"essayist" poems
unsure, uncertain,
of the laws invested
in the realms and reams
of poetry ingested,
am i addict,
or supplier,
retail consumer
or
wholesale supplier,
a mom & pop candy store,
or a metastasizing intelligence
that takes any thing, and all,
a solitary letter,
an instance of a sighting,
a gasping palpitation
and reformats it into
a hehe literary madhatter^ piece
you supply, I demand,
I supply, boy oh boy,
do I ever, but you never,
come to me directly asking,
write me a poem, thick or thin,
witty fitty or an overly looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong
e~pistle (a/k/a e~pistol)
yet the trade goes on and om,
the marketplace never closes,
except when periodically the
gatewaykeeper is slow to pay his bills,
and the trading centres are global scattered,
young entrepreneurs try to sell a single
piece, as if it was breaking news history,
and tired old men, review their lived,
eager to memorialize, so it's ok to forget,
in retro!spect perspective,
the mirror who cannot lie,
states affirmatively, you are
both ****** and dealer,
a corporation scientific
of ancient biblical origins,
a psalmist, a deacon,
a lyricist, but thankfully
not a singer,
an essayist who writes best
when ****** by tawny port wine,
who snatches inspiration with
equality of equity,
(wait! that's wrong,
the equity of equality,)
where he can
find, ***** city streets, the deaths
of heroes, the sunrise calm miracle
he drinks in daily, by rivers, by seas,
by estuaries brackish, and streams
of watered purity, the riveting bays,
the individualized glisten deflected
into my eyes, that each
contains one pure blessing within…. nml
Sep 27, 2025
Sep 27, 2025 at 9:24 AM UTC
Sonnet: The Ruins of Balaclava
by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Oh, barren Crimean land, these dreary shades
of castles―once your indisputable pride―
are now where ghostly owls and lizards hide
as blackguards arm themselves for nightly raids.
Carved into marble, regal boasts were made!
Brave words on burnished armor, gilt-applied!
Now shattered splendors long since cast aside
beside the dead here also brokenly laid.
The ancient Greeks set shimmering marble here.
The Romans drove wild Mongol hordes to flight.
The Mussulman prayed eastward, day and night.
Now owls and dark-winged vultures watch and leer
as strange black banners, flapping overhead,
mark where the past piles high its nameless dead.
Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is widely regarded as Poland’s greatest poet and as the national poet of Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. He was also a dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor and political activist. As a principal figure in Polish Romanticism, Mickiewicz has been compared to Byron and Goethe. Keywords/Tags: Mickiewicz, Poland, Polish, Balaclava, Crimea, war, warfare, castle, castles, knight, knights, armor, Greeks, Rome, Romans, Mongols, Mussulman, Muslims, death, destruction, ruin, ruins, romantic, romanticism, sonnet, depression, sorrow, grave, violence, mrbtr
Jun 13, 2020
Jun 13, 2020 at 8:56 PM UTC
a quote from Samuel Johnson, or Dr. Johnson, the storied eighteenth-century poet and essayist who once said:
“The sole aim of writing is to enable readers a little better to enjoy life, or a little better to endure it.”
<>
our “sole aim,”
Oh what burden the doctor places on our shoveling pens,
to be earthmovers
that dig trenches, uproot earth,
that lies and hides our faces, entombing our hearts,
eliciting and erupting emotions that cannot be contained,
nor controlled,
indeed, deserving of replanting in
our shared selves, transplanted into a communal flowerpot
of our multi bursting colored commonality
lift my composing tools,
peer into
winter blue skies guarding the towers of
Manhattan isle, longing for guidance.
lusting for specificity of direction,
how,
how, to easy our burdens
with carefully selected and
careless wonderful words,
words that deal out caring uncarefully,
with a graceful recklessness of abandon
that open thy tears,
lift up the edges of your lips,
so that my duality is your duality,
the burden shared.
the burden eased…
to cry and laugh simultaneous,
lift and lighten,
a momentary distraction,
a cut flower in our vase,
that lasts but brief,
yet with each gaze repeated and
repeatedly,
well stains us with
eyes uplifting
Feb 4, 2024
Feb 4, 2024 at 8:37 AM UTC
Sally, the wordsmith, Poet essayist
You’re the childhood road runner
Divine word receiver
Can I take your hand?
Let’s go for a dance.
I’ll carry your luggage, Towards the parking lot
You’re sober, romantic, Unapologetic.
Can I take your bags?
Let’s go for a trek?
Sharing is caring, But except for you Sally.
You’re demanding, free spirited
A flower in restraint
Never a cold day, warming sun giggles
Don’t you hurry, your childhood
Seven Year’s too short.
Don’t you get upset,
Until my eyes are wet.
Well everything’s just a glitch in my head
Time traveling’s a future scope.
You and him’s a proof of concept.
Dec 23, 2018
Dec 23, 2018 at 2:48 AM UTC
Die Maske des Bösen (“The Mask of Evil”)
by Bertolt Brecht
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
A Japanese woodcarving hangs on my wall—
the mask of an ancient demon, limned with golden lacquer.
Not unsympathetically, I observe
the forehead’s bulging veins,
the strain
such malevolence requires.
Original German text:
Die Maske des Bösen
An meiner Wand hängt ein japanisches Holzwerk
Maske eines bösen Dämons, bemalt mit Goldlack.
Mitfühlend sehe ich
Die geschwollenen Stirnadern, andeutend
Wie anstrengend es ist, böse zu sein.
Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956] was a major German poet, playwright, novelist, humorist, essayist, theater director and songwriter. Brecht fled Germany in 1933, when ****** assumed power. A number of Brecht's poems were written from the perspective of a man who sees his country becoming increasingly fascist, xenophobic and militaristic. Keywords/Tags: Bertolt Brecht, German, translation, Holocaust, poem, Japanese, carving, mask, demon, evil, malevolence, sympathy, compassion, understanding, feeling, forehead, veins, swollen, bulging, effort, strain, exhausting, concentration, suggest, suggesting, suggestive, demonstrating, revealing, showing, wall, gold, golden, lacquer, paint, woodwork, totem, malice, hatred, enmity, spite, spitefulness, animosity, anger, maliciousness, malignancy, venom, spleen, viciousness
Bertolt Brecht Epigrams and Quotations
These are my modern English translations of epigrams and quotations by Bertolt Brecht.
Everyone chases the way happiness feels,
unaware how it nips at their heels.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The world of learning takes a crazy turn
when teachers are taught to discern!
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Unhappy, the land that lacks heroes.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Hungry man, reach for the book:
it's a hook,
a harpoon.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Because things are the way they are,
things can never stay as they were.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
War is like love; true ...
it finds a way through.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
What happens to the hole
when the cheese is no longer whole?
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
It is easier to rob by setting up a bank
than by threatening the poor clerk.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Do not fear death so much, or strife,
but rather fear the inadequate life.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Keywords/Tags: Bertolt Brecht, translation, translations, German, modern English, epigram, epigrams, quote, quotes, quotations
Mar 20, 2020
Mar 20, 2020 at 11:50 PM UTC
God bless the writers;
The novelists, essayist, play-writes and poets,
The writers who put their pen to paper,
To share their imaginations, thoughts, ideas,
Who have the courage to share this with the world,
To open themselves to the judgement of readers,
These people who know not the lives they save,
the smiles they bring,
the hearts they change,
whose minds they shape,
Bless them
Mar 8, 2015
Mar 8, 2015 at 12:41 PM UTC
CAIN
By Ariana Reines
The city was humming gently under me
Like an adolescent quaffing deeply
from the cup of righteousness
Out of practice with my own world
I was looking at how someone else saw it
Longer than I realized
Longer than I care to admit
Those goggles left a mark on me
Then I stared at my own face
An invitation came with my face
To melancholy while Nature
Purred at the edges of my perception
And before me lay a broad road
Enjoining me to do of myself and make
Of myself according to the American
Tradition. Secretly I felt and knew
Things I had not perceived my body
Turning into secrets. In other words
I did not notice the mechanism
By which something within me noted
My experiences and apprehensions of ‘the truth’
Would not be met with favor if I spoke them
Which is not to say one speaks only to find favor
Only that unreciprocated realities have a boring
Way of haunting the cells
Pulling them somehow down
Like the countenance of Cain
Which fell one day and never rose
Again, and the fall of his face
Rhymed with the fall out of Eden
Leading to the first murder and the invention
Of cities, where we now find ourselves
Each tower the ghost of a farmer
Who failed to meet the favor of the Lord
<|>
Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Ariana Reines is a poet, a performing artist and a playwright from Salem, Mass. “A Sand Book” won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She runs Invisible College, a study hall for poetry, sacred texts and the arts. This poem is from her next book, “The Rose.”
Sep 23, 2023
Sep 23, 2023 at 10:24 AM UTC
may ayim
african-german
poetess
essayist
co-established the
term "black german"
decades ago
until then germans would
call a person of color a "neger"
(and too many still do so)
however one
of the most inspiring
talents
took her own life:
august 9
1996
that's it.
god bless you
may ayim
Nov 21, 2019
Nov 21, 2019 at 4:36 AM UTC
I see you reflected in the patterns I live in.
Like the universe reflects on it's own being, I observe you as best I can.
You are the magnetism to my electricity
The chemist to my essayist
The plus to my minus
The yin to my yang
Unlike charges attract
We take and give like
The symmetrical wings of a butterfly work to fly
You are my "otter" half
My universe within a universe
The ever swinging, spinning clock of interlocking grains of sand
in space.
Inner Space! Outer Space!
The atoms within your body, I live on
an electron that revolves around a piece of you, a precious star
needed for the very existence of life.
Mar 17, 2015
Mar 17, 2015 at 1:21 PM UTC
it's one thing that philosophy dismissed
poetry, but it's another that psychiatry did
likewise, interpreting poetry as madness, esp.
western haiku is better than the Freudian
interpretation of dreams; can you believe
the unconscious holes hidden in western
interpretation of *** poetry?
the way you can weave an essay into a few words,
is like fidgeting a theory with
a few images - although the former is less
inclined to a rigidness, and more inclined to
a rubber-band elasticity -
Freud had a few images to work from given
we experience dreams in nanosecond intervals
given the overall mundaneness of a 8 hours repose -
but imagine injecting an essayist's
interpretation of a haiku akin to some psychiatrists
spotting Pythagoras rubbing a tree
for Greenpeace with an *********** of triangles & apples,
like Freud with some rich kid paying for his
opera visits of castratos singing: la dolce vita...
i mean the ******* iceberg...
a few words in haiku are bopping along to
the tides from the Arctic, yet beneath them a
mass of narratives, even the Beijing waiters reminisce
recitations from school to this Mao revolution
syllabus... the unconscious meaning: fill in the gaps...
mathematically? algebra...
after all, very few people experience
'Houston, we have a problem' moments.
Jul 3, 2016
Jul 3, 2016 at 10:23 PM UTC
whether it matters anymore to look to look
to count who of us is fuller of night does
sensibility disappear every time it appears
i have been called upon more than once and understand
that the most poignant statues of Pygmalion are
built on misery and
how much more can my feet disappear in insomnia
through my imagination's door a myriad of beautiful things are hidden that make me cry i am so touched
how much distance is needed between
three decaf days to
still feel it feel it
i decapitate my presence
my existence leads its own life: with a curious
personality a somehow experiencing courtesy
ergo my inner landscape: conversations between an
infinite essayist and a
grounded grounded devilish being
i categorise everything like
the sound of nails and crystal chalice and angel voices stray in a
circle of dirt and head on my chest
good morning to all in your lines
lick your fingers clean fiercely let me
remark something of desiring value:
how are those nests you all hold high above your heads
i can see handfuls of spider webs
i sit nailed into a wall
Jan 20, 2019
Jan 20, 2019 at 5:15 AM UTC
There's a difference between essays and poetry. "Prose" is a type of poetry. It is distinctly different from an essay. One who writes essays is an "essayist"...NOT a "poet". The majority of you on this site are essayists and not poets. Which is fine, but defeats the purpose of a poetry website. The problem is...most of you don't know you're not actually poets.
Sep 18, 2019
Sep 18, 2019 at 10:42 AM UTC
SEARCHING FOR A RATION OF PASSION
Wrangling of words might become a tightrope for the writer to *****
While the reader may feel the fervor that an author still hasn't discovered
Frequently fondling of familiar phrases may become dull,lost in a lull,hiding behind hope
Basking over prose a browser can feel close,bring themselves to find what the scribe may not have recovered
Lost in a webster's lottery laboriously lamenting in language, mindless and in a mope
Scholar wanting the lecturer to teach ,essayist out of reach,more reason for rhymes for which they hunger
Easy essays aren't eloquent,lingering thoughts quickly lost,locked in with no code
Simple students wishing for more a peek inside the penmans mind ,giving them even more reason to wonder
Almost lost like an old cowboy song,left to search in a field with little yield,memories too easily erode
Bookworms wringing hands await on the edge of a seat ,their fondness for dialog wanting to be pleased but the dramatist waiting to ponder
Wordsmiths wants sometimes leaving them empty,then like an open sky raining down phrases leaves them with a new day and new way to reload . R.C.
Aug 31, 2017
Aug 31, 2017 at 6:37 AM UTC