"chapbooks" poems
They had begun to question consciousness,
turning solid matter into fuzziness in their brains,
rendering not atoms, nor photons, nor particles,
only cold energy, halucenogenic stardust joints.
For the exclusionary few to whom the material
had never meant **** to a tree or a **** to a rabbit,
it was the cash-cow of quantum reality,
ambiguous poetry for a Beat Generation,
Uncertainty in free verse chapbooks.
So they wrote of our interconnectedness ---
the Ginsbergs, the Levertovs, the Ferlinghettis ---
till the gravity of space-mind curved imagination,
a nation falling unheard without a whimper in the forest.
Feb 22, 2012
Feb 22, 2012 at 1:58 PM UTC
This is to all those misfits
To the Romeo car-washing in Inglewood inlets
To the Hippy selling crystals on the Venice boardwalk
The Magician swallowing 8-balls at the Huntington Beach peer
The Rapper selling CDs in the Ranch Market parking lot
The **** tatting in a makeshift garage
The Poet slinging chapbooks at cafes and rec centers…
Not androids pontificating from lecterns
But grimy roots burrowing deep
Seismic rumblings toppling down
Insured ivory towers
Smashing pilled-paradigms beneath Docs
Hustling and slinging
In the forbidden outshacks of civilization
In tents, over barbed-wire, beside shards
Desperate and burning
For neither Truth or Beauty
But for LIFE
They do not tap wrists
No, they thump chests
To feel it beat
To feel it rage
For fugitive fugues
For new eternities
They embrace
********** romance
Graveyard necromance
The holy hunger for change
Defying commercials and charts
Shivering and howling on streets
Waging guerrilla war
Liberating cubicled-hearts
Dec 23, 2016
Dec 23, 2016 at 8:20 PM UTC
Hello all. I have been pretty busy with projects I've been working on.
I have been putting my poems up in PDF format and all of the new poems are available for download here:
http://deadbeatantihero.wixsite.com/thereisnothinghere
This website works best on a desktop. I tried accessing the website on my phone but some of the titles are buried within the other titles so I think it is best if you just access the website using a desktop. All you have to do is click the title that you want to read and it should automatically bring you directly to the PDF format of the works. You may also download them for free if you wish.
I am converting these works into PDF format with the intention to turn them into zines and chapbooks in the near future, given the right price and resource people to help me come up with the projects. Feel free and read away, all of the works are free and downloadable.
The website currently has 19 titles for you to read and download (if you want to, that is). Let me know if I could help you with anything!
Aug 1, 2016
Aug 1, 2016 at 2:50 PM UTC
Where Oceans Meet
We Last Were Home-bound
Anchored Forest
Redamansy
Etc!
May 24, 2023
May 24, 2023 at 2:02 PM UTC
She stares at the wall and
she curses it all when all is
said and done.
But at night she’s thrown,
by the brink of her bones
like glass into the silent sky.
So she’s suddenly lost in
nothing but rain
with a glimpse of Sanity Hill.
There’s nothing to lose, but
mirrors to gain
in pursuit of cloudless dreams.
And when she wakes
she frantically shakes but
always takes her time—
she sits and sifts
by burying her misfits
beneath the fluff of steel pillows.
She stares at her
chapbooks from Poe and Sylvia
plathed upon her cedar shelf.
She puckers and sighs at "the end of the world"
but remains afraid of herself.
Dec 5, 2012
Dec 5, 2012 at 1:08 PM UTC
See
by Michael R. Burch
See how her hair has thinned: it doesn’t seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there, then burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are—that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows, elegant and rare.
For life remains undimmed in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book’s.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.
Keywords/Tags: Elderly, woman, grandmother, thin, thinning, hair, airy, emu, moult, soft, plumage, wrinkles, laugh lines, frail, gaunt, bones, winter, grave, eyes, courage, laughter, family, gathered, bedside, kisses, hugs, goodbyes, farewells, life, death, photo album, pictures, photos, photographs
Published by The Eclectic Muse, Love Me Knots (an anthology of the top 100 contemporary love poems), Nutty Stories (South Africa), Black Medina, The New Formalist, Better Than Starbucks, Potcake Chapbooks, Strange Roads, Sonnetto Poesia, Litera (UK), Poems About, Poetry Life & Times, MahMag (in a Farsi translation by Dr. Mahnaz Badihian), Somewhere Along The Beaten Path (Anthology), Freshet, Life & Legends, Famous Poets & Poems, Short Quotes & Poems (listed in the top 10 short poems) and Victorian Violet Press. “See” won 3rd place in the 2003 Writer’s Digest Rhyming Poetry contest, out of over 18,000 overall entries, and was published in Writer’s Digest’s The Year’s Best Writing.
Mar 6, 2020
Mar 6, 2020 at 4:44 AM UTC
Poet after poet
written July 10th, 2021
Day by day, and poem by poem
my home and my life
fill with friends and lovers
who took the time to write to me
through the years and distances.
Jane Kenyon sits
on the corner of
my dining room table
a pool of calm
for me to dip into
anytime I need.
113 poets (I counted)
from Copper Canyon Press
are in residence between the covers
of The Gift of Tongues.
They enliven the desk where I write
always falling into respectable order
when I peak in before writing.
Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda
Olga Broumas, W S Merwin
and other dear friends
sit on my shelves
sometimes amiably discussing
other times heatedly debating
each other's sock choices.
George Bilgere, Ellen Bass
and Gregory Orr
have seduced me
filling me with awe
as they stimulate my mind
my lovers far away
who talk to me in chapbooks.
Poet after poet
I wonder how many
I have not met
because I have not found them yet
or they were not preserved or published.
I bow my head
in a moment of grateful silence
to those known and unknown
who make my world
a more lively place.
Jul 17, 2021
Jul 17, 2021 at 8:07 AM UTC
****** Most Fowl!
by Michael R. Burch
****** most foul!”
cried the mouse to the owl.
“Friend, I’m no sinner;
you’re merely my dinner!”
the wise owl replied
as the tasty snack died.
Published by Lighten Up Online and Potcake Chapbooks
NOTE: In an attempt to demonstrate that not all couplets are heroic, I have created a series of poems called “Less Heroic Couplets.” I believe even poets should abide by truth-in-advertising laws! This poem also questions who the "original sinner" was. How was it not the Creator, if such a being exists, since owls are forced by nature to ****** innocent mice and other prey animals? Is it possible that the Creator is not so heroic either? Keywords/Tags: Death, Nature, Rhyme, Pain, Creator, Predator, Prey, Mouse, Owl
Sep 1, 2020
Sep 1, 2020 at 1:04 AM UTC