"doddering" poems
Passages on Fatherhood
by Michael R. Burch
for Jeremy Michael Burch
He is my treasure,
and by his happiness I measure
my own worth.
Four years old,
with diamonds and gold
bejeweled in his soul.
His cherubic beauty
is felicity
to simplicity and passion—
for a baseball thrown
or an ice-cream cone
or eggshell-blue skies.
...
It’s hard to be “wise”
when the years
career through our lives
and bees in their hives
test faith
and belief
while Time, the great thief,
with each falling leaf
foreshadows grief.
The wisdom of the ages
and prophets and mages
and doddering sages
is useless
unless
it encompasses this:
his kiss.
Keywords/Tags: father, fatherhood, child, childhood, children, son, time, years, wisdom, kiss
Apr 6, 2020
Apr 6, 2020 at 3:36 AM UTC
Why is he Vaticanizing
when he could be catechizing ?
This silly man with a funny hat
this doddering puppet
with his dead Jesus on a stick
this irrelevant vestigial *****
this geriatric Marxist-Lite
outdated Liberationist
terminal Global Warmist;
no wonder the World
heeds his incoherent discourse.
No wonder they
listen to him
but hate the Truth.
Sep 23, 2015
Sep 23, 2015 at 2:08 PM UTC
**A dark, sensuous, blithe, night
seduction is her sole intent,
beating in tune with the heart of
a lover, an adventurer, a crazy poet,
a beggar, a courtesan, a clown or a priest,
prompts each one to do what to them please,
to the manner born, unconcerned of darkness and light,
her knitted quilt thrown over their heartbeats rhythmic.
Sleep is the best refuge for the uninspired, lonely, sick,
love, *** any number of intriguing options she offers for her lovers,
and when the clock of night is torn open by the impatient sun
and day arrives with vengeance to reclaim its land,
with daggers of sadness stuck to heart, bleeding
they move, like shadows doddering in the path of life.**
Sep 8, 2013
Sep 8, 2013 at 1:03 PM UTC
*The camel she rode was doddering, on its last legs,
the way she petted it, all along the caravan's route
made them think that she wouldn't bear its inevitable fate.
Not loosing her cool, she gets down, views the looming desert,
others are puzzled, unfathomable is her mind,
alacritous she is, draws her sabre, cuts open the camel, with her deft hands
water in the desert is more precious than love,
that exceeds the prescribed time limit, her act speaks aloud,
no one moves, stunned not even knowing what they feel,
then realize, in a desert tender feelings are short-lived, like new blooms.
What a desert human life has become of late
in silence they contemplate as they leave behind the camel's carcass*
Nov 30, 2013
Nov 30, 2013 at 8:13 PM UTC
Just Smile
by Michael R. Burch
We’d like to think some angel smiling down
will watch him as his arm bleeds in the yard,
ripped off by dogs, will guide his tipsy steps,
his doddering progress through the scarlet house
to tell his mommy “boo-boo!,” only two.
We’d like to think his reconstructed face
will be as good as new, will often smile,
that baseball’s just as fun with just one arm,
that God is always Just, that girls will smile,
not frown down at his thousand livid scars,
that Life is always Just, that Love is Just.
We just don’t want to hear that he will shave
at six, to raze the leg hairs from his cheeks,
that lips aren’t easily fashioned, that his smile’s
lopsided, oafish, snaggle-toothed, that each
new operation costs a billion tears,
when tears are out of fashion.
O, beseech
some poet with more skill with words than tears
to find some happy ending, to believe
that God is Just, that Love is Just, that these
are Parables we live, Life’s Mysteries . . .
Or look inside his courage, as he ties
his shoelaces one-handed, as he throws
no-hitters on the first-place team, and goes
on dates, looks in the mirror undeceived
and smiling says, “It’s me I see. Just me.”
He smiles, if life is Just, or lacking cures,
Your pity is the worst cut he endures.
But hack him down and still he’ll always rise,
lifting his smile to the sun or the star-filled skies.
Published by Lucid Rhythms, The Eclectic Muse and Victorian Violet Press, then nominated by the latter for the Pushcart Prize
Keywords/Tags: Angels, baseball, ****** reconstruction, surgery, operation, God, scars, tears, courage, mirror, smile, date, dating, dog, attack, dogs, happy ending
Mar 4, 2020
Mar 4, 2020 at 3:24 AM UTC
There was always an odour of sin around
The nave of that ancient church,
I knew of it as a choirboy,
I didn’t have far to search,
The smell welled up in the vestry,
A sulphur and brimstone tang,
It leached on into our cassocks
When the bell for the matins rang.
The priest, he was old and doddering
And didn’t look ripe for sin,
Old Father Coates may have sowed his oats
With nobody looking in,
But sin was there for a century,
It wasn’t of recent time,
The stories told of a Father Golde
I heard from a friend of mine.
Back in the days when the church was strong
And it ruled the lives of all,
A Father Golde was the priest of old
And preached of the devil’s fall,
When women came to confess their sins
And spoke of their evil deeds,
The priest took them at the altar there
In sin, and down on their knees.
The Nuns attached to the convent were
Obedient to his whim,
And many a cold and frosty night
He would call a sister in,
Her place, he said, was to warm his bed
To deter his chills, and ague,
And many a child was born in dread
To the parish, since the plague.
But one day after confessional
He had ***** a Colonel’s wife,
Who came to him with her petty sin
And described what it was like,
The priest, inflamed by her words and deeds
Had her pressed by the vestry door,
And who could know what she had to show
But the flagstones on the floor.
A troop of soldiers had marched on in
To assuage the Colonel’s rage,
The moment the wife had gone back home
And told of the priest’s outrage,
They seized the priest and they ran him through
With a sword right to the hilt,
Then tied him onto the cross outside
Where a sign outlined his guilt.
And every year on the first of June
You can hear the feet outside,
Marching up to the old church door,
The day that the father died.
A sense of sin that is coming in
As the church doors swing apart,
And blood appears on the altar in
The shape of an evil heart.
David Lewis Paget
Jun 9, 2015
Jun 9, 2015 at 5:28 PM UTC
They lose their lives to small hates so easily that you wonder if they are allergic to love. Perhaps these gangsters, revelling in their roadsters, go banging in their round pools of darkness to shut out the light, light so bright that it will reveal something sick about themselves. Their hair is so slick that it shines in the headlights and warns them to step away, find the shadows, a place that is far far away from cops and gallows. I thought myself a gangster once, true, tossing teens to the ground to grab their shoes; breaking windows with heads to see bleeding prism hues. But I learned otherwise when I found you: I discovered that life is a measured destruction of time already, so I renounced my life so small in order to **** myself in minutes rather than bullets and enjoy each and every doddering slip -- each and every juddering rise and fall as we watch the future play out having already gambled it all.
May 14, 2013
May 14, 2013 at 11:31 AM UTC
A streak of light flashes past the late sky.
It is the distant future.
Or futures, may be?
A knot at the junction of possibilities.
It's a space vessel. Intelligent life whizzing by.
# 1.
Nobody notices the decrepit rock.
Doddering about its axis and orbit by the sun.
Inwardly consumed.
Like Mars.
Long drained dry of all her life.
# 2.
Too hard to resist, the
mysterious peace radiating from the surface -
Contact:
and Earth,
enters the union of worlds.
What road it is that is not to be taken:
for all our righteous protestations
and blaming of the Gods or Daemons,
don't we know the futures unfolding?
# 1. Of long here was once a glorious world.
# 2. Peace in our lands and the universe to explore.
Jun 25, 2013
Jun 25, 2013 at 2:24 AM UTC
I never thought I would live this long.
I thought I would be dead by fifty.
Live hard, make a pretty corpse
Seemed, at the time to be nifty.
But, fifty came and went on by
And did so relatively quickly,
And here am I, not doddering
Not stooped over, not sickly.
I remember being that kind of kid
Who thought forty was old age.
The kind of oldster playing gramps
In the movies and on the stage.
Gray hair meant guys near death,
I needed not too much convincing.
Thinking of that, thirty years on,
These days, has me broadly wincing.
Looking back is more difficult
As eyesight loses credibility.
So much of what one sees in youth
Is forgotten so very easily.
I look at the photographs of me
Back when I had flattened abs.
Back when my flesh was taut
And hung on me in solid slabs.
I didn’t seem to have any limits
And could do anything I’d care.
Now a long walk is difficult and
My best friend is an easy chair.
Today I see life as a daily feat
That seems to come on quietly
Like a maid in a swank hotel.
It comes in and then out, silently.
I hasten to assure, I am not
Complaining about anything.
I have had more than my share
Of victories, spent my winnings.
It’s just that I never planned
To be an a senior citizen,
Entitled to cheaper entry fees,
An early-bird buffet denizen.
With amazement I nod whenever
Young people offer their seats.
And any time I run a bit too fast
My heart skips a couple of beats.
Then I walk by a mirror and see
That older person standing there
Who is amazed to still be here
Rocking a head of gray hair.
May 9, 2016
May 9, 2016 at 11:36 PM UTC
Have you seen her yet?
haven’t you still met?
the little girl that you bet
would grow up to be
a woman
your favorite object?
So she could marry
a man whose beard
covers his double chin
and whose hair likens
grayish and doddering lint?
so she could be a
piñata doll to the cane?
a helpless dame
to scoundrels who became
guiltless sinners
only to taste her breast
and spit on her shame?
When will you see her?
this damsel you’ll set
soon in distress
but in the mind of whose
you’ll set a dream of
turning her into a mistress?
You must be quite sly
you’ll surely agree
in your little trap
she is much liable to sink
that she can be as strong
as a man or even Hercules
but would she know
that there would be
no one
when she would feel
human and cry
barely a soul around her
to hear her pleas?
That she is to trick
herself into faking
her real sentiment
into a heartfelt grin
because she will be
nothing
but a smiling condiment
amid the flavorless crowd
because how else can
she make you proud?
Will you tell her
that she was born
with her skin
not to cover her body
but to cover it again
by animal silk?
or better yet,
cotton, jute or laced pink?
That just a glimpse
of her ravishing thigh
can cause an ********
a sublime indication
of a man’s lusted high?
What about the time
when she would shudder
with desire
of feeling love
in its prime?
Or when she would
want to fly across the seas
and the mountains?
Would you simply
push her within
a four walled room
and shut the doors
while she rips the curtains?
Would you let her
learn to write
with a pencil
or make her sit
by the stove
by the window
in deadly still
while growing men
learn how to pay a bill
how to exercise a will
and gasp at life’s thrill?
She would still be a girl
if she came into this world
you made for yourself
a precious pearl
you’d only carve her into a stone
so she could be unfurled
to the wind and the perils
of man
Because you barely built
a world for her
along with him
together
little would she know
that we live in a
man’s deadly clan.
Aug 17, 2018
Aug 17, 2018 at 1:45 PM UTC
Flickering like a tentative alpenglow corraded from profaned time
A whisper jostles through a crowded rumpus prescient of teleology and design
Jolting with pangs of panic a screech emanates from the brontides of tomorrow
A chagrin outpaces the gingerly apprehension of a peevish sorrow
Among the ruffled plumes quaffed from pedigree and put to disuse
A banausic electricity galvanizes the ****** of the amalgamated acuity pinched from the sordid, the obtuse
Refracted like off a darkened moon that clenches the darkness in an abstruse tomb
Combs through sentience of Saturn presiding over ineluctable doom
A silence louder than a plangent ****** of phantasmagoria debased
A looming victor erodes with the putrefaction of sworn and utter distaste
How to obtrude on the evening with triaged fulmination
Is an affront to the rudders of a piecemeal civilization in tatters with exacting doddering calculation
Graveyards bustle with the eidolons of scurrilous spite
Congregating around a blackened epitaph on an alabaster palace gilded in the swanky pinnacle of light
Scuttling the outmoded flanks of an abortive war
Against a henchman of state too ostentatious to hardly ever ignore
We clamber with insistence hoping on fortuitous deliverance
Yet we are deranged of the clasped distance between the crevasse of the clerisy and the satisdiction of futures passed with meticulous diligence
Absconding with furtive furrows on a wizened guild an entrusted world we helped build
We witness the silence creep over us like a trepidation contained as lethal killers of the cartel willed
That which frightens a self-fulfillment is a fatalism gone awry
Someday soon omens excavated from immolated tombs will beseech a more universal backlash, an alienated sorrow that will one day cry
But until that fetched disaster occurs
Let us meditate only on the process of emanation among wayward words
That dance with a destiny that the hegemony of momentary circumstance much prefers
Feb 16, 2018
Feb 16, 2018 at 2:19 AM UTC
It is strange, sad, but true,
I now have a disordered mind,
Reasoned coherent thought,
All replaced and left behind.
Things I have to do: or not;
Run away as if to escape,
The day’s events rerunning,
On a deceptive loop of tape.
Mismatched memories amass,
Flickering coloured thought,
Unfocused faded imagery,
So stressed and overwrought.
‘Because of age’, so I’m told,
Golden years such a silly sham,
Knowing then what I do now,
I might even know who I am!
Alas I don’t: not anymore
Neither do I really care,
When not myself I’m someone else
Together, we do make a pair.
I am content, nothing matters,
As I reach life’s setting sun,
Basking in the happy memories
Of things, I’ve never done.
Sep 26, 2010
Sep 26, 2010 at 5:40 AM UTC
I am sharing this opus
It's more of an onus
Of just how things went
But were not really bogus.
I earned my life lumps
Racing over speed bumps
Trying to outrun cards dealt
That were not quite trumps.
Still I made it this far
And while I’m not a star
I suited and showed up.
Things are what they are
And I can debate them
But I can’t dispute them.
It would be a big lie
If I tried to refute them.
So my doddering totter
Gets odder and odder
Telling me loudly
I am Grim Reaper fodder.
Some bridges burned,
Another corner turned
Dealing with the effects
Of the lessons learned.
Now an irascible rascal
Far too frequently wrathful
Warring with too-small print
I am the long-retired radical
No longer marching around
Supporting causes I found.
No longer a crusader, I am
A kind of sad circus clown.
I never expected to have it made
Like a grandee in the shade
Sipping my iced mint julep
Rich from making the grade
But with youthful short sight
I never saw it in this light
That I would fall so short
Of playing things just right.
Still, I have to cut some slack
When I sit here looking back
At where and what I was.
The view is not so black.
While superstars never came,
My lottery dreams were lame,
I feel I did all that could
To honestly play the game.
Feb 21, 2018
Feb 21, 2018 at 1:03 AM UTC
I look into the mirror
And what do I see?
A wizened old man
Looking back at me.
How did this happen
How did he get here?
Wasn’t I a young man
Not more than last year?
Where did the lines come from
The wrinkles and the spots?
I used to have some gray hair
Now I seem to have lots.
And am I not shorter now
Than I had seemed before?
Now my vision seems too fuzzy
To successfully ignore.
I made a mocking muscle
By bending my arm to see.
What became of my bicep?
It looks small and sort of puny.
I decided to see it all, so
I stepped a bit back and felt
A roundness, an expanse,
A pudgy fullness at my belt.
This comes from not being
A slave to my own mirror.
If I had been watching myself
My image might be clearer.
I might have seen before now
This aging, doddering old fool.
But I only looked when I had to.
Lack of boastfulness was the rule.
So I now I am a camera trick
Played by a mischievous director
Who slipped this aging body past
My doddering old **** detector.
Now it remains for me to accept
What I have long since become,
And admit that I can no longer be
As I have for decades been: numb.
Apr 29, 2018
Apr 29, 2018 at 5:26 PM UTC
i wander along the walkways
where the tame animals are fenced
and where the loyal crowd climb
up to the big top
i'm paid a pittance
to put on a little show
before the big one starts
i never tire of
petting the elephants,
the tigers, even the
tiny black spiders
that crawl along
the picket fences
my hat is a paper mache affair
that keeps coming loose
till it looks like part of my hair
i have shoes too big for my feet
and most days my smile
is only half complete
people see me
think i'm a good **** for their jokes
let's taunt this
doddering, nerdy bloke
nobody laughs at me except
when i cry
it's like i'm back in school
the poor picked on guy
i'm silent like Keaton
quiet no riot
though sometimes i fear
a bully might sneak up
and give me a beatin'
but bravely i forge on
happy when i hear
the roustabouts warbling a song
or an elephant yawning in
the early dawn
i don't complain much
though i hunger occasionally
for a tender touch
i think of my lost loves
but that just makes me cry
i pull out my hanky
and daub while
the people get
a good laugh passing by
my life is here
but one day will go
and people will then say,
"you don't mean THAT poor Joe?"
and maybe the band
will strike up a tune
and maybe not
fame i have never sought
luck or no luck
life's just the way
the cookie crumbles
so let the acrobats tumble
the trapeze artists take
their flips and the
lions roar at every crack of the whip
i remain a clown
of no renown
who rarely hears the clapping sound
Oct 5, 2016
Oct 5, 2016 at 12:02 PM UTC
My head is in a spin,
My obsession just to win,
I'm driven and I'm mad
All I smell is gushing blood.
I feel I'm in a surreal game
That shooting sort - so very lame,
Where targets pop-up all around,
Nothing ever out of bounds.
What's good for them is great for me,
I'll deftly flatten all I see,
From rabid lawyers to media hacks,
I relish all their wild attacks.
For unbridled as they are
They alone propel me far,
Every moment of every day
From their lips my name they say.
Isn't that just simply grand,
As for every blow they land
Folks just rally to my side
Ferral wokes unable to abide.
I'm a fighter - all see that,
Unlike Joe that doddering dud.
Yes I'm tired - who wouldn't be,
But now the end I clearly see.
With the White House in my grasp,
I doubt I'll even need to ask,
They'll plead with me to take the keys
Given Biden's on his knees.
So while my enemies do the dance,
The time is near for me to prance.
They'll squeal and holler with all their might,
With me cheerleading at the sight.
I'll seal this race and do it quick
By any means and every trick.
Count me out at your great peril,
Not great odds even for the Devil.
Jan 19, 2024
Jan 19, 2024 at 10:30 AM UTC
He mopped his brow and sweated more, loaded up the gun and locked the door, sat down in the easy chair, easy there, and polished twenty seven silver spoons noticing the way you do that silver in a certain light looks almost blue.
Steady, steady he got ready for the big kabang and then the doorbell rang, being mindful of the deed he planned aware there'd be some noise and then, the coroner and his boys would come, look at him, say, someone's son has done it now, he rose and answered to the chimes, how many times had he thought too, change the bell but didn't do.
Do you believe in Jesus? said the caller who stood sideways on the welcome mat,
'not that I'm aware of but I never really thought of that,
he replied, the thought of gunfire flashed across his lazy eyes,
slowly I might add and not that he was mad or nothing so mundane
it was just he was so fed up of the anything and everything, the same old same old was getting older every day and the only way to end it was to put the barrel to his lips and take the cartridge shell, to arc magnificently and descend the stairway into hell.
The man with Jesus tattooed in his hair who knocked and waited for his share of godliness didn't care, he wasn't paid for this, his work was to promote his Christ not listen to some doddering **** who was quite obviously sick.
The easy not so easy stare that sits in some old easy chair to polish twenty seven silver spoons is not so easy being there, but I expected this.
Oct 16, 2015
Oct 16, 2015 at 7:08 AM UTC
The clocks are ringing twelve,
Prissy people comin' through,
Doddering in the darkness,
Diggin' out them graves,ahaa!
The moon is fading out,
Bobbydazzlers showin' up,
Cadavers burning out,
Subhumans stroamin' around.
Some robbing vagabonds,
Regicides in the throne,
Snary proposals,
And prankin' psychopaths.
The kingdom fade away,
Plausible lies arise,
Credence in subjection,
Its time for extinction!
Oh! Its time for extinction.
Aug 22, 2020
Aug 22, 2020 at 2:32 PM UTC