another day has passed.
a day closer to the black sky.
and you read poetry today.
you read a book today.
But, what trace have you left on this planet, today?

Who will acknowledge it? Will you be misunderstood? Will a young boy with curly brown hair and silver eyes weep over your words for a hundred years, while listening to our now vintage songs?

Will anyone remember you? Will you matter, after the Earth makes hundreds of thousands of spins around the Sun, which perhaps is circling around something bigger? Will you reincarnate? Will you be alive? Will you just disappear, or will you stick around?

Is there hope for humanity, is there hope for immortality? Will they enable people to live forever, to find a way to break nature, a year after you die? Will people still follow the same traditions, as they do today, will families have lunch together like their ancestors used to have?

Will there be depressed children, stressing and crying and cutting themselves because nobody would believe when they say "It's too much"? Will people still be stuck in the circle of melancholy and nostalgy, held captured by the never-ending routine when the first thing they do in the morning is ask themselves " Is this worth it? Do I really have to go to work? Perhaps I should end this, maybe it'll be easier then?"

Will people still break under their masks that they hold with trembling hands, grasping the clay so hard that their nails break and their fingers bleed, just so their kids couldn't discern what's underneath it?

Will everything stay the same and nothing improve? Will there be a catastrophy and expunge you, the one writing this, the gorgeous stranger you met on the street on a cold winter evening five years ago? Will it also wipe out your elementary school teacher, wipe out the florist from who you bought that flower for your first love and a rose for your mother?

Will people change, mentally and physically evolve along with our brains? Will the names we have to learn by heart - Darwin, Watt, Dante, Boccaccio and Einstein become irrelevant comparing to the inventions that are yet to come? Will somebody prove they were wrong, will somebody speak badly of them? Will someone still adore Dante's Heaven and Hell as much as I do? Will people analyse poetry the way I do? Will anyone ever feel the way you do?
Will anyone ever make a decision like you did, will anyone look up to you?

Is there a reason to be stressed and depressed, when all of this won't last? Is there a point in searching for the meaning of life rather than picking a reason to live that satisfies you both mentally, emotionally and physically?

Will people have passion and hate and freedom of expression, will they be bold or will they become faded? Lost? Encouraged or enraged?

Well you'll never know.

And that's hard to grasp.

Lost in narcotic prescriptions
all your chemistry
now an elixir tweaked
in the lab where hairless blind rats
are fed the drugs in your bathroom cabinet
caged to Mankinds search for immortality
sometimes you give them a cigarette and a tab of LSD
but mostly you watch them die and sell the poisoned outcome
to a national pest control conglomerate.

we belong to the starving places, the broken places,
the screaming, shattered, hallucinated alleys
of blood and smoke and demons of shuddering righteousness.
floating lovers running high and poison-drunk
into doorways and neonic windows crying out
for absinthe and holy, holy benzedrine
in glazed teacups of library cafés.
demonic siren-songs,
shrieking car alarms in afternoon machineries,
when all the righteous are sleeping
and the chosen come out to scream
in front of shutters closed down to the ******.

vibrations from the drilling drilling drilling
into the pavements of greying rain-tears and rainbowed gasoline
spilled carelessly from engines
releasing rotten and evil from the deepness of the earth.
those righteous-shutters blow half open
in the madness of waxing moon-winds.

beautiful, beautiful darkness,
beautiful, beautiful damnation,
golden deception,
golden lucifer,
golden hell,
golden lights straying off pathways of dark-deep forests,
golden souls in eager rivers of underworlds,
golden addiction,
golden smiles of torture,
golden wheels of death and birth
and dying, dying, dying for the darkness,
dying with blood running purple
into the indigo road- drains of night,
reflecting golden constellations and golden lamp-posts
and the golden windows of empire state and the l-train.

scream, scream, scream into your indigo death.
fearful, ground-sleeping, six feet forgotten,
fires below, regret above, redemption and tears from the righteous
with their closed windows far above the bodies now.

those starving places belong to us.
the dumpster-fainted concussions,
the vomited acids of last night’s drunken affairs in amber side-streets,
the hollow-eyed babies born out of terror and war
and atomic demises of love and perforated money,
those flawlessly created youths with their drugged immortality
shining broken-skinned from out of their eyes and mouths
those nothing-brained men of poetry and heavenly visions,
those meilleurs esprits,
those wanton dreamers of scotch and rosé
and pure ethanol gulped from glassware,
burning throats and minds and talent
and running genius into drains
with the purple blood of the dying.
the starving places belong to the starving,
and the starving belong to their indigo deaths.

Love is a beacon of light
in a cold dark lonely place
yet often it can Start a fight
but still be Seen with grace
love will Not abandon you
although it may evolve
as long as you love others too
there is your resolve
love is Not an Iron block
you can throw against a wall
mostly it is week and fragile
and sometimes very small
love is Not immortality
like some poets may say
One day it will seize to be
but thats what makes it great
So cherish love with understanding
But please dont throw a Fit
everything will have its ending
just Know it will be missed.

The State of the Art

These are my "ars poetica" poems: the ones about the art and craft of writing poetry in a modern world that doesn't always recognize the artists or their work.



The State of the Art
by Michael R. Burch

Has rhyme lost all its reason
and rhythm, renascence?
Are sonnets out of season
and poems but poor pretense?

Are poets lacking fire,
their words too trite and forced?
What happened to desire?
Has passion been coerced?

Must poetry fade slowly,
like Latin, to past tense?
Are the bards too high and holy,
or their readers merely dense?

Keywords/Tags: poetry, art, rhyme, reason, meter, rhythm, form, sonnet, sonnets, fire, passion, Latin, stale, outdated, past, tense, readers, readership, write, writing, poems, poets, bards, readers, words, creation, motion



Currents
by Michael R. Burch

How can I write and not be true
to the rhythm that wells within?
How can the ocean not be blue,
not buck with the clapboard slap of tide,
the clockwork shock of wave on rock,
the motion creation stirs within?

Originally published by The Lyric



Sonnet: Discrimination
by Michael R. Burch

The meter I had sought to find, perplexed,
was ripped from books of "verse" that read like prose.
I found it in sheet music, in long rows
of hologramic CDs, in sad wrecks
of long-forgotten volumes undisturbed
half-centuries by archivists, unscanned.
I read their fading numbers, frowned, perturbed—
why should such tattered artistry be banned?

I heard the sleigh bells' jingles, vampish ads,
the supermodels' babble, Seuss's books
extolled in major movies, blurbs for abs...
A few poor thinnish journals crammed in nooks
are all I've found this late to sell to those
who'd classify free verse "expensive prose."

Originally published by The Chariton Review



The Harvest of Roses
by Michael R. Burch

I have not come for the harvest of roses―
the poets' mad visions,
their railing at rhyme ...
for I have discerned what their writing discloses:
weak words wanting meaning,
beat torsioning time.

Nor have I come for the reaping of gossamer―
images weak,
too forced not to fail;
gathered by poets who worship their luster,
they shimmer, impendent,
resplendently pale.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



Sonnet: The Forge
by Michael R. Burch

To at last be indestructible, a poem
must first glow, almost flammable, upon
a thing inert, as gray, as dull as stone,

then bend this way and that, and slowly cool
at arms-length, something irreducible
drawn out with caution, toughened in a pool

of water so contrary just a hiss
escapes it―water instantly a mist.
It writhes, a thing of senseless shapelessness ...

And then the driven hammer falls and falls.
The horses ***** their ears in nearby stalls.
A soldier on his cot leans back and smiles.

A sound of ancient import, with the ring
of honest labor, sings of fashioning.

Originally published by The Chariton Review



Goddess
by Michael R. Burch

for Kevin N. Roberts

"What will you conceive in me?"
I asked her. But she
only smiled.

"Naked, I bore your child
when the wolf wind howled,
when the cold moon scowled . . .

naked, and gladly."
"What will become of me?"
I asked her, as she

absently stroked my hand.
Centuries later, I understand;
she whispered, "I Am."

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly (it was the first poem in the first issue)



Safe Harbor
by Michael R. Burch

for Kevin N. Roberts

The sea at night seems
an alembic of dreams—
the moans of the gulls,
the foghorns’ bawlings.

A century late
to be melancholy,
I watch the last shrimp boat as it steams
to safe harbor again.

In the twilight she gleams
with a festive light,
done with her trawlings,
ready to sleep . . .

Deep, deep, in delight
glide the creatures of night,
elusive and bright
as the poet’s dreams.

Published by The Lyric, Grassroots Poetry, Romantics Quarterly, Angle, Poetry Life & Times



The Beat Goes On (and On and On and On ...)
by Michael R. Burch

Bored stiff by his board-stiff attempts
at “meter,” I crossly concluded
I’d use each iamb
in lieu of a lamb,
bedtimes when I’m under-quaaluded.

Originally published by Grand Little Things



Poetry
by Michael R. Burch

Poetry, I found you
where at last they chained and bound you;
with devices all around you
to torture and confound you,
I found you—shivering, bare.

They had shorn your raven hair
and taken both your eyes
which, once cerulean as Gogh’s skies,
had leapt with dawn to wild surmise
of what was waiting there.

Your back was bent with untold care;
there savage brands had left cruel scars
as though the wounds of countless wars;
your bones were broken with the force
with which they’d lashed your flesh so fair.

You once were loveliest of all.
So many nights you held in thrall
a scrawny lad who heard your call
from where dawn’s milling showers fall—
pale meteors through sapphire air.

I learned the eagerness of youth
to temper for a lover’s touch;
I felt you, tremulant, reprove
each time I fumbled over-much.
Your merest word became my prayer.

You took me gently by the hand
and led my steps from boy to man;
now I look back, remember when
you shone, and cannot understand
why here, tonight, you bear their brand.

I will take and cradle you in my arms,
remindful of the gentle charms
you showed me once, of yore;
and I will lead you from your cell tonight
back into that incandescent light
which flows out of the core
of a sun whose robes you wore.
And I will wash your feet with tears
for all those blissful years...
my love, whom I adore.

I consider "Poetry" to be my Ars Poetica. However, the poem has been misinterpreted as the poet claiming to be Poetry's "savior." The poet never claims to be a savior or hero. The poem only says that when Poetry is finally freed, in some unspecified way, the poet will be there to take her hand and watch her glory be re-revealed to the world. The poet expresses love for Poetry, and gratitude, but never claims to have done anything himself. This is a poem of love, compassion and reverence. Poetry is the Messiah, not the poet. The poet washes her feet with his tears, like Mary Magdalene.

Originally published by The Lyric.

Keywords/Tags: art, ars poetica, poems, poets, poetry, verse, write, writing, Muse



In the Whispering Night
by Michael R. Burch

for George King

In the whispering night, when the stars bend low
till the hills ignite to a shining flame,
when a shower of meteors streaks the sky,
and the lilies sigh in their beds, for shame,
we must steal our souls, as they once were stolen,
and gather our vigor, and all our intent.
We must heave our bodies to some violent ocean
and laugh as they shatter, and never repent.
We must dance in the darkness as stars dance before us,
soar, SOAR! through the night on a butterfly's breeze:
blown high, upward-yearning, twin spirits returning
to the world of resplendence from which we were seized.

Originally published by Songs of Innocence



What the Poet Sees
by Michael R. Burch

What the poet sees,
he sees as a swimmer
~~~~underwater~~~~
watching the shoreline blur
sees through his breath’s weightless bubbles ...
Both worlds grow obscure.

Originally published by Byline



In Praise of Meter
by Michael R. Burch

The earth is full of rhythms so precise
the octave of the crystal can produce
a trillion oscillations, yet not lose
a second’s beat. The ear needs no device
to hear the unsprung rhythms of the couch
drown out the mouth’s; the lips can be debauched
by kisses, should the heart put back its watch
and find the pulse of love, and sing, devout.

If moons and tides in interlocking dance
obey their numbers, what’s been left to chance?
Should poets be more lax—their circumstance
as humble as it is?—or readers wince
to see their ragged numbers thin, to hear
the moans of drones drown out the Chanticleer?

Originally published by Poetry Porch/Sonnet Scroll



What Works
by Michael R. Burch

for David Gosselin

What works―
hewn stone;
the blush the iris shows the sun;
the lilac’s pale-remembered bloom.

The frenzied fly: mad-lively, gay,
as seconds tick his time away,
his sentence―one brief day in May,

a period. And then decay.

A frenzied rhyme’s mad tip-toed time,
a ballad’s languid as the sea,
seek, striving―"immortality.

When gloss peels off, what works will shine.
When polish fades, what works will gleam.
When intellectual prattle pales,
the dying buzzing in the hive
of tedious incessant bees,
what works will soar and wheel and dive
and milk all honey, leap and thrive,

and teach the pallid poem to seethe.

Originally published by The HyperTexts



Caveat Spender
by Michael R. Burch

for Stephen Spender

It’s better not to speculate
“continually” on who is great.
Though relentless awe’s
a Célèbre Cause,
please reserve some time for the contemplation
of the perils of EXAGGERATION.

Originally published by The HyperTexts



Kin
by Michael R. Burch

for Richard Moore

1.
Shrill gulls,
how like my thoughts
you, struggling, rise
to distant bliss—
the weightless blue of skies
that are not blue
in any atmosphere,
but closest here ...

2.
You seek an air
so clear,
so rarified
the effort leaves you famished;
earthly tides
soon call you back—
one long, descending glide ...

3.
Disgruntledly you ***** dirt shores for orts
you pull like mucous ropes
from shells’ bright forts ...
You eye the teeming world
with nervous darts—
this way and that ...
Contentious, shrewd, you scan—
the sky, in hope,
the earth, distrusting man.

Originally published by Able Muse



At Wilfred Owen's Grave
by Michael R. Burch

A week before the Armistice, you died.
They did not keep your heart like Livingstone's,
then plant your bones near Shakespeare's. So you lie
between two privates, sacrificed like Christ
to politics, your poetry unknown
except for one brief flurry: thirteen months
with Gaukroger beside you in the trench,
dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench
of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched
your broken heart together and the fist
began to pulse with life, so close to death.

Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care
of "ergotherapists" that you sensed life
is only in the work, and made despair
a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath,
a mouthful's merest air, inspired less
than wrested from you, and which we confess
we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air
that even Sassoon failed to share, because
a man in pieces is not healed by gauze,
and breath's transparent, unless we believe
the words are true despite their lack of weight
and float to us like chlorine—scalding eyes,
and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate
of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies.

Originally published by The Chariton Review



Abide
by Michael R. Burch

after Philip Larkin's "Aubade"

It is hard to understand or accept mortality—
such an alien concept: not to be.
Perhaps unsettling enough to spawn religion,
or to scare mutant fish out of a primordial sea

boiling like goopy green tea in a kettle.
Perhaps a man should exhibit more mettle
than to admit such fear, denying Nirvana exists
simply because we are stuck here in such a fine fettle.

And so we abide . . .
even in life, staring out across that dark brink.
And if the thought of death makes your questioning heart sink,
it is best not to drink
(or, drinking, certainly not to think).

Originally published by Light Quarterly



Millay Has Her Way with a Vassar Professor
by Michael R. Burch

After a night of hard drinking and spreading her legs,
Millay hits the dorm, where the Vassar don begs:
“Please act more chastely, more discretely, more seemly!”
(His name, let’s assume, was, er . . . Percival Queemly.)

“Expel me! Expel me!”—She flashes her eyes.
“Oh! Please! No! I couldn’t! That wouldn’t be wise,
for a great banished Shelley would tarnish my name . . .
Eek! My game will be lame if I can’t milque your fame!”

“Continue to live here—carouse as you please!”
the beleaguered don sighs as he sags to his knees.
Millay grinds her crotch half an inch from his nose:
“I can live in your hellhole, strange man, I suppose ...
but the price is your firstborn, whom I’ll sacrifice to Moloch.”
(Which explains what became of pale Percy’s son, Enoch.)

Originally published by Lucid Rhythms

This poem is based on an account of Edna St. Vincent Millay being confronted by a male Vassar authority. However, there is a some poetic license involved, for the sake of humor. It was actually Vassar President Henry Noble MacCracken who mentioned Shelley. Here is his account in a response to a question about Millay cutting classes: “She cut everything. I once called her in and told her, ‘I want you to know that you couldn’t break any rule that would make me vote for your expulsion. I don’t want to have any dead Shelleys on my doorstep, and I don’t care what you do.’ She went to the window and looked out and she said, “Well on those terms I think I can continue to live in this hellhole.” The stuff about Enoch and Moloch is, of course, pure fabrication on my part.



Come Down
by Michael R. Burch

for Harold Bloom

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
now brittle and brown
as fierce northern gales sever.

Come down, or your heart
will grow cold as the weather
when winter devours
and spring returns never.

Originally published by The HyperTexts

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.



Orpheus
by Michael R. Burch

after William Blake

I.

Many a sun
and many a moon
I walked the earth
and whistled a tune.

I did not whistle
as I worked:
the whistle was my work.
I shirked

nothing I saw
and made a rhyme
to children at play
and hard time.

II.

Among the prisoners
I saw
the leaden manacles
of Law,

the heavy ball and chain,
the quirt.
And yet I whistled
at my work.

III.

Among the children’s
daisy faces
and in the women’s
frowsy laces,

I saw redemption,
and I smiled.
Satanic millers,
unbeguiled,

were swayed by neither girl,
nor child,
nor any God of Love.
Yet mild

I whistled at my work,
and Song
broke out,
ere long.

Originally published by The HyperTexts



****** or Heroine?
by Michael R. Burch

for mothers battling addiction

serve the Addiction;
worship the Beast;
feed the foul Pythons
your flesh, their fair feast ...

or rise up, resist
the huge many-headed hydra;
for the sake of your Loved Ones
decapitate medusa.

Published by The HyperTexts



Loose Knit
by Michael R. Burch

She blesses the needle,
fetches fine red stitches,
criss-crossing, embroidering dreams
in the delicate fabric.

And if her hand jerks and twitches in puppet-like fits,
she tells herself
reality is not as threadbare as it seems ...
that a little more darning may gather loose seams.

She weaves an unraveling tapestry
of fatigue and remorse and pain; ...
only the nervously pecking needle
****** her to motion, again and again.

Published by The Chariton Review, Penumbra, Black Bear Review, Triplopia. Keywords/Tags: drugs, addiction, user, ******, needle, tracks, marks, pain, despair, agony, hopelessness, defeat, misery



Medusa
by Michael R. Burch

Friends, beware
of her iniquitous hair:
long, ravenblack & melancholy.

Many suitors drowned there:
lost, unaware
of the length & extent of their folly.

Originally published in Grand Little Things



The Octopi Jars
by Michael R. Burch

Long-vacant eyes
now lodged in clear glass,
a-swim with pale arms
as delicate as angels'...

you are beyond all hope
of salvage now...
and yet I would pause,
no fear!,
to once touch
your arcane beaks...

I, more alien than you
to this imprismed world,
notice, most of all,
the scratches on the inside surfaces
of your hermetic cells ...

and I remember documentaries
of albino Houdinis
slipping like wraiths
over the walls of shipboard aquariums,
slipping down decks'
brine-lubricated planks,
spilling jubilantly into the dark sea,
parachuting through clouds of pallid ammonia...

and I know now in life you were unlike me:
your imprisonment was never voluntary.

Published by Triplopia and The Poetic Musings of Sam Hudson



Sonnet: Second Sight (II)
by Michael R. Burch

(Newborns see best at a distance of 8 to 14 inches.)

Wiser than we know, the newborn screams,
red-faced from breath, and wonders what life means
this close to death, amid the arctic glare
of warmthless lights above.
Beware! Beware!—
encrypted signals, codes? Or ciphers, noughts?

Interpretless, almost, as his own thoughts—
the brilliant lights, the brilliant lights exist.
Intruding faces ogle, gape, insist—
this madness, this soft-hissing breath, makes sense.
Why can he not float on, in dark suspense,
and dream of life? Why did they rip him out?

He frowns at them—small gnomish frowns, all doubt—
and with an ancient mien, O sorrowful!,
re-closes eyes that saw in darkness null
ecstatic sights, exceeding beautiful.



Published as the collection "The State of the Art"

The ever moving traveller, time marches only forward.
A moment created is now a moment passed.
Enslaved to time our organic progression is also our journey to decay.
The rhythm of the ticking of the clock enchanted to change what was.

Hail to the giver of joy and memory
We wage war against the conqueror of life itself.
Time is understood but never acknowledged.
Immortality is our comfort yet is never ours for the taking.

The gift of time is a treasure that we cast into the sea of waste.
The giver of memory walks beside us but is no loyal companion.
Swimming against the ancient flow of the unseen river which we all bathe in.
Time and fate tethered star crossed lovers,embrace the love story of ages.

Dance to the rhythm of the ticking of the clock for only your flesh is bound by time.
Rejoice in the memories of time passed, those are gifts not all will receive.

'Who are you?'
Is the one constant question I ask myself?
'A man.'
The answer has come, most times.
Even when I wasn't asking.

Your nature, stature and even adventure is that of a man.
But that is all you have for a man.
For your words are eternal, and though you are only an image of God, I see him in you.
You speak with a foreign tongue, not only in words, but in acts as well.
Mortal man!
Immortality rules your being, as your wisdom would subdue the earth as it has my body.
My heart beats for that man, who speaks of everlasting love.
The love that is real and agape,
As it goes beyond the pleasure of kissing and ******.

Many are those times when I find myself wondering if God, in his very nature has embedded more than just his image in you.
That maybe like Zeus once took the form of a cow,
Jehovah took to your form.
But then for what purpose,
For I am nothing like 'Europa', either in stature or status.
Am neither that beautiful to call for divine attention from such a man as you.
Nor do I hold the crown of a queen on my head to attract a man of your nobility.

May the lord forgive me for using such words that are almost blasphemous,
But all I am saying is that you are the true image of God, yet only a mortal man.
You are A RARE BREED!
And yet like every other man,
You are just a man.

You hear the cry in the dead of night,
So close to see, but not in sight.
You hear the breath, you feel the eyes,
But nothing’s there, a mind that lies.
You check the window, a slight mind flare,
But once again, there’s nothing there.
You turn around, and there you see,
The deadly one, the fearsome me.
You run for the door, so close as to reach it,
But I get there first, and block your split.
You run for the window, thinking you might have a chance,
But I beat you there no second glance.
I have you cornered, you’re mind for the killing,
There’s just one problem, you’re not willing.
“Come on,” I say, “You’ll love it to death.”
“But,” you plea, “I’ll have no life left.”
“But you’ll live with me,” I state, “Immortality.”
Once again yo try to flee, but once again the faster is me.
I let down my guard after a silent minute,
And you grab a sheath with a witch’s knife in it.
You stab me once and twist it quick,
And then you take a fearsome lick.
You have my blood, you are one of them now, don’t fight it,
You sit down, no longer afraid of the quiet.
You hear the cry in the dead of night,
So close to see, still not in sight.
You feel the breath, you sense the eyes,
Yet nothing’s there, a mind full of lies.
You check the window to see what’s there,
Disappointed, you step back and stare.
You see your reflection, you had no clue,
That all along, the deadly one, was you.

my cell phone, my Kindle, my desktop
if I die intestate?

what will willfully addresses the solemn secrets of silicon?

(and woe be to me if my last call is a wrong number, my last Facebook entry an unanswered political jab)

will anybody bother to delete my files
after I am deleted?

or is that the new immortality--for apoptosis does not apply to photons,
electrons and "lol"s

I bet when limbo, heaven and hell were conceived, not a soul would have believed, a hard drive in the sky would one day keep us all alive, indefinitely...

Dreaming while dying
Is the only way to catch
Immortality

I was soothed,
dipped in Styx
for immortality,
the reality of my weakness
makes me vulnerable to broken hearts,
usually my own.

Inquire not of me, nor of my life!
     All knowledge, by instruction, is withheld.
     Our blood line cut, your kin no more my wife,
     your right to know by your own hand dispelled.
Your silence had you ousted from my heart,
     when I besought your most beloved names.
     Your hush kept me at bay, and us apart,
     as I sought you, my son-ship you disclaimed.
Now if perchance a thought of me has raised,
     please quick extinguish it and mind me not.
     Why resurrect the ghost of one you've razed
     upon your kin's request, and made as naught?  
True love, when born, has immortality;
when false it lives only conditionally.

(C)2018, Christos Rigakos

"After we die the only real thing left of us, the only real fragment of the person that we were, is not the children we had, not the pictures taken of us, not the random trinkets we gathered over our lives–it's what we wrote down, what we said about ourselves. That lives and breathes. That speaks beyond our lips to say at any moment after, just as we were in that moment. Writing then is the very serious work of living. It is the chronicling and preserving of ourselves–it is the task of immortality.

And like all such tasks it ultimately fails. Only, it fails more accurately."

"Blink of an eye is a thought"
You are never here because you die.
You are in your dreams.
You just open your eyes once everyday.
But in one day I die.
So is life just a blink of an eye.
Is this all your past stuck in the future.
Like your head stuck to your body.
Your mind more advance and incontrol of your body telling it what to do.
Yet your body stays here reminds you of the past.
Skull is inside of you meaning you are dead walking.death is immortality as you carry it inside already.fearing death is dying.but if you conquer death you become immortal.

You
behind the doors where the monsters reside,
watching the citadel fall and Jerusalem calls for an encore,
but they lied to you
as they always do.

We
hope for immortality on this roller coaster ride and down we go again behind the doors where the monsters reside.

I work or I die and when the day is due you will too and whatever or which way the cards fall
Jerusalem will still fall and
they'll still lie,
work or die?

Use your voice,
touch type your voice on the white stick that you carry,
or we could marry,
she coughs and splutters in the kitchen
butters toast and removes from my face
the *** of jam.

I move on beyond where the image burns
beyond where the sane men turn and stand in awe,
seen it
done it and no fun in it for the untied who wait outside the doors where the monsters reside.

Licking jam off my lips she slides me a kiss and I slip on saliva that drips from my tongue,
that is fun, never done that before,
I move away from the door
for a while.

The trick to self-analysis is self-alerting awareness.
Thus the cliché: know yo'own self.
Each you you ever be, see you be you.

Each self makes a bio, builds a being viable on earth.
Thus the click, on earth as…
always brings to mind in heaven, which is

--quotes are useless, it's like a choir of…
--- Hermes fans all fanning at once call for…

where,
did Jesus say? The kingdom of truth is within you.
No way,
Jah, wei

we know, we tasted. Wanna bet, your interesting times?
Inter-cept
ception receive the key from long before,
now is as we are
aware,
free to be anything imaginable
or if
we find whole lives memorizable, realizable
at the speed of thought, you live as long
as you wish,
to act as if you have the mind of any one mental
able-knowing
thing
- mortal thing, we can't imagine immortality
- by law limiting speed of thought to
- the inner edge of the bell curve on
- mindless oblivion or nirvana, some call it.

imagine you are fed and clothed, because you survived,
no other measure of your worth,
or mine,
we survived, we can do good knowing,
knowing we know hell is a test all the best pass thru.
Fix your mind's hero story, you're it.
You are your mind's hero story hero, not mine.

I sold mine, did I not make that clear, when this game began,
I took you at you word, truth has a mind, so I sold the
mindless ***** NPC and blew my own bubble
to be in truth with a word accepted as true,
it cannot lie, I took it to heart,
like magic… new ifity

and I'm me. Not a fan of any name, tho' I do call Jesus friend.
{pre-facebook kinda friend, big deal in du-Sie times o'yor|

then you wish to die, and you do.
Before you do,

that's the trick. The other one.

Serenity was everywhere
after that night
Calmness  declared its
existence for infinity
All eyes were wide open
as if they are seeing
immortality,
or a ray of light
brisk bright

But I knew,
an intense darkness will be there
waiting only for me
in my vanity
What I lost
will not be reflected
anytime anywhere
in your minds
or on the pages of history
Rather
I will be ill-famed
in my own land
in my country

But somewhere
I had a feeling
that I could
bring back your smiles
Smiles,
for an eternity
And
it does not matter
whether future will see
your smiles
as history

These unruly kites,
The froth of the world
     Know immortality.*

© 2015 J.S.P.

Something about immortality fascinates me!
But I realized that I don't need science or cryogenics,
Because when this flesh is finished,
I'll still have these words I wrote living.
When I leave this life,
I'm gonna leave behind,
The fruit of this eccentric mind!

Live a life without fear of death
  Love so freely
               so wildly
That when it is time to write
    you're final page
That death will pause and tremble
          to read your
            last words
Then with your last breath
  embrace death
And fill its lungs
with a life well lived
And pass through this life
  and illusion
Towards the next dream
of love and immortality
                            For if in the end
                            All we find is the end
                                Dream the dream
                                  that never ends
                                    Dream of life and
                                      death and
                                        death and love
                                           and love and
                                        Life and dream
                                          without fear

Blue steel above you
  no sail is tall enough
to put in my eyes
just for one chance to chisel
at what lies at the core of you.

Every one has a theory.
Freedom. Love. Immortality.

My imitation for capture
  blindfolds me in witchhunt
as I walk the haunted circle
  listening for the eruption of
silent stones to save me.

"What does a fish know about the water in which he swims?"

"Before God we are equally wise and equally foolish."

Do you believe in immortality? "No, and one life is enough for me."

"God always takes the simplest way."

"I do not believe in the God of Theology who rewards good and punishes evil."

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties, He integrates empirically."

"God does not play dice."

"God may be subtle, but he isn't malicious."

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of His creation and is but a reflection of human frailty."

"I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details."

"It was the experience of mystery-even if mixed with fear-that engendered religion."

"Morality is of the highest importance, but for us, not for God."

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior Spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."

"When the solution is simple, God is answering."

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

"Science without religion is lame; religion without Science is blind."

More available upon request...

The black sun wreathed the land in a dark thick smoke. The once blue sky was crying, through eyes of blackened hope. A silence so dead had fallen, upon the fallen land. The smell of fire was fresh, it's charcoal after taste painted every breath. It's dying embers still linger, glowing like faeries in the day's bleak twilight. It felt as if their light had power, an undying immortality. Eerie crimson splotches, dotted the unmoving earth. As our boots moved noiselessly across the newly made waste. I came within reach of those orbs that seemed so much like the Sun's silent tears. And looking down upon the shallow crater in which it was buried. My eyes were met by the gaping maw of an undying corpse. In the blackness of that maw, my mind glimpsed the end of eternity. And the cessation of conscious life. The body held no soul, but it's visage was alive with the memory of pain. I could smell it's cooked grey skin, scent so heavy on the air. And suddenly an arm had reached out and launched me two full strides forward. At that moment, terror so pure and so harsh latched onto my heart with the intensity of a dying star.

Surrounded by death.
this is when I feel most alive
not in a morbid way
rather the opposite
the whispers  of the dead
and the secrets they hold
inspire me to live
to gaze and wonder
to appreciate them
and myself
and others

I heed the messages they leave behind
warnings of their mistakes
the tales of love and hate
intended to go under with them
but the written word survives
words are the closest thing we have
to immortality

as I write these letters out I consider
not what they mean to me
but what they will mean  
to whom ever will be reading them
as they will out live me
a mere mortal of flesh and blood
they will be my mark
my body when I have none
the message that I leave behind

Internal love
Conceived
Eternal joy
Begetting
Immortality

“Please, oh please don’t move”
I whisper under my breath
I don’t want to forget this moment
Drawing the sketchbook from under my arm
With quick strokes I capture the scene
A rough sketch
Just enough to remember it later
My subject, unaware, stirs
The moment is gone
But I will carry it with me
The sketchbook a weight on my heart
Until I return to my room and behind closed door
With furious strokes bring to life on the page
The moment that I witnessed before
Pouring self into art
Until at last I am empty and the burden is lifted
Always the artist, never the subject
Capturing these visions
That come so few and far between
Until now
It seems that I can’t keep up with them
One piling on top of another
As I frantically scribble, trying not to miss a single one
Never have these solitary wanderers
Come in such numbers
They seem to be drawn to you
And when at last I have etched
These precious moments into immortality
I cannot help but bring my work to you
An artist showing his subject his art
Not expecting to see you reach behind your back
And bring forth a sketchbook of your own

We dance on the glass prisms
Below us burns the fire
The flick of a romance or love on the edge
A half open door...death or life?

I never understand the world
The reality where we live
It's like a crooked satire or a hallucination of walking bodies
Before they have erased all memories
Of their own faces.

But those who deny forgetting their own faces
And look at the mirror every day,
See age crawling through the naked bodies
A man and a woman in bed..then their warm skin at midnight on the brink of extinguished immortality.

Poetry comes to me in those moments
Of laughter, of a feeling after love making
An emptiness, a desolation yet hunger for everything
That is when beyond our dreams our shadow comes and dance
On the prisms.
Like Pygmalion, I create my own woman of beauty in silence.

So many times

You provoked me

To write about you

"   let you illustrate

But,how can I?

And,also whom am I?

To do so.......

I'm just a beholder

Simply a drunker

Of  your eternal beauty

And,kindly let me remain so......

Your beauty is spellbound

And,I'm deaf

Will soon be dumb too

Let the eye speak

Let the heart hear

It's the voice of love

Language of immortality

Inner voice of Soul-Written on 06.09.2012,Thursday