"heroically" poems
‘I am…’ 'Or am I’? Who can say?
‘A posteriori’ leads the way
For the extra and the ordinary
Axiomatic sway,
In the gravity of corollary,
‘A priori’ interplay
Ataraxic overlay of anxious automation,
As the innocence of dissonance delay.
Practicing semantic contemplation,
In willfully prevenient interpolation,
Civilly disobedient in expediently seeming disarray,
Forecasts in vague extrapolation
Contrasts the millennial contagion
Already underway,
Filling nihilistic voids with particles in waves,
To interpret dreams of Freud to free Oedipus’s slaves,
A degreeless scholastic who never misbehaves,
Simulated humanoid dramatic in the affect that he craves,
Inflating linguistics in acrobatic raves,
A thespian who plans conation with legacy engraves.
The probabilistic determiner of cosmogenous debates,
An apperceived inquirer of qualitative states,
Inspiring proprietor of dismality abates.
Challenging aporia as epistemic oscillates,
Stoically, heroically, ‘one’ who amalgamates,
Circling the infinite in hermeneutic calibrates.
An escaped prisoner from depressive disillusion,
Of an introspective extrovert who finds solace in confusion,
The personable recluse fighting an illusion
Breaking down the nuances of every institution.
Calculating consequence as time goes to infinity
Revolutionary commonsense of principal utility,
An opinionated adversary,
to the realist without evidence,
Theorizing in futility,
Stipulating every sense leading to the virility of the pretense that dominates community.
Divergently converging all the efforts we’ve personified,
Inadvertently submerging old traditions that unethically were codified,
Hastening the urgency for purging that which cannot be modified through the merging of the certainty that will no longer coincide,
Stationing the levies to finally stem the tide,
Of periodic enmities disguised to be necessities so blatantly deified.
Observing moral sentiments, perched upon eternity,
As consequential regiments are expounded universally,
To unstratify the residents indiscriminately
And identify quantum elements spiritualistically,
Changing collective behavior individually,
Socializing constructs in joint ventured logo therapy.
Nov 16, 2018
Nov 16, 2018 at 8:07 AM UTC
ah, enslave without compassion
bound ancestors you must impale
go seek and show no mercy
let those who escape carry the tale
all the sufferers bearing witness
to their ministers spilling their blood
staggered screeches from bleak recesses
regicide plotters bend to the dust
with unmitigated conquest and **********
trample them under your tyranny
slimy enshrinement brings into question
what's divinely lamented for
scatter populations with ruthlessness
let them choose sycophancy or sword
reappoint difficult commanders
for instigation unbroken awaits
kept in frenzy, they whisper confusion
never quite sure of their fate
with unmitigated conquest and **********
trample them under your tyranny
let the cowardly unlock the gates for you
to heroically claim what's inside
crowds you abhor kneeling in wonder
all the world is your ****** bride
punctuate the roads with tollgates
***** monuments to broadcast your name
all your banquet's guests are your enemies
entertain them with one another's shame
with unmitigated conquest and **********
trample them under your tyranny
with unmitigated conquest and **********
trample them under your tyranny
under your tyranny
Jun 11, 2015
Jun 11, 2015 at 2:32 AM UTC
MY LONG TREK ON WRONG LEGS, BEG DYNAMITE FROM HUSH DUDS
DAMP CANNONS BILLOW IN THE EAST WIND, LIKE FLACCID DRAGONS
GAGGING ON IRON APPLES
I SURGE IMPOTENT IN MY WRATH, SUNBATHING BY AFTERGLOW
HEROICALLY CONTAINED.
DISMANTLED...
I CRAFT THE WITHERING OF MY FURY
WITH A STEADY HAND; AND A JADED HEART
STARK BLIGHT, DRAINS MY CUP OF THUNDER, WHERE MY LIGHTNING CLOTS
WHERE SOLID DARK
HARKENS
MY YELLOW SUN HARDENS; LIKE AN UNSTRUCK COIN
BLANK IN MY POCKET
SHARDS OF DULL ACHE... UNSHARPEN
MY RED SEA
DEPARTS
MY KELP BEDS
DISMAYED.
Jun 24, 2013
Jun 24, 2013 at 7:03 PM UTC
THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, "O sea-starved, hungry sea.'
5.9k
*The blue song bird
mellifluous singer admired
for her songs that melt
even hearts of rock,
riding the crust
of the adoring wind,
swoop,
down,
down,
down
without a thought
suddenly alights,
heroically tries to sit,
on a high tension power line;
yet another of her
impromptu acts like before,
she labors to convince everyone
in a shrill chirping sound
that dangerously she lives
taking life in her own hands.
East wind, her companion tells
she is mistaken; he tries to push
her away from the lethal wire
on which death awaits with its dark hum
"young and wayward bird
you tell me you learn so quickly
from your mistakes, alright
from now and the moment next
lies an unknown chasm
in a jiffy if you decide to fathom it
no time is left for unlearning what it teaches
and reverse your journey
to the winter land of darkness
from where no migratory bird has ever come back"
The bird so deaf to wind's words,
still hovers above the wire
the wind in warning hums a sad tune aloud.*
Jan 9, 2014
Jan 9, 2014 at 11:18 AM UTC
Though it were bright
It is most assuredly overcast now,
I basked in the radiance of your love
Before you married him.
I thought maybe heroically to interrupt the wedding
When the Minister exclaimed, "Speak now or forever hold your peace"
But instead settled to sit in my car as the rain fell, my tears flowed,
And the rice showered upon your exit of the chapel.
Years have passed, yet memories still fresh
I think often of our young unbridled love
And still it hurts, this dull ache within my heart
To wonder how beautiful we would have been.
Once upon a time ago, you told me you loved me, constantly
With the tears that rolled down your cheek when we kissed
Today the sun's rays are still radiant
Yet I live in the shadows of this oxymoron for the rest of my life.
-----ChawzzyScript
Mar 16, 2013
Mar 16, 2013 at 4:30 PM UTC
Southern Icarus
by Michael R. Burch
Windborne, lover of heights,
unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching embrace
you climb, skittish kite ...
What do you know of the world’s despair,
gliding in vast solitariness there
so that all that remains is to
fall?
Only a little longer the wind invests its sighs;
you stall
spread-eagled as the canvas snaps
and ***** its white rebellious wings,
and all
the houses watch with baffled eyes.
Originally published by Poetry Porch. Keywords/Tags: Icarus, flight, flying, hang-gliding, kite, glider, wind, canvas, South, southern, truck, unspooled
Note: The following poem unites Icarus with Tom O'Bedlam in a final, magical quest ...
Finally to Burn
(the Fall and Resurrection of Icarus)
by Michael R. Burch
I.
Athena takes me
sometimes by the hand
and we go levitating
through strange Dreamlands
where Apollo sleeps
in his dark forgetting
and Passion seems
like a wise bloodletting
and all I remember
—upon awaking—
is: to Love sometimes
is like forsaking
one’s Being—to glide
heroically beyond thought,
forsaking the here
for the There and the Not.
II.
O, finally to Burn,
gravity beyond escaping!
To plummet is Bliss
when the blisters breaking
rain down red scabs
on the earth’s mudpuddle...
Feathers and wax
and the watchers huddle...
Flocculent sheep,
O, and innocent lambs!
I will rock me to sleep
on the waves’ iambs.
III.
To Sleep, that is Bliss
in Love’s recursive Dream,
for the Night has Wings
pallid as moonbeams—
they will flit me to Life,
like a huge-eyed Phoenix
fluttering off
to quarry the Sphinx.
IV.
Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,
Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.
Quixotic, I seek Love
amid the tarnished
rusted-out steel
when to live is varnish.
To Dream—that’s the thing!
Aye, that Genie I’ll rub,
soak by the candle,
aflame in the tub.
V.
Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,
Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.
Somewhither, somewhither
aglitter and strange,
we must moult off all knowledge
or perish caged.
VI.
I am reconciled to Life
somewhere beyond thought—
I’ll Live in the There,
I’ll Dream of the Naught.
Methinks it no journey;
to tarry’s a waste,
so fatten the oxen;
make a nice baste.
I’m coming, Fool Tom,
we have Somewhere to Go,
though we injure noone,
ourselves wildaglow.
Apr 14, 2020
Apr 14, 2020 at 3:57 AM UTC
We beat the paths that
are laid before us with
machetes and gunfire
Loving violently, loving
violence like Roman citizens
at a colosseum.Cringing
heroically at dismemberment
and pain.
And we're all just the same.
Feb 21, 2011
Feb 21, 2011 at 9:32 AM UTC
the nights are growing cold
I sat outside to finish reading a book
about love and cancer
extremities growing numb
falling foolishly in love
with the pretty girl whose face
gave me the courage
to sit down beside her
on a bench
in the sun
five minutes before my next class started
I found out her favorite author
but neglected to discover her name
in the sunlight
YOLO only says to live
and it’s easy to forget
that I’d like to have
a future
my night sky consists
of millions of tiny, ferociously burning
pin ******
and one heroically loyal mirror
reflecting more brightly than ten thousand
500 million year old projections
of dead stars
I am doomed to fall in love
with a girl who can honestly tell me
that fear of death
and love of life
don’t really feel any different
I wish I could choose
the type of fool I will be
but I know that the moon
has never been in love with the sun
that she has only ever revolved around us
as we revolved around him
waiting eight minutes for his light to reach us
until night falls and we finally notice
her cold, bright eye
slowly blinking at us
doing all she can to be like the light
that we love
her,
reflecting the old, distant light at us
seconds after it touches her surface
she is the closest thing we have to a companion
to a light source
yet we still spend our lives reaching for the stars
I have no belief in a God
I know the sun
is a ball of burning gas
expelling particles and waves of energy
into blank, full space
and that the moon
is a dense space cloud
with a reflective surface covered
in craters
and darkness
and brightness
and a few human footprints and I know
that the night sky
is full of things that can **** me
and everyone I know
with no warning
but such a fool as I am
I can do nothing but love
the cold, lonely face
that looks down on me as a reflection
of my source of life
she will only ever be my beautiful mistress
of untouchable hurt
and so I am doomed
to love that which will break me
if I ever get close enough to touch it
I can’t tell you whether my heart is dying
or if I’ve finally found a way to live with myself
Oct 15, 2013
Oct 15, 2013 at 2:48 PM UTC
His mouth was a nuclear leak
(he fried his brain when he was 17)
And I can’t get the burning toxins off my skin
(and that is as far as he ever grew up)
Some of them have seeped in deeper, I can
(he’s amused by stick figure animation)
Hear them rupture the seams of my insides
(and the shuffling photos of his obsessions;)
My brain thankfully, is still intact
(his car, his clothes, his kids…and me)
Fighting this fight heroically
(my god, to be one of his children)
Anxiously looking over my shoulder
(he can’t keep a nanny for very long)
Refuting his demeaning accusations
(no one stays in his life who is not on payroll)
********* Narcissist
(but even they all quit eventually)
Still forgiving myself for letting it happen
(oblivious that his entourage disrespects him)
This antithesis-of-me-toxic-bath
(he is incapable of giving or deserving trust)
Disdained my beliefs and philosophies
(he still wishes he had his mullet of 1986)
Demanded my selflessness without return
(and the older woman he ****** in high school)
Reduced me to dismissible arm candy;
(immature alcoholic tantrums lie just)
The missing feature of his pride
(below the surface of every conversation)
And I can’t shake this feeling
(which speak exclusively of himself and his many impulses)
That I have truly met evil face to face
(or the stupidity of humanity who serve his whims)
Afraid to realize how narrowly I escaped
(his highest dream is to own a personal servant)
Except for the residue
(explains his demands clearly and concisely)
Adhering like burned on soap ****
(believes money and a big **** make him a man)
I feel like he will never, ever really be gone
(his reptilian brain controls every move)
That he will still try to own me or make me
(“I don’t want to be an ******* I’m just really good at it”)
Pay for refusing to surrender my soul
(funny, those words almost make me feel sorry for him)
May 7, 2016
May 7, 2016 at 12:21 AM UTC
Carefully caressing your cheek
Fretting fiercely over fig cake
Greeting gracefully
Gorging gloriously
Happily humming hyms heroically
While finishing fig cake ferociously
Starting in p ending in y
Plainly pointing the position
The poppies placed with percision
Deliciously devilishly delightful
Boy! Fig cake filled me up...
Sitting, satiating sizable crumbs
Placed on the poppy plate
Suddenly the slightest smell sinks my sore eyes
I decided to rise to go to bed
Ahhhhhh....
Jun 6, 2016
Jun 6, 2016 at 1:56 AM UTC
I stopped being a story teller when I learned to read. I don’t think I ever learned to write. I think I was a story teller long ago, before the truth mattered. Before the truth became an obsession. Truth can get in the way when we want to tell a story. Truth has a way of narrowing the walls around us, putting the pressure on us, and sometimes squeezing the blood from us.
When I look at what I write, the things others would call poetry, the truth is nearly always inversely related to whatever value the words have. You see, there will always be someone who has felt more intense pain or joy. There will always be someone who has behaved more heroically or shamefully than any person about whom I can write. There will always be some common man or woman who has transcended his or her circumstances far better than anybody I have ever met or observed.
If I feel compelled to write about things, acknowledging that whatever great stories I might have had inside were long ago flushed from me by the waters of truth, then I must create people and events. I must conjure them up like ghosts. These apparitions have no form to be washed away.
The people who follow my words like tracks of an animal--predator or prey--should know I feel closest to being one who says something of value when the words are the greatest distance from the texture and grit of events. If I were to tell the truth, it would hurt. It would hurt me to write the truth, and it would hurt the reader who reads it. That reader has often rested complacently with the belief that the words are true, that history is really history rather than one of an infinite number of versions of the truth in this thing one might be inclined to call the book of life.
When you read my words, please don’t forget I don’t like the truth. I avoid it even in my stories that I believe are based on "real" occurrences. I avoid the truth. Yes, I may have seen the eyes of bloodied Vietnamese children when I was twenty, and yes, I may have sat in a bunker and listened to someone tell me they saw innocents slaughtered on the Mekong, or what the young warm blood felt like on their hands, and yes, I may have heard someone’s last words before hospice sleep, but all these things are only shadows cast by some light whose source I cannot see or comprehend.
Truth hurts. If you have read my words before, and felt something, there is no way to rob you of the feeling. Please, however, know that I was doing my utmost to hide the truth, because trying to reveal it would have been even more futile.
Oct 26, 2012
Oct 26, 2012 at 1:36 PM UTC
How did you find your faith?
did you stumble upon it
was it discovered on a beech
was it heroically sought after
in the fissure of a breach?
Did you ever lose faith?
did a great expectation dwindle
was a deep held trust betrayed
did a dear friend disappoint you
ubiquitous suffering and dismay?
Where did you find it?
in the grandeur of a sacred place
in the contours of a beloved face
in the splendor of anointed grace
as balm to salve a deep disgrace?
were you riding a subway
or floating on a pink cloud
were you kneeling in a church
were bombs exploding loud?
was it the embrace of a lover
was it a crisis of deep plight
was it a soul stirring chorus
did you lose an awful fight?
in the glory of a painting
dripping petals of a desert flower
the majesty of mountain glaciers
a surging river filled with power
Could you lose your faith again?
If you did, would you know how to find it?
Where would you look if it happened?
How will you know its faith when you find it?
What does faith feel like?
What do you do when you got it?
What do you do when you get it?
How do you know you got it when you get it?
How do you know you get it when you got it?
Or are you formally faithless in a formal sense?
Signed,
Trying to Keep the Faith
Music Selection:
George Michael, Faith
Art Selection
Caprichos
Francisco Goya
101098
Stamford, CT
jbm
Jun 26, 2013
Jun 26, 2013 at 12:58 AM UTC
This is the first breath that I've ever cared about.
Please abandon your everlasting doubt.
We've opened up a magic portal through an alien route,
exposing you to my internally dying dehydrating drought.
I'm like a waning foreign phoenix finding fairness in its contaminated ashes.
I still get flashes of post-traumatic emotional rashes,
from an abstract haunting nightmare that I don't care to wear
on my not-so-bare chest anymore.
Be aware that I don't always do my share,
and that I am made of skin that has been known to ware and tear.
If this is just Truth or Dare, I don't want to play anymore.
Please be fair.
Please beware.
The snow has suddenly stopped straining my spiraling somber sorrows into silent sirens sounding seasonal surreal suicidal scenes of secret sappy solitude tomorrows.
And though the weakening leaves outside are withering,
and my feeble frozen bones are quietly quivering;
my shivering insides are shyly shifting
into brand new hues of brighter blues
that are constantly turning into a lighter and mightier muse,
like the autumn leaves that heroically live beneath my yearning Red Wing shoes.
I'm on a blissful beach of elated snow,
burying my feet in what we both know;
that our doubt has been put to rest below.
Nov 16, 2018
Nov 16, 2018 at 4:54 AM UTC
~*a companion poem to
Marry Me! -(I am-in-love-with-you) (1)*~
wherein was writ:
**“here I stop
lest I die of bursting, and yet I weep
for us, for you,
no longer
read my poetry”**
<>
another winter’s day cruelty,
for this wretched refuse of a
former man
who
once could,
who even deemed
owner of a loving teeming,
who adored kneeling,
before love’s altar,
sacrificially, heroically
once in possession of
amazing grace, (2)
but now no longer such
in his scriptures
deeded,
for our save-by-day ,
appears, before my eyes,
so informing my love permit
has now time~expired
I once was found,
but not
once more,
but
once again,
refamiliarized with
loss
wretched and wrenched,
so I punch up at the sky,
and the sky,
like you, my love,
doesn’t punch back,
and now we are in
aggrieved agree:
there is no returning
to where
we graced each other,
so one more poem I’ll
prepare
so let it be,
the “we”
will be momentarily -
but not ! ever lastingly
but for a well~timed
very finite infinity
be returned
to coexist
and let
grace be extended
even surreptitiously
for we
to separate,
sub divide our souls,
in a graceful manner:
*why this last act,
a hallmark of
what once
stood for
us,
was,
and perhaps then,
you will read:*
my only love poetry
once moreover,
with com-passion
and even tiny teeny seconds
of memorized affection,
and that would be an
amazing grace
Dec 13, 2024
Dec 13, 2024 at 3:17 PM UTC
enveloped within the familiar creases,
the sweatshirt
faithful to me in
each weather forecast it
heroically resists
whose sleeves have been left frayed
and abandoned since
spring
winter brings the
old heater
down the narrow steps
from the attic
its red switch illuminated, the whirring fan exhaling
warmth throughout a reluctant room
and the shades quiver
and melt to the floor, their edges
skimming the wood surface that is
resentful and ruthless at sunrise
on my bare feet
Oct 27, 2013
Oct 27, 2013 at 4:26 PM UTC
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.
Jun 13, 2014
Jun 13, 2014 at 7:04 PM UTC
In the third eye of symmetry
Never mind the strings of beauty (words)
If the outcome is poetry
Artistry
So long as man dreams
Never mind hymns of danger
If you're moving on heroically
Such is a poets causality.
He knows not the construct of words from ordinary men. They lack structure, rhyme and purpose. They are the ramblings of those who can not see,
Those who cannot feel
And those...
Those he cannot be.
Mar 26, 2017
Mar 26, 2017 at 3:24 PM UTC
I know the pitcher got
A
Hell of a fastball
And one mean curve
But we got 1000 hitters
Crowding the on deck circle.......
SOMEBODY!
Get up there and try to hit the ball
WILLYA!
••
("I can't
Me good **** gone and me be sad!
Boo Hoo")
••
••
RAIN
Is the name of the song
In the shadows?
Is it you I see?!!
Standing TALL
heroically
TELL ME YOUR NAME AND I'LL TELL IT TO GOD
for on you
All trust is placed
••
A
Little child
is
Lost on the Street
Won't you help me find him
Please?
Nov 3, 2013
Nov 3, 2013 at 4:03 PM UTC
Heroes and Heroines
hold to what they know
Honing, as they refine
maintaining, status-quo
No greater mission or quest
protecting the innocent, and weak
Passing each, and every test
as honor and justice, seek
Ever will the plague be passed
as each and every time
for damages, present and past
the bill, for others crimes
The cowardice and fear, of masses
as the resolve and bravery, of the few
for the dark, the light, surpasses
persevering, and always coming through
Jan 19, 2017
Jan 19, 2017 at 10:02 AM UTC
Fingers wrapped around throat
Words pricking your soul
-- little thorns that ebb into your heart,
into your mind.
The image forever framed in
gothic black;
Hung in an alley of my darkest memories.
***"I'm not *******
playing around"***
A scene from a movie
-- an extra reel of their life
that I heroically,
no,
tragically
stepped into. Only to be told
kindly,
to **** off***
We no longer wish to carry the burden
of other lives.
But some things have been ******
within the view of my eyes,
whether I wish to see them, or bid them
farewell.
911, what's your emergency?
I think our souls are falling apart.
-lf-
Jul 27, 2013
Jul 27, 2013 at 3:16 PM UTC
I love heroes.
They make the world a better place.
After the bad guys,
they save the day
heroically flying in the bright blue sky
shining in their pride and grace.
It makes sense if the world has heroes
to give the weak hope
and the evil a conscience.
but heroes,
the very ones that
save my cat from the high tree,
rescue the feeble from their fears,
and save this horrid society of it's
the omnipotent ongoing evils,
are nothing more than heroes.
for heroes,
as they glow and glimmer
in all their glorious ways,
being the big brother
judge from one side of justice to the other,
don't exist
to save me
to exist to try
to save me
and make me
they leave that to me.
that's why
Jun 13, 2012
Jun 13, 2012 at 2:48 AM UTC
Ruminating epoché,
‘I am…’ ‘Or am I’? Who can say?
‘A posteriori’ leads the way
For the extra and the ordinary
Axiomatic sway
In the gravity of corollary,
‘A priori’ interplay.
Ataraxic overlay of anxious automation,
As the innocence of dissonance delay
Initiatives imperative consolidation,
Civilly disobedient in expedient disarray.
Practicing semantic contemplation,
Filling nihilistic voids with particles in waves,
Forecast in vague extrapolation,
To interpret dreams of Freud to free Oedipus’s slaves,
A degreeless scholastic who never misbehaves,
Simulated humanoid dramatic in the affect that he craves,
Inflating the linguistics of silent enclaves,
A thespian who plans conation with legacy engraves.
Probabilistic determiner of cosmogenous debates,
The Apperceived inquirer of qualitative states,
Inspiring proprietor of dismality abates.
Challenging Aporia as epistemic oscillates,
Stoically, heroically, ‘one’ who amalgamates,
Circling the infinite in hermeneutic calibrates.
May 23, 2018
May 23, 2018 at 1:24 AM UTC
seldomly "random" at all
choosing whether to choose or not
we seal our fate
with ribbons and symbols
of something or other
with postcard pictures of eachother
and our phantom....god
seldomly "random" at all
heroically rising
after the false
belief in "the fall"
(hardly "a rising" at all!)
we are who we decide to be
free or a slave
this is the only choice we make
(hardly "a choice" at all)
nothing random about it at all
nothing random at all
Sep 8, 2010
Sep 8, 2010 at 2:00 PM UTC
A
heart is where its
gaggle of appropriate nerves
tingle singing nerves
single teeming nerves
a tumult of aching skin
towers correctly sublime
a balmy twinge of evenings
who curl with clearest scent
about the firmer freshly body
of the thighs quaking totally
(a face that twists heroically
churns adroitly
in adoring pleasure
wreaking fragile sturdy
crescents
limping on the hotting
chalice of her febrile
brink. she totters just almost
at it. right at it fiercely.
her flush groaning
her garden parting
),i flay the difficult ugly
that wears on her this
common uncanny second
i turn her sorely into naked
flavored robes writhing
between her thrashing together
i stab her forever giddy
my placid crashing”
May 16, 2011
May 16, 2011 at 1:24 AM UTC