamen here once smile
upon the children of the Nile?

or Nefertiti ever rise
with wild abandon in her eyes
to gaze across this arid plain
and cry, “Great Isis, live again!”

Published by Golden Isis and The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



Leave Taking (I)
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, Borderless Journal (Singapore), Mindful of Poetry, Silver Stork Magazine, and There is Something in the Autumn (anthology)



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.



Self Reflection
by Michael R. Burch

for anyone struggling with self-image

She has a comely form
and a smile that brightens her dorm ...
but she’s grossly unthin
when seen from within;
soon a griefstricken campus will mourn.

Yet she’d never once criticize
a friend for the size of her thighs.
Do unto others—
sisters and brothers?
Yes, but also ourselves, likewise.



Ah! Sunflower
by Michael R. Burch

for and after William Blake

O little yellow flower
like a star ...
how beautiful,
how wonderful
we are!

Originally published by Borderless Journal (Singapore)



no foothold
by michael r. burch

there is no hope;
therefore i became invulnerable to love.
now even god cannot move me:
nothing to push or shove,
no foothold.

so let me live out my remaining days in clarity,
mine being the only nativity,
my death the final crucifixion
and apocalypse,

as far as the i can see ...



brrExit
by Michael R. Burch

what would u give
to simply not exist—
for a painless exit?
he asked himself, uncertain.

then from behind
the hospital room curtain
a patient screamed—
"my life!"



fog
by michael r. burch

ur just a bit of fluff
drifting out over the ocean,
unleashing an atom of rain,
causing a minor commotion,
for which u expect awesome GODS
to pay u SUPREME DEVOTION!
... but ur just a smidgen of mist
unlikely to be missed ...
where did u get the notion?



grave request
by michael r. burch

come to ur doom
in Tombstone;

the stars stark and chill
over Boot Hill

care nothing for ur desire;

                 still,

imagine they wish u no ill,
that u burn with the same antique fire;

for there’s nothing to life but the thrill
of living until u expire;

so come, spend ur last hardearned bill
on Tombstone.



Starting from Scratch with Ol’ Scratch
by Michael R. Burch

for the Religious Right

Love, with a small, fatalistic sigh
went to the ovens. Please don’t bother to cry.
You could have saved her, but you were all *******
complaining about the Jews to Reichmeister Grupp.

Scratch that. You were born after World War II.
You had something more important to do:
while the children of the Nakba were perishing in Gaza
with the complicity of your government, you had a noble cause (a
religious tract against homosexual marriage
and various things gods and evangelists disparage.)

Jesus will grok you? Ah, yes, I’m quite sure!
Your intentions were noble and ineluctably pure.
And what the hell does THE LORD care about Palestinians?
Certainly, Christians were right about serfs, slaves and Indians.
Scratch that. You’re one of the Devil’s minions.



thanksgiving prayer of the parasites
by michael r. burch

GODD is great;
GODD is good;
let us thank HIM
for our food.

by HIS hand
we all are fed;
give us now
our daily dead:

ah-men!

(p.s.,
most gracious
& salacious
HEAVENLY LORD,
we thank YOU in advance for
meals galore
of loverly gore:
of precious
delicious
sumptuous
scrumptious
human flesh!)



Sometimes the Dead
by Michael R. Burch

Sometimes we catch them out of the corners of our eyes—
     the pale dead.
          After they have fled
the gourds of their bodies, like escaping fragrances they rise.

Once they have become a cloud’s mist, sometimes like the rain
     they descend;
they appear, sometimes silver like laughter,
to gladden the hearts of men.

Sometimes like a pale gray fog, they drift
     unencumbered, yet lumbrously,
          as if over the sea
there was the lightest vapor even Atlas could not lift.

Sometimes they haunt our dreams like forgotten melodies
     only half-remembered.
          Though they lie dismembered
in black catacombs, sepulchers and dismal graves; although they have committed felonies,

yet they are us. Someday soon we will meet them in the graveyard dust
     blood-engorged, but never sated
          since Cain slew Abel.
But until we become them, let us steadfastly forget them, even as we know our children must ...



This poem was recited by Carla Maria Gnappi to her English literature class in Italy, along with other poems of mine, during a study of the poetry of William Blake.

Orpheus
by Michael R. Burch

for and after William Blake

I.
Many a sun
and many a moon
I walked the earth
and whistled a tune.

I did not whistle
as I worked:
the whistle was my work.
I shirked

nothing I saw
and made a rhyme
to children at play
and hard time.

II.
Among the prisoners
I saw
the leaden manacles
of Law,

the heavy ball and chain,
the quirt.
And yet I whistled
at my work.

III.
Among the children’s
daisy faces
and in the women’s
frowsy laces,

I saw redemption,
and I smiled.
Satanic millers,
unbeguiled,

were swayed by neither girl,
nor child,
nor any God of Love.
Yet mild

I whistled at my work,
and Song
broke out,
ere long.



Les Bijoux (“The Jewels”)
by Charles Baudelaire
loose translation/interpretation 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,
Till 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.

Published by Lush Stories, The ****** Salon and loovebook



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.



Resurrecting Passion
by Michael R. Burch

Last night, while dawn was far away
and rain streaked gray, tumescent skies,
as thunder boomed and lightning railed,
I conjured words, where passion failed ...

But, oh, that you were mine tonight,
sprawled in this bed, held in these arms,
your ******* pale baubles in my hands,
our bodies bent to old demands ...

Such passions we might resurrect,
if only time and distance waned
and brought us back together;
                                                       now
I pray these things might be, somehow.

But time has left us twisted, torn,
and we are more apart than miles.
How have you come to be so far—
as distant as an unseen star?

So that, while dawn is far away,
my thoughts might not return to you,
I feed your portrait to banked flames,
but as they feast, I burn for you.



Progress
by Michael R. Burch

There is no sense of urgency
at the local Burger King.

Birds and squirrels squabble outside
for the last scraps of autumn:
remnants of buns,
goopy pulps of dill pickles,
mucousy lettuce,
sesame seeds.

Inside, the workers all move
with the same très-glamorous lethargy,
conserving their energy, one assumes,
for more pressing endeavors: concerts and proms,
pep rallies, keg parties,
reruns of Jenny McCarthy on MTV.

The manager, as usual, is on the phone,
talking to her boyfriend.
She gently smiles,
brushing back wisps of insouciant hair,
ready for the cover of Glamour or Vogue.

Through her filmy white blouse
an indiscreet strap
suspends a lace cup
through which somehow the ****** still shows.
Progress, we guess, ...

and wait patiently in line,
hoping the Pokémons hold out.



Poppy
by Michael R. Burch

“It is lonely to be born.” – Dannie Abse, “The Second Coming”

It is lonely to be born
between the intimate ears of corn . . .
the sunlit, flooded, shellshocked rows.

The scarecrow flutters, listens, knows . . .

Pale butterflies in staggering flight
ascend the gauntlet winds and light
before the scything harvester.

The winsome buds of cornflowers
prepare themselves to be airborne,
and it is lonely to be shorn,
decapitate, of eager life
so early in love’s blinding maze
of silks and tassels, goldened days
when life’s renewed, gone underground.

Sad confidante of worm and mound,
how little stands to be regained
of what is left.
A tiny cleft
now marks your birth, your reddening
among the amber waves. O, sing!

Another waits to be reborn
among bent thistle, down and thorn.
A hoofprint’s cleft, a ram’s curved horn
curled inward, turned against the heart,
a spoor like infamy. Depart.
You came too late, the signs are clear:
whose world this is, now watches, near.
There is no ****** for the heart.

Originally published by Borderless Journal



Child of 9-11
by Michael R. Burch

a poem for Christina-Taylor Green, who was born on September 11, 2001 and died at the age of 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 shellshocked 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 gentle 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.



Upon a Frozen Star
by Michael R. Burch

Oh, was it in this dark-Decembered world
we walked among the moonbeam-shadowed fields
and did not know ourselves for weight of snow
upon our laden parkas? White as sheets,
as spectral-white as ghosts, with clawlike hands
****** deep into our pockets, holding what
we thought were tickets home: what did we know
of anything that night? Were we deceived
by moonlight making shadows of gaunt trees
that loomed like fiends between us, by the songs
of owls like phantoms hooting: Who? Who? Who?

And if that night I looked and smiled at you
a little out of tenderness ... or kissed
the wet salt from your lips, or took your hand,
so cold inside your parka ... if I wished
upon a frozen star ... that I could give
you something of myself to keep you warm ...
yet something still not love ... if I embraced
the contours of your face with one stiff glove ...

How could I know the years would strip away
the soft flesh from your face, that time would flay
your heart of consolation, that my words
would break like ice between us, till the void
of words became eternal? Oh, my love,
I never knew. I never knew at all,
that anything so vast could curl so small.

“Upon a Frozen Star” was my first attempt at blank verse.



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.



An Obscenity Trial
by Michael R. Burch

The defendant was a poet held in many iron restraints
against whom several critics cited numerous complaints.
They accused him of trying to reach the "common crowd,"
and they said his poems incited recitals far too loud.

The prosecutor alleged himself most artful (and best-dressed);
it seems he’d never lost a case, nor really once been pressed.
He was known far and wide for intensely hating clarity;
twelve dilettantes at once declared the defendant another fatality.

The judge was an intellectual well-known for his great mind,
though not for being merciful, honest, sane or kind.
Clerics loved the "Hanging Judge" and the critics were his kin.
Bystanders said, "They'll crucify him!" The public was not let in.

The prosecutor began his case by spitting in the poet's face,
knowing the trial would be a farce.
"It is obscene," he screamed, "to expose the naked heart!"
The recorder (bewildered Society), well aware of his notoriety,
greeted this statement with applause.

"This man is no poet. Just look—his Hallmark shows it.
Why, see, he utilizes rhyme, symmetry and grammar! He speaks without a stammer!
His sense of rhythm is too fine!
He does not use recondite words or conjure ancient Latin verbs.
This man is an impostor!
I ask that his sentence be . . . the almost perceptible indignity
of removal from the Post-Modernistic roster!"

The jury left, in tears of joy, literally sequestered.

The defendant sighed in mild despair, "Might I not answer to my peers?"
But how His Honor giggled then,
seeing no poets were let in.

Later, the clashing symbols of their pronouncements drove him mad
and he admitted both rhyme and reason were bad.



Ann Rutledge’s Irregular Quilt

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 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 the Railsplitter’s joy and grief
(and his hope and his disbelief).

V.
For 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 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.



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 Chieftains

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 was their only wealth.

They were proud folk, with only their lives to owe,
who sought the liberation of this 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!



wild wild west-east-north-south-up-down
by michael r. burch

each day it resumes—the great struggle for survival.

the fiercer and more perilous the wrath,
the wilder and wickeder the weaponry,
the better the daily odds
(just don’t bet on the long term, or revival).

so ur luvable Gaud decreed, Theo-retically,
if indeed He exists
                               as ur Bible insists—
the Wildest and the Wickedest of all
with the brightest of creatures in thrall
(unless u
somehow got that bleary
Theo-ry
wrong too).



I wrote this poem after discovering the poetry of e. e. cummings while reading poetry independently in high school. My “cummings period” started around 1974 at age 15-16. I believe this poem was the first of its genre. I seem to remember working on it my sophomore and junior years, making mostly minor revisions in 1975.

i (dedicated to u)

i.

i move within myself
i see beyond the sky
and fathom with full certainty:
this lifes a lethal lie

my teachers try to tell me
that they know more than i
(and well they may
but do they know
shrewd TIME is slipping by
and leaving us all to die?)

i shout within myself
i stand up to be seen
but only my eyes
watch as i rise
and i am left between
the nightmare of “REALITY”
and sleeps soothing scenes
and both are only dreams

i cry out to my “friends”
but none of them can hear
i weep in dark frustration
but they swim beyond my tears
i reach out to assist them
but they cannot find my hand
they all believe in “GOD”
yet all of them are ******

come, my self, come with me
move within your shell
cast aside such “enlightenment”
and let us leave this living hell

ii.

i watch the maidens play
their fickle games of love
and is this is what
life is of
then i have had enough

all my teachers tell me
to adjust to SOCIETY
yet none of them will venture
how (false) it came to be
this gaud, SOCIETY

i watch the maidens play
and though i want them much
i know the illusion of their purity
would shatter at my touch
leaving annihilated truth
to be pieced together to dispel
the lies that accompany youth

i watch the maidens play
and know that what i want
i cannot take because
then it would be gone

iii.

i watch the lovely maidens
i search their sightless eyes
i find that only darkness
lies behind each guise

i try to touch their feelings
but they have been replaced
by intelligence and manners
and tact and social grace

i want to make them love me
but they cannot love themselves
and though they seek love desperately
and care for little else
they stand little chance
of much more than romance
for a few days

i try to friend the men
but they have even less
for they want nothing more
than whatever seems “the best”
their hollow, burnt-out eyes
reveal their souls have flown
and all that loss has left
is a strange, sad fear of debt
and a love for things of gold

ive.

ive never seen a day break
but ive seen a life shatter
it was mine
and i suppose it still is:
all ten thousand pieces

id.

id like to put it together
(someONE please tell me how!)
for i am out of the glue
called u
that held my life together

i.e.

and i wish that u
and i were through
but whatever u do
dont say that we are!




Cycles
by Michael R. Burch

I see his eyes caress my daughter’s *******
through her thin cotton dress,
and how an indiscreet strap of her white bra
holds his bald fingers
in fumbling mammalian awe . . .

And I remember long cycles into the bruised dusk
of a distant park,
hot blushes,
wild, disembodied rushes of blood,
portentous intrusions of lips, tongues and fingers . . .

and now in him the memory of me lingers
like something thought rancid,
proved rotten.
I see Another again—hard, staring, and silent—
though long-ago forgotten . . .

And I remember conjectures of ***** lines,
brief flashes of white down bleacher stairs,
coarse patches of hair glimpsed in bathroom mirrors,
all the odd, questioning stares . . .

Yes, I remember it all now,
and I shoo them away,
willing them not to play too long or too hard
in the back yard—
with a long, ineffectual stare

that years from now, he may suddenly remember.



Sunset, at Laugharne
by Michael R. Burch

for Dylan Thomas

At Laugharne, in his thirty-fifth year,
he watched the starkeyed hawk career;
he felt the vested heron bless,

and larks and finches everywhere
sank with the sun, their missives west—
where faith is light; his nightjarred breast

watched passion dovetail to its rest.

*

He watched the gulls above green shires
flock shrieking, fleeing priested shores
with silver fishes stilled on spears.

He felt the pressing weight of years
in ways he never had before—
that gravity no brightness spares,

from sunken hills to unseen stars.
He saw his father’s face in waves
which gently lapped Wales’ gulled green bays.

He wrote as passion swelled to rage—
the dying light, the unturned page,
the unburned soul’s devoured sage.

*

The words he gathered clung together
till night—the jetted raven’s feather—
fell, fell . . . and all was as before . . .

till silence lapped Laugharne’s dark shore
diminished, where his footsteps shone
in pools of fading light—no more.



No One
by Michael R. Burch

No One hears the bells tonight;
they tell him something isn’t right.
But No One feels no need to rush:
he smiles from beds soft, green and lush
as far away a startled thrush
flees screeching owls in sinking flight.

No One hears the cannon’s roar
and muses that its voice means war
comes knocking on men’s doors tonight.
He sleeps outside in awed delight
beneath the enigmatic stars
and shivers in their cooling light.

No One knows the world will end,
that he’ll be lonely, without friend
or foe to conquer. All will be
once more, celestial harmony.
He’ll miss men’s voices, now and then,
but worlds can be remade again.



These Hallowed Halls
by Michael R. Burch

a young Romantic Poet mourns the passing of an age . . .

A final stereo fades into silence
and now there is seldom a murmur
to trouble the slumber of these ancient halls.
I stand by a window where others have watched
the passage of time—alone, not untouched.
And I am as they were—unsure,
                                                    for the days
stretch out ahead, a bewildering maze.

Ah, faithless lover—that I had never touched your breast,
nor felt the stirrings of my heart,
which until that moment had peacefully slept.
For now I have known the exhilaration
of a heart having leapt from the pinnacle of Love,
                  and the result of each such infatuation ...
the long freefall to earth, as the moon glides above.

These Hallowed Halls
by Michael R. Burch

a young Romantic Poet mourns the passing of an age . . .

I.

A final stereo fades into silence
and now there is seldom a murmur
to trouble the slumber
of these ancient halls.

I stand by a window where others have watched
the passage of time—alone,
not untouched.

And I am as they were
...unsure...
for the days
stretch out ahead,
a bewildering maze.

II.

Ah, faithless lover—
that I had never touched your breast,
nor felt the stirrings of my heart,
which until that moment had peacefully slept.

For now I have known the exhilaration
of a heart having vaulted the Pinnacle of Love,
             and the result of each such infatuation ...
the long freefall to earth, as the moon glides above.

III.

A solitary clock chimes the hour
from far above the campus,
but my peers,
returning from their dances,
heed it not.

And so it is
that we fail to gauge Time’s speed
because He moves so unobtrusively
about His task.

Still, when at last
we reckon His mark upon our lives,
we may well be surprised
at His thoroughness.

IV.

Ungentle maiden—
when Time has etched His little lines
so carelessly across your brow,
perhaps I will love you less than now.

And when cruel Time has stolen
your youth, as He certainly shall in course,
perhaps you will wish you had taken me
along with my broken heart,
even as He will take you with yours.

V.

A measureless rhythm rules the night—
few have heard it,
but I have shared it,
and its secret is mine.

To put it into words
is as to extract the sweetness from honey
and must be done as gently
as a butterfly cleans its wings.

But when it is captured, it is gone again;
its usefulness is only
that it lulls to sleep.

VI.

So sleep, my love, to the cadence of night,
to the moans of the moonlit hills’
bass chorus of frogs, while the deep valleys fill
with the nightjar’s strange bullfrog-like trills.

But I will not sleep this night, nor any;
how can I—when my dreams
are always of your perfect face
ringed by soft whorls of fretted lace,
and a tear upon your pillowcase? / framed by your rumpled pillowcase?

VII.

If I had been born when knights roamed the earth
and mad kings ruled savage lands,
I might have turned to the ministry,
to the solitude of a monastery.

But there are no monks or hermits today—
theirs is a lost occupation
carried on, if at all,
merely for sake of tradition.

For today man abhors solitude—
he craves companions, song and drink,
seldom seeking a quiet moment,
to sit alone, by himself, to think.

VIII.

And so I cannot shut myself
off from the rest of the world,
to spend my days in philosophy
and my nights in tears of self-sympathy.

No, I must continue as best I can,
and learn to keep my thoughts away
from those glorious, uproarious moments of youth,
centuries past though lost but a day.

IX.

Yes, I must discipline myself
and adjust to these lackluster days
when men display no chivalry
and romance is the "old-fashioned" way.

X.

A single stereo flares into song
and the first faint light of morning
has pierced the sky's black awning
once again.

XI.

This is a sacred place,
for those who leave,
leave better than they came.

But those who stay, while they are here,
add, with their sleepless nights and tears,
quaint sprigs of ivy to the walls
of these Hallowed Halls.



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 men 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.



“Sea Dreams” is one of my longer and more ambitious early poems, along with the full version of “Jessamyn’s Song.” To the best of my recollection, I wrote “Sea Dreams” around age 18 in high school my senior year, then worked on in college. It appeared in my poetry contest notebook and thus was substantially complete by 1978.

Sea Dreams
by Michael R. Burch

I.
In timeless days
I've crossed the waves
of seaways seldom seen ...

By the last low light of evening
the breakers that careen
then dive back to the deep
have rocked my ship to sleep,
and so I've known the peace
of a soul at last at ease
there where Time's waters run
in concert with the sun.

With restless waves
I've watched the days’
slow movements, as they hum
their antediluvian songs.

Sometimes I've sung along,
my voice as soft and low
as the sea's, while evening slowed
to waver at the dim
mysterious moonlit rim
of dreams no man has known.

In thoughtless flight,
I've scaled the heights
and soared a scudding breeze
over endless arcing seas
of waves ten miles high.

I've sheared the sable skies
on wings as soft as sighs
and stormed the sun-pricked pitch
of sunset’s scarlet-stitched,
ebullient dark demise.

I've climbed the sun-cleft clouds
ten thousand leagues or more
above the windswept shores
of seas no vessel’s sailed
— great seas as grand as hell's,
shores littered with the shells
of men's "immortal" souls —
and I've warred with dark sea-holes
whose open mouths implored
their depths to be explored.

And I've grown and grown and grown
till I thought myself the king
of every silver thing . . .

But sometimes late at night
when the sorrowing wavelets sing
sad songs of other times,
I taste the windborne rime
of a well-remembered day
on the whipping ocean spray,
and I bow my head to pray . . .

II.
It's been a long, hard day;
sometimes I think I work too hard.
Tonight I'd like to take a walk
down by the sea —
down by those salty waves
brined with the scent of Infinity,
down by that rocky shore,
down by those cliffs I’d so often climb
when the wind was **** with the tang of lime
and every dream was a sailor's dream.

Then small waves broke light,
all frothy and white,
over the reefs in the ramblings of night,
and the pounding sea
—a mariner’s dream—
was bound to stir a boy's delight
to such a pitch
that he couldn't desist,
but was bound to splash through the surf in the light
of ten thousand stars, all shining so bright!

Christ, those nights were fine,
like a well-seasoned wine,
yet more scalding than fire
with the marrow’s desire.

Then desire was a fire
burning wildly within my bones,
fiercer by far than the frantic foam . . .
and every wish was a moan.
Oh, for those days to come again!
Oh, for a sea and sailing men!
Oh, for a little time!

It's almost nine
and I must be back home by ten,
and then . . . what then?
I have less than an hour to stroll this beach,
less than an hour old dreams to reach . . .
And then, what then?

Tonight I'd like to play old games—
games that I used to play
with the somber, sinking waves.

When their wraithlike fists would reach for me,
I'd dance between them gleefully,
mocking their witless craze
—their eager, unchecked craze—
to batter me to death
with spray as light as breath.

Oh, tonight I'd like to sing old songs—
songs of the haunting moon
drawing the tides away,
songs of those sultry days
when the sun beat down
till it cracked the ground
and the sea gulls screamed
in their agony
to touch the cooling clouds.

The distant cooling clouds.

Then the sun shone bright
with a different light
over sprightlier lands,
and I was always a pirate in flight.

Oh, tonight I'd like to dream old dreams,
if only for a while,
and walk perhaps a mile
along this windswept shore,
a mile, perhaps, or more,
remembering those days,
safe in the soothing spray
of the thousand sparkling streams
that tumble into this sea.
I like to slumber in the caves
of a sailor's dark sea-dreams . . .
oh yes, I'd love to dream,
to dream
and dream
and dream.

“Sea Dreams” is one of my longer and more ambitious early poems, along with the full version of “Jessamyn’s Song.” For years I thought I had written “Sea Dreams” around age 19 or 20. But then I remembered a conversation I had with a friend about the poem in my freshman dorm, so the poem must have been started by age 18 or earlier. Dating my early poems has been a bit tricky, because I keep having little flashbacks that help me date them more accurately, but often I can only say, “I know this poem was written by about such-and-such a date, because ...”



Alien Nation
by Michael R. Burch

for J. S. S., a Christian poet who believes in “hell”

On a lonely outpost on Mars
the astronaut practices “speech”
as alien to primates below
as mute stars winking high, out of reach.

And his words fall as bright and as chill
as ice crystals on Kilimanjaro —
far colder than Jesus’s words
over the “fortunate” sparrow.

And I understand how gentle Emily
must have felt, when all comfort had flown,
gazing into those inhuman eyes,
feeling zero at the bone.

Oh, how can I grok his arctic thought?
For if he is human, I am not.

Note: The coinage “grok” appears in Robert Heinlein’s classic sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The novel’s protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, was raised on Mars by enlightened Martians, and he often feels out of sorts on Earth, where he struggles to grok (understand deeply and profoundly) earthlings and their primitive, often inhuman, ways.

Keywords/Tags: These Hallowed Halls, ivy, college, university, school, class, classmates, students, study

A jaded mind clogged
with empty thoughts
on an hour I should be sleeping
With sleep-heavy eyelids,
and an uneasy buzzing silence.

Life so fragile annihilated
Before we have time to double-take,
Or those who leave claw marks
As death drags them by the toes
(Clawing away the face of fate,
How did you survive?)

Shivers tiptoe through my bones
And all the faces
of the overlooked seem to surface…

The perils of a ghost's existence,
Staring upon the same cycle
of human foolishness.
Seeing your mistakes and trials
re-enacted for you to never forget.
(wandering, observing in
the shadows of man)

Human tears and stomach aches
to distract you from your fears
when they stare you in the face,
as you lower your eyes and weep.
What are we as humans,
crippled from birth, crawling
with innate self-importance
annihilated by chance?

They sing their songs to console themselves
Looming in their lonely rooms;
Transparent, feared by man
Watching them meet their fate.

I am indomitable, untouchable
I am wrath embodied
The rage of the downtrodden made flesh
Nothing will stand in my way

Their corpses torn apart by my hands
Their blood soaked into the soil
I have wrought destruction upon them
And brought ruin to their hearth

They dared to provoke me
To spit upon me when I was weak
And what was sown
They have reaped

I am the berserker
Blood streams from my wounds
The horde overwhelms me
Yet I refuse to be defeated

I smash through their lines
A roar ripping from my throat
As I rend my enemies asunder
And cover myself in their gore

I see terror in their eyes
As they see the blood frenzy in mine
I lay waste to all who oppose me
And still it is not enough

My lust for battle can not be sated
It will not be satisfied
Until I have annihilated them
Until I have erased every trace of them