"finem" poems
y o u
a l w a y s
told m e i
was too skinny
but no no no i am
beautiful, i am strong
(stronger than i used to
imagine i could be) and
my heart is still thumping
like it has been for all
these centuries i've lived
even after losing you, even
after feeling like i wasn't
enough to make you
happy. b u t jesus
c h r i s t i w a s
enough i was
enough i a m
e n o u g h .
Aug 17, 2014
Aug 17, 2014 at 9:25 PM UTC
Come Down
by Michael R. Burch
for Harold Bloom and the Ivory Towerists
Come down, O, come down
from your high mountain tower.
How coldly the wind blows,
how late this chill hour ...
and I cannot wait
for a meteor shower
to show you the time
must be now, or not ever.
Come down, O, come down
from the high mountain heather
blown to the lees
as fierce northern gales sever.
Come down, or your heart
will grow cold as the weather
when winter devours
and spring returns never.
NOTE: I dedicated this poem to Harold Bloom after reading his introduction to the Best American Poetry anthology he edited. Bloom seemed intent on claiming poetry as the province of the uber-reader (i.e., himself), but I remember reading poems by Blake, Burns, cummings, Dickinson, Frost, Housman, Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, Whitman, Yeats, et al, and grokking them as a boy, without any “advanced” instruction from anyone. Keywords/Tags: Harold Bloom, literary, critic, criticism, elitist, elitism, ivory, tower, heights, mountain, winter, cold, frigid
Rant: The Elite
by Michael R. Burch
When I heard Harold Bloom unsurprisingly say:
Poetry is necessarily difficult. It is our elitist art ...
I felt a small suspicious thrill. After all, sweetheart,
isn’t this who we are? Aren’t we obviously better,
and certainly fairer and taller, than they are?
Though once I found Ezra Pound
perhaps a smidgen too profound,
perhaps a bit over-fond of Benito
and the advantages of fascism
to be taken ad finem, like high tea
with a pure white spot of intellectualism
and an artificial sweetener, calorie-free.
I know! I know! Politics has nothing to do with art
And it tempts us so to be elite, to stand apart ...
but somehow the word just doesn’t ring true,
echoing effetely away—the distance from me to you.
Of course, politics has nothing to do with art,
but sometimes art has everything to do with becoming elite,
with climbing the cultural ladder, with being able to meet
someone more Exalted than you, who can demonstrate how to ****
so that everyone below claims one’s odor is sweet.
You had to be there! We were falling apart
with gratitude! We saw him! We wept at his feet!
Though someone will always be far, far above you, clouding your air,
gazing down at you with a look of wondering despair.
Mar 30, 2020
Mar 30, 2020 at 12:44 AM UTC
I could paint the walls behind my head
Red and grey shades of intellect
An abstract portrait of Picasso potential
The spaces between are the differential
The tachytelic nature of my mind
Seems to want my body to unwind
To fall away to the wind
A metanoia, I have sinned
Apr 11, 2013
Apr 11, 2013 at 8:35 PM UTC
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Guide me safely through the night
and wake me with the morning's light.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
my silent scream, my soul to reap.
Choke and burn me through the night,
I can't escape, too weak to fight.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
to wander blind through darkness deep.
The demons now have bound me tight,
my hollow smile seems not quite...right.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I leave them all behind to weep.
Crimson lines on skin so white,
I will not wake to morning's light.
Amen.
Oct 26, 2012
Oct 26, 2012 at 5:19 PM UTC
Some songs do not truly end,
they only change with time.
It seems are song follows this trend,
and I am forced to revert to rhyme.
The broken dance of silent dreams
was meant to be the close.
But there's a remix of our song it seems,
and I'm forced to think with prose.
Do you remember what I set out to do,
a year from this very day?
It seems my words of passion were true
and the dance is having its way.
There is a twist to our broken song,
and it has lead me straight back to you.
and now this is a place we both truly belong,
but I am hampered on what to do.
Ad Finem,
It rose tonight with no warning and came,
and over and over it spoke your name.
It's neck was red where my hands beheld it,
and scorched my brow with its scorching breath.
I thought it was dead, but with no warning
It told me a love like this can know no death.
It was enough to wake me at the hour of three,
and to frazzle my sense of verse.
And it won't let me stop thinking of you and me,
and the eternal circle curse.
My thoughts shall not turn to action,
they will not interfere.
For the negative reaction,
means no more than means a tear.
I must think to a hundred years from now dear heart,
when the grief will be o'er.
I must accept the absence of the kiss through the rose leaf rain,
and mask this dreadful secret pain.
I now know that it knows no death,
and so for that I will save my breath.
It's something that goes beyond the laws of verse and rhyme,
It is something withstanding the test of time.
The structured chaos of our sinking house of dreams
is where this all must stay.
For I just want to see you happy it seems,
and I could not stand to push you away.
I would love to put away our past,
and start something fresh anew.
For a friendship is something that can last,
and I would like to have that with you.
I love when we are together,
but I can't help how I feel.
I shall mask it altogether,
despite it being real.
I just do not understand my heart,
Though I know it true.
We had such a brief start,
yet it has lasted through.
I have never been like this,
my lingering feelings make no sense.
Something about our kiss
made this all intense.
So for now I will sit here thinking
of the meaning of this poem.
Why I was awakened to write this,
and why to you I roam.
So number six of this story,
of how a broken man gleams,
searching for our glory,
sinking in our house of dreams.
Dec 24, 2012
Dec 24, 2012 at 5:36 AM UTC
"Tu solus puer, non solum tenebris est, et mori pro populo. Fortis puer es, sed ego sum ultra vires; Ego in finem, et venerunt tibi"
"You are alone child, there is only darkness for you, and death for your people.
You are strong child, but I am beyond strength; I am the end, and I have come for you."
Dec 18, 2017
Dec 18, 2017 at 5:38 AM UTC
One day, I will be fortunate enough
To sing the body electric in my own notes
And wail for the best minds of my generation in my own alley
And feel a connection to Sylvia beyond a page
Without the pain of Poe
And the forest-mindedness of Thoreau
My path of syllables
Excerpt from a song
Will bombard the bestseller shelves
And leave twenty people
Huddled in candlelight to hear as
The Chosen One reads my manuscript
From a ribbon-bound mass
And my verses are muttered between “intellectuals”
The same way no one has ever read Howl
Leaving a thirsty one
Or two
Flipping through the aimless last pages
Taunting ad finem
And an early morning critic
Trepanned
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 2:42 PM UTC
when shuttle feeds show the earth on fire
and unprovened ashes stray from the pyre
ammonium nitrate will still be there
to keep us unvitiated, cold, and bare.
not that we'll need it, the sun can warm
with its dying light it is no longer "aurum"
but "ater."
lying next to me, a body in destitution
rags and bones and circumlocution
no medicine can fix you, no analeptic drug
only the attraction of the gravitational tug
for when we are done with cosmic consorts,
we will be only sedimentary quartz.
Jan 14, 2015
Jan 14, 2015 at 7:04 PM UTC
Alive and kicking, to walk the Earth
At the eleventh hour; already, yet,
At length, at last, the body politic
Coming as events cast their shadows before
Destinies illume myrtle lectionary as
Moribund as Erebus to consign the odour
Of sanctity; the sword of the spirit,- non est
To remove the curtain of dissolution thread
And thrum the ***** that gives quietus like
Clockwork to all mortality, rank and file
Ne plus ultra; purviewing avast the lief ebb
Parousia of the dickens sombrous soli upon
The Stygian shore of Thanatos, whom none but
Himself could parallel and therby hangs twice
A tale told pure and simple, to come into the world,
Root and branch, fore and aft:-
The Sheydim-Tantz; written economical
With five-wits, ad finem by the kalamos Gallows
On this side of the grave to shut the door
Upon eternity shorn of its midnight
Dark beams of truth.
ELEETE J MUIR
Dec 20, 2017
Dec 20, 2017 at 10:58 PM UTC