i miss the way fingertips felt against my cold skin
the soft touch that only a lover can provide
the kind of touch that can melt icebergs and start wildfires
i miss the sweet sound of whispered words that could start a revolution and the goosebumps that came with each mumbled "i love you"
i miss the feeling of drifting off in a pair of arms that transformed an embrace into a home and made a safety net around me as if protection could only exist within this space between fingertips and other ligaments
i miss the feeling that you provided
i miss the feeling of being wanted
i miss loving something, someone
i feel as if i have lost all sense of direction

My friend, the fates are cruel
There are no dreams
No honour remains
The arrow has left
The bow of the goddess
My soul corrupted by vengeance
Hath endured torment
To find the end of the journey
In my own salvation
And your eternal slumber
Legends shall speak
Of sacrifice at world's end
The winds sail over the waters surface
Quietly but surely

You made me
Breathless

The way you stole my heart;
Effortless

Every night, you left me
Sleepless

I thought our love was
Timeless

But you made me feel
Faceless

You left my heart
Homeless

You left me on the ground,
Loveless.

I am gone.
Adrift thru cold dead air,
Lost in the horizon.
There's no comfort,
No means of adaptation.
Only this void.
          this loveless space.
Out here I am forgetting you —
Slowly,
As my oxygen depletes.

Oh, do the angels cry in the dark?
in a world without love
made by a God with a loveless heart
Oh, I look upon the dark
and sad things of this world
a blind girl
sings a lovely song
a motherless child
cries over her mother's grave
all the starving and lonely people
who shiver in the cold
Oh, My heart is broken in two
and sings a sad song
a song of hopelessness  
for a world made by a God
with a loveless heart
Oh, but with one kiss from You
upon My heavy brow
the world is transformed
hope is born in the world anew
and I know
no angel ever cried in the dark
in a world bereft of a father's love
your love has brought the dead
and withered rose back to life
Your love is a fire
that warms the earth
and makes the flowers grow
Oh, my darling
from Me hide not your love
for then the world
is but a dead and dying thing
that was better left unmade
by a cruel and unloving God
who loves the dark and hates the light
and I am doomed to die
a cold and cruel
and heartless death
as the angels cry in the dark
and the impossible yearning to kiss Your lips
so lovely as the first dawn of creation
is as bitter and cold
as a northern icy wind
and a poison to My soul
and I die unloved and ungrieved
by Your loveless heart
and a creator who loves the dark
and hates the light
and a cold loveless wind
blows across My grave
forever
as the angels cry in the dark

And indeedst, thou mourneth once more
When th' lover who is to thine become
Returneth not, in thy own brevities-of love and hate,
As t'is chiding ruthlessness might not be
thy just fate.

Cleopatra, Cleopatra
Shalt thy soul ever weepest for me?
Weep for t'ese chains of guilt and yet, adorable clarity
T'at within my heart are obstreperously burning
I thy secret lover; shrieks railing at my heart
Whenever thou lurchest forwards
and tearest t'is strumming passion apart.

And t'ere is one single convenience not
As I shalt sit more by northern winds; and whose gales
upon a pale, moonlit shore.
Cleopatra, play me a song at t'at hour
Before bedtime with thy violin once more
And let us look through th' vacant glasses;
at clouds t'at swirl and swear in dark blue masses.

Ah, my queen, t'ese lips are softly creaking
and swearing silently; emitting words
of which I presume thou wouldst not hear.
On my lonely days I sat dreamily
upon t'at hard-hearted wooden bench,
and wrote poems of thee
behind th' greedy palm trees;
They mocked me and swore
t'at my love for thee was a tragedy;
and my poem a menial elegy
For a soldier I was, whom thy wealth
and kingdom foundeth precisely intolerable.
How I hate-t'ose sickly words of 'em!
Ah, t'ose unknowing, cynical creatures!
I, who fell in love with thee
Amongst th' giggling bushes,
stomping merrily amongst each other
and shoving their heads prettily on my shoulder
As I walked pass 'em;
I strapped their doom to death,
and cursed their piously insatiable wrath
Until no more grief was left attached
To th' parable summer air; and rendered thou as plainly
as thou had been,
but bleak not; and ceremoniously unheeded
Only by thy most picturesque features, and breaths.
Thou who loved to wander behind th' red-coated shed,
and beautiful green pastures ahead
With tulips and white roses on thy hand,
And with floods of laughter thou wouldst dart ahead
like a summer nightingale;
'fore stretching thy body effortlessly
amongst th' chirping grass
Ah, Cleopatra, thou looketh but so lovely-
oh, indeedst thou did; but too lovely-too lovely to me!
A figure of a princess so comely,
thou wouldst but be th' one
who bringst th' light,
and fool all t'ose evils, and morbid abysses;
Thou shalt fill our future days with hopes,
and colourful promises.

And slithered I, like a naive snake
Throughout th' bushes; to swing myself into thee
Even only through thy shadow,
I didst, I didst-my love, procured my satisfaction
By seeing thee breathe, and thrive, and bloom.
I loveth her not, t'is village's outrageous,
but sweet-spirited maiden;
a dutiful soldier as I am,
my love for thee is still bountiful,
ah, even more plentiful t'an t'is cordial one
I may hath for my poor lover. Not t'at I despise
her poorness, but in my mind, thou art forever my baroness;
Thou art th' purest queen, amongst all th' virgins
Ah, Cleopatra!
To me, if rejection is indeedst misery,
thine is but a glorious mystery;
for whose preciousness, which is now vague,
by thy hand might come clear,
for within my sight of thee
All t'ese objections are still ingenious,
within thy perilous smile,
t'at oftentimes caresses me
With relief, whenst I am mad,
and corrupts my conscience-
whenst I am sad;
Even only for a second; and even only
for a while.
But if thy smile were all it seemeth,
and thy perfection all t'at I dreameth,
Then a nightmare could be mirth,
and a bitter smile could be so sweet.
Just like everything my eyes hath seen;
if thy innocence was what I needest,
and thy gentleness th' one I seekest,
then I'd needst just and ought, worry not;
for all thy lips couldst be so meek
and thy glistening cheeks
wouldst be so sleek.

Oh, sweet, sweet-like thee, Cleopatra!
Sweet mournful songs are trampling along my ears,
but again, t'ey project me into no harmony-
I curse t'em and corrupt t'em,
I gnaw at t'em and elbow t'em-
I stomp on t'em and jostle t'em-
th' one sung by my insidious lover,
I feel like a ghost as I perch myself beside her.
Whilst thou-thou art away from me!
Thou, thou for whom my breath shalt choke
with insanity,
thou who wert there and merrily laughed with me-
just like last Monday,
By yon purple prairie and amber oak trees
By my newest words and dearly loving poetry.
Oh, my poetry-t'at I hath always crafted so willingly,
o, so willingly, for thee!
For thee, for thee only, my love!
Ah, Cleopatra, as we rolled down th' hoarse alley t'at day,
and th' silky banks by rueful warm water-
I hoped t'at thou wouldst forever stay with me,
like th' green bushes and t'eir immortal thorns,
Thou wouldst lull me to sleep at nights,
and kiss me firmly every dewy morn.

Cleopatra, Cleopatra
Ah, and with thy cherry-like lips
Thou shalt again invite me into thy living gardens,
With thy childish jokes and ramblings and adventures
To th' dying sunflowers, thou wert a cure;
and thy crown is even brighter t'an their foliage,
For it is a resemblance of thy heart, but
thy vanity not;
Thou art th' song t'at t'ey shalt sing,
thou art th' joy t'at no other greatness canst bring.

Ah, Cleopatra, look-and t'is sun is shining on thee,
but not my bride;
My bride who is so impatiently to withdraw
her rights; her fatal rights-o, I insist!
And so t'is time I shall but despise her
for her gluttony and rebellious viciousness.
T'at savage, unholy greed of hers!
How unadmirable-and blind I was,
for I deemed all t'ose indecipherable!
How I shalt forever deprecate myself,
for which!
Ah, but whenst I see thee!
As how I shall twist my finger into hers,
(Oh! T'is precocious little harlot!)
Thou art th' one who is, in my mind, to become my lover,
and amongst tonight's all prudence and marriage mercy
I shall dreameth not of my wife but thee;
Whilst my wife is like a cloaked rain doll beneath,
and her ******* shall be rigid and awkward to me-
unlike thee, so indolent but warm and generous
with unhesitant integrity;
Ah, I wish she could die, die, and be dead-by my hands,
But no anger and fury could I wreak,
for she hath been, for all t'ese years,
my single best friend.
Or she was, at least.
Oh Cleopatra, thou art my girl;
please dance, dance again-dance for me in thy best pink frock,
and wear thy most desirous, fastidious perfume;
I shall turn thee once more, into a delicious nymphet,
and I standing on a rock, a writer-soldier husband to thee-
Loving thee from afar, but a nearest heart,
my soul shalt become tender; but passionately aggravated
With such blows of poetic genuinity in my hands-
by t'ese of thee-so powerful, and intuitive sonnets.

Oh, my dear! T'is is a ruin, ruin, and but a ruin to me-
A castle of utmost devastation and damage and fear,
for as I looketh into her eyes behindeth me,
and thine upon thy throne-
so elegant and fuller of joy and permanent delight
Than hers t'at are fraught with pernicious questions,
and flocks of virginal fright,
I am afraid, once more-t'at I am torn,
before thy eyes t'at pierce and stun me like a stone,
an unknown stone, made of graveyard gems, and gold
Thou smell like death, just as dead as I am
On my loveless marriage day
And as I gaze into th' dubious priest
And thee beside him, my master-o, but my dream woman!
Oh, sadly my only dream woman!
Th' stars of love are once more
encompassing thine eyes,
and with wonder-oh Cleopatra, thou art seemingly tainted
with sacrifice, but delightfully, lies-
As I stareth at thee once more,
I knoweth t'at I loveth thee even more
just like how thou hath loved me since ever before
And thy passion and lust rooted in mine
Strangling me like selfish stars;
and th' moon and saturated rainbows
hanging up t'ere in troubled, ye' peaceful skies, tonight.

I want her not, as thou hath always fiercely,
and truthfully known,
so t'at I wriggle free,
ignoring my bride's wise screams
and cries and sobs uttered heartbreakingly-
onto th' gravel-and gravely chiseled pavement outside,
'fore eventually I slippeth myself out of my brownish
soldier's uniforms.
Thou standeth in surprise, I taketh, as I riseth
from my seat-my fictitious seat, in my mind,
for all t'is, pertaining to my unreal love for her,
shalt never be, in any way, real-
All are but th' phantom and ghost
of my own stories; trivial stories
Skulking about me with unpardonable sorries
Which I hate, I hate out of my life, most!
As to anyone else aside from thee
I should and shalt not ever be-married,
and as I set my doleful eyes on thee once more,
curtained by sorrow and unanswered longings,
but sincere feelings-I canst, for th' first time,
admire thy silent, lipped confession
Which is so remarkably
painted and inked throughout
thy lavish; ye' decently translucent face;
t'at thou needst me and wouldst stick by me
in soul, though not in flesh;
but in heaven, in our dear heaven,
whenst I and thou art free,
from all t'ese ungodly barriers and misery,
to welcome th' fierceness of our fate,
and taste th' merriment of our delayed date.
Oh, my love!
My Cleopatra! My very own, my own,
and mine only-Cleopatra!
My dear secret lover, and wife; for whom
my crying soul was gently born, and cherished,
and nurtured; for whose grief my heart shall be ripped,
and only for whose pride-for whose pride only,
I shall allow mine to be disgraced.
Cleopatra! But in death we shall be reunited,
amongst th' birds t'at flow above and under,
To th' sparkling heavens we shall be invited,
above th' vividly sweet rainbows; about th' precious
rainy thunder.

I

Out of the little chapel I burst
Into the fresh night-air again.
Five minutes full, I waited first
In the doorway, to escape the rain
That drove in gusts down the common’s centre
At the edge of which the chapel stands,
Before I plucked up heart to enter.
Heaven knows how many sorts of hands
Reached past me, groping for the latch
Of the inner door that hung on catch
More obstinate the more they fumbled,
Till, giving way at last with a scold
Of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled
One sheep more to the rest in fold,
And left me irresolute, standing sentry
In the sheepfold’s lath-and-plaster entry,
Six feet long by three feet wide,
Partitioned off from the vast inside—
I blocked up half of it at least.
No remedy; the rain kept driving.
They eyed me much as some wild beast,
That congregation, still arriving,
Some of them by the main road, white
A long way past me into the night,
Skirting the common, then diverging;
Not a few suddenly emerging
From the common’s self through the paling-gaps,
—They house in the gravel-pits perhaps,
Where the road stops short with its safeguard border
Of lamps, as tired of such disorder;—
But the most turned in yet more abruptly
From a certain squalid knot of alleys,
Where the town’s bad blood once slept corruptly,
Which now the little chapel rallies
And leads into day again,—its priestliness
Lending itself to hide their beastliness
So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason),
And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on
Those neophytes too much in lack of it,
That, where you cross the common as I did,
And meet the party thus presided,
“Mount Zion” with Love-lane at the back of it,
They front you as little disconcerted
As, bound for the hills, her fate averted,
And her wicked people made to mind him,
Lot might have marched with Gomorrah behind him.

II

Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,
In came the flock: the fat weary woman,
Panting and bewildered, down-clapping
Her umbrella with a mighty report,
Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,
A wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort,
Like a startled horse, at the interloper
(Who humbly knew himself improper,
But could not shrink up small enough)
—Round to the door, and in,—the gruff
Hinge’s invariable scold
Making my very blood run cold.
Prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered
On broken clogs, the many-tattered
Little old-faced peaking sister-turned-mother
Of the sickly babe she tried to smother
Somehow up, with its spotted face,
From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place;
She too must stop, wring the poor ends dry
Of a draggled shawl, and add thereby
Her tribute to the door-mat, sopping
Already from my own clothes’ dropping,
Which yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on:
Then, stooping down to take off her pattens,
She bore them defiantly, in each hand one,
Planted together before her breast
And its babe, as good as a lance in rest.
Close on her heels, the dingy satins
Of a female something past me flitted,
With lips as much too white, as a streak
Lay far too red on each hollow cheek;
And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied
All that was left of a woman once,
Holding at least its tongue for the *****.
Then a tall yellow man, like the Penitent Thief,
With his jaw bound up in a handkerchief,
And eyelids ******* together tight,
Led himself in by some inner light.
And, except from him, from each that entered,
I got the same interrogation—
“What, you the alien, you have ventured
To take with us, the elect, your station?
A carer for none of it, a Gallio!”—
Thus, plain as print, I read the glance
At a common prey, in each countenance
As of huntsman giving his hounds the tallyho.
And, when the door’s cry drowned their wonder,
The draught, it always sent in shutting,
Made the flame of the single tallow candle
In the cracked square lantern I stood under,
Shoot its blue lip at me, rebutting
As it were, the luckless cause of scandal:
I verily fancied the zealous light
(In the chapel’s secret, too!) for spite
Would shudder itself clean off the wick,
With the airs of a Saint John’s Candlestick.
There was no standing it much longer.
“Good folks,” thought I, as resolve grew stronger,
“This way you perform the Grand-Inquisitor
When the weather sends you a chance visitor?
You are the men, and wisdom shall die with you,
And none of the old Seven Churches vie with you!
But still, despite the pretty perfection
To which you carry your trick of exclusiveness,
And, taking God’s word under wise protection,
Correct its tendency to diffusiveness,
And bid one reach it over hot ploughshares,—
Still, as I say, though you’ve found salvation,
If I should choose to cry, as now, ‘Shares!’—
See if the best of you bars me my ration!
I prefer, if you please, for my expounder
Of the laws of the feast, the feast’s own Founder;
Mine’s the same right with your poorest and sickliest,
Supposing I don the marriage vestiment:
So, shut your mouth and open your Testament,
And carve me my portion at your quickliest!”
Accordingly, as a shoemaker’s lad
With wizened face in want of soap,
And wet apron wound round his waist like a rope,
(After stopping outside, for his cough was bad,
To get the fit over, poor gentle creature
And so avoid distrubing the preacher)
—Passed in, I sent my elbow spikewise
At the shutting door, and entered likewise,
Received the hinge’s accustomed greeting,
And crossed the threshold’s magic pentacle,
And found myself in full conventicle,
—To wit, in Zion Chapel Meeting,
On the Christmas-Eve of ‘Forty-nine,
Which, calling its flock to their special clover,
Found all assembled and one sheep over,
Whose lot, as the weather pleased, was mine.

III

I very soon had enough of it.
The hot smell and the human noises,
And my neighbor’s coat, the greasy cuff of it,
Were a pebble-stone that a child’s hand poises,
Compared with the pig-of-lead-like pressure
Of the preaching man’s immense stupidity,
As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure,
To meet his audience’s avidity.
You needed not the wit of the Sibyl
To guess the cause of it all, in a twinkling:
No sooner our friend had got an inkling
Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible,
(Whene’er ‘t was the thought first struck him,
How death, at unawares, might duck him
Deeper than the grave, and quench
The gin-shop’s light in hell’s grim drench)
Than he handled it so, in fine irreverence,
As to hug the book of books to pieces:
And, a patchwork of chapters and texts in severance,
Not improved by the private dog’s-ears and creases,
Having clothed his own soul with, he’d fain see equipt yours,—
So tossed you again your Holy Scriptures.
And you picked them up, in a sense, no doubt:
Nay, had but a single face of my neighbors
Appeared to suspect that the preacher’s labors
Were help which the world could be saved without,
‘T is odds but I might have borne in quiet
A qualm or two at my spiritual diet,
Or (who can tell?) perchance even mustered
Somewhat to urge in behalf of the sermon:
But the flock sat on, divinely flustered,
Sniffing, methought, its dew of Hermon
With such content in every snuffle,
As the devil inside us loves to ruffle.
My old fat woman purred with pleasure,
And thumb round thumb went twirling faster,
While she, to his periods keeping measure,
Maternally devoured the pastor.
The man with the handkerchief untied it,
Showed us a horrible wen inside it,
Gave his eyelids yet another *******,
And rocked himself as the woman was doing.
The shoemaker’s lad, discreetly choking,
Kept down his cough. ‘T was too provoking!
My gorge rose at the nonsense and stuff of it;
So, saying like Eve when she plucked the apple,
“I wanted a taste, and now there’s enough of it,”
I flung out of the little chapel.

IV

There was a lull in the rain, a lull
In the wind too; the moon was risen,
And would have shone out pure and full,
But for the ramparted cloud-prison,
Block on block built up in the West,
For what purpose the wind knows best,
Who changes his mind continually.
And the empty other half of the sky
Seemed in its silence as if it knew
What, any moment, might look through
A chance gap in that fortress massy:—
Through its fissures you got hints
Of the flying moon, by the shifting tints,
Now, a dull lion-color, now, brassy
Burning to yellow, and whitest yellow,
Like furnace-smoke just ere flames bellow,
All a-simmer with intense strain
To let her through,—then blank again,
At the hope of her appearance failing.
Just by the chapel a break in the railing
Shows a narrow path directly across;
‘T is ever dry walking there, on the moss—
Besides, you go gently all the way up-hill.
I stooped under and soon felt better;
My head grew lighter, my limbs more supple,
As I walked on, glad to have slipt the fetter.
My mind was full of the scene I had left,
That placid flock, that pastor vociferant,
—How this outside was pure and different!
The sermon, now—what a mingled weft
Of good and ill! Were either less,
Its fellow had colored the whole distinctly;
But alas for the excellent earnestness,
And the truths, quite true if stated succinctly,
But as surely false, in their quaint presentment,
However to pastor and flock’s contentment!
Say rather, such truths looked false to your eyes,
With his provings and parallels twisted and twined,
Till how could you know them, grown double their size
In the natural fog of the good man’s mind,
Like yonder spots of our roadside lamps,
Haloed about with the common’s damps?
Truth remains true, the fault’s in the prover;
The zeal was good, and the aspiration;
And yet, and yet, yet, fifty times over,
Pharaoh received no demonstration,
By his Baker’s dream of Baskets Three,
Of the doctrine of the Trinity,—
Although, as our preacher thus embellished it,
Apparently his hearers relished it
With so unfeigned a gust—who knows if
They did not prefer our friend to Joseph?
But so it is everywhere, one way with all of them!
These people have really felt, no doubt,
A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,
More or less perfectly, (who can tell?)
The mood itself, which strengthens by using;
And how that happens, I understand well.
A tune was born in my head last week,
Out of the thump-thump and shriek-shriek
Of the train, as I came by it, up from Manchester;
And when, next week, I take it back again,
My head will sing to the engine’s clack again,
While it only makes my neighbor’s haunches stir,
—Finding no dormant musical sprout
In him, as in me, to be jolted out.
‘T is the taught already that profits by teaching;
He gets no more from the railway’s preaching
Than, from this preacher who does the rail’s officer, I:
Whom therefore the flock cast a jealous eye on.
Still, why paint over their door “Mount Zion,”
To which all flesh shall come, saith the pro phecy?

V

But wherefore be harsh on a single case?
After how many modes, this Christmas-Eve,
Does the self-same weary thing take place?
The same endeavor to make you believe,
And with much the same effect, no more:
Each method abundantly convincing,
As I say, to those convinced before,
But scarce to be swallowed without wincing
By the not-as-yet-convinced. For me,
I have my own church equally:
And in this church my faith sprang first!
(I said, as I reached the rising ground,
And the wind began again, with a burst
Of rain in my face, and a glad rebound
From the heart beneath, as if, God speeding me,
I entered his church-door, nature leading me)
—In youth I looked to these very skies,
And probing their immensities,
I found God there, his visible power;
Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense
Of the power, an equal evidence
That his love, there too, was the nobler dower.
For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god
Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.
You know what I mean: God’s all man’s naught:
But also, God, whose pleasure brought
Man into being, stands away
As it were a handbreadth off, to give
Room for the newly-made to live,
And look at him from a place apart,
And use his gifts of brain and heart,
Given, indeed, but to keep forever.
Who speaks of man, then, must not sever
Man’s very elements from man,
Saying, “But all is God’s”—whose plan
Was to create man and then leave him
Able, his own word saith, to grieve him,
But able to glorify him too,
As a mere machine could never do,
That prayed or praised, all unaware
Of its fitness for aught but praise and prayer,
Made perfect as a thing of course.
Man, therefore, stands on his own stock
Of love and power as a pin-point rock:
And, looking to God who ordained divorce
Of the rock from his boundless continent,
Sees, in his power made evident,
Only excess by a million-fold
O’er the power God gave man in the mould.
For, note: man’s hand, first formed to carry
A few pounds’ weight, when taught to marry
Its strength with an engine’s, lifts a mountain,
—Advancing in power by one degree;
And why count steps through eternity?
But love is the ever-springing fountain:
Man may enlarge or narrow his bed
For the water’s play, but the water-head—
How can he multiply or reduce it?
As easy create it, as cause it to cease;
He may profit by it, or abuse it,
But ‘t is not a thing to bear increase
As power does: be love less or more
In the heart of man, he keeps it shut
Or opes it wide, as he pleases, but
Love’s sum remains what it was before.
So, gazing up, in my youth, at love
As seen through power, ever above
All modes which make it manifest,
My soul brought all to a single test—
That he, the Eternal First and Last,
Who, in his power, had so surpassed
All man conceives of what is might,—
Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite,
—Would prove as infinitely good;
Would never, (my soul understood,)
With power to work all love desires,
Bestow e’en less than man requires;
That he who endlessly was teaching,
Above my spirit’s utmost reaching,
What love can do in the leaf or stone,
(So that to master this alone,
This done in the stone or leaf for me,
I must go on learning endlessly)
Would never need that I, in turn,
Should point him out defect unheeded,
And show that God had yet to learn
What the meanest human creature needed,
—Not life, to wit, for a few short years,
Tracking his way through doubts and fears,
While the stupid earth on which I stay
Suffers no change, but passive adds
Its myriad years to myriads,
Though I, he gave it to, decay,
Seeing death come and choose about me,
And my dearest ones depart without me.
No: love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,
Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,
The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it,
Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it.
And I shall behold thee, face to face,
O God, and in thy light retrace
How in all I loved here, still wast thou!
Whom pressing to, then, as I fain would now,
I shall find as able to satiate
The love, thy gift, as my spirit’s wonder
Thou art able to quicken and sublimate,
With this sky of thine, that I now walk under
And glory in thee for, as I gaze
Thus, thus! Oh, let men keep their ways
Of seeking thee in a narrow shrine—
Be this my way! And this is mine!

VI

For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon’s consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
‘T was a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon’s self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its seven proper colors chorded,
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white,—
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier and flightier,—
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the keystone of that are?

VII

This sight was shown me, there and then,—
Me, one out of a world of men,
Singled forth, as the chance might hap
To another if, in a thu

As he walks blindly, the somnambulist
deep in his subconscious is awareness why it happens;
loveless nights prompts wanderings in darkness
he can't willfully stop this wild goose chase

(To Sarah Bernhardt)

How vain and dull this common world must seem
To such a One as thou, who should’st have talked
At Florence with Mirandola, or walked
Through the cool olives of the Academe:
Thou should’st have gathered reeds from a green stream
For Goat-foot Pan’s shrill piping, and have played
With the white girls in that Phaeacian glade
Where grave Odysseus wakened from his dream.

Ah! surely once some urn of Attic clay
Held thy wan dust, and thou hast come again
Back to this common world so dull and vain,
For thou wert weary of the sunless day,
The heavy fields of scentless asphodel,
The loveless lips with which men kiss in Hell.

Fireflies keep me awake,
deep nights unfold
with countless lights,
I wonder, and wonder,
O' fireflies with flickering lights,
have you found your knights,
is the night warm enough
for your lights to work the magic
to catch the perfect mates?

Global warming, so many hazards
suppose the nights are not warm enough
for the chemicals to work
and fireflies did not get their lights,
will that mean the death
no mating and
the end of fireflies?

I sit awake, night grows deep
staring out at the waning moon,
the garden wears a girdle,
a fairy girdle of winking lights,
the fireflies go high and low
I hope, just hope
this summer is rich in romance
for the fireflies to find love.

Summer without them
would be loveless warmth,
for He and I join our sights
weaving our love story
watching the fireflies
love each other
with soft, flickering lights.

Every summer a blessing,
a return to paradise,
fireflies and romance
He and I
new wings to love
A toast to Life!

which is the lesser grief?

to stay, with all the pain of misunderstanding? with all the heartache, stress and tears...the suspicion and jealousy...and all the relentless fear. fear of failing you, fear of inadequacy, fear of disappointment.

fear that one day you will turn away loveless.

but if i leave you to go cold again, to escape the inevitable pain, will i be able to stop loving you? will i imprint your face on every stranger walking these streets? can my body erase all memory of your hands?

i fear i will be haunted by those long slow mornings...held so tightly i dreamed that when your heart would stop, so would mine.

Even if the morrow
Is barren of promises
Nothing shall forestall my return
To become the dew
That clenches the land
To spare the sands
The seas and the sky
I offer thee this silent sacrifice

Every time she is near me I am assaulted by memories
I would rather forget. Her perfume will not leave my senses.
Her face my dreams.
Every time we pass must we make idle conversation?
Let us be better people and pretend to watch birds singing in the trees.
At least they are happy.
Walk through me if not around me. I am more spirit now.
Men would give up completely without their delusions.
Look at me for example. Being over her is easy. I do it every day.
Till morning wanes to afternoon.
Three hours since I thought her name. Or put my head in an oven.
She passes me in the corridor wishing me well and everything aches
Greys. Falls like snow against the window pane.
I forget half the words she says, but know every inch of the warmth
She has granted me with those wide and welcome arms.
How can she be so blind? And yet so lovely.
I have seen her walk around a fly so as not to hurt it.
And yet she kills me so easily. Drowned in kisses.
Yes. Nice to see you too. You look well.
Perfection.
No I have not met someone else yet. Yes. I deserve the best.
But I do not want the best. I want her.
You think me alive? You are talking to a ghost.
Let me be, breath and I shall forgive all evils.
Leave me alone and I shall feel the warmth of the sun
Again on my cheeks.
Tomorrow I shall be free. Tomorrow she will lose her power over me.
But today is all I need. Today I will say hello.
And ask she never leave me.

I am a poet, yes, but I sing only of
what I know, and all of that is
bicycles, the cries of the giraffe,
loneliness, and walks on
radioactive beaches.

So what is this, when you
ask me to write a love poem?
For three days, I have sat and
tried to write; and from my hand
has only come three arduous lines:

"I shall **** your ******* so hard
that your external **** sphincter shall
forever cease to function."

What the hell was that, I beseech you?
Our poets down the ages, have
written love poems on their paramours' blue
eyes, their raven-black hair, their fair
faces, yet mine is of my lover's rear?

Alas, this love song is no better than
a ******'s, as it lacks compassion,
eroticism, sentimental
tear-filled eyes and superficial flirting words.
It is nothing fit for a Valentine's Day card.

But know, my darling, my aim was true;
I wished only to express my love for you.
At your disdain, your unhappiness, with my
threat toward an orifice, I've written five
lines of some things that I do happen to know:

"The weeping giraffe,
rode his blue bike
in silence,
down the contaminated beach,
lamenting his loneliness."

In the tears of that giraffe can be found
my great love for you.

You are my
Ensorcelled Elysium,
You are my
Eden Dream.

You cascade
Upon my Dreamscape,
Enshrine my slumber in
A flowered gale of aromatic petals
That envelop me, beckon me
To herald the rebirth
Of Days of Yore.

You vein
The Glistening Glade of Memories
With your
Brooks of Aqueous Emerald.

Tis' the
Phantasmagoric Plane
Where still
My wayworn spirit wanders, wearily
In search of the magic
To enfetter
The Hands of Fate
(For they conspire against us).

Swifter than your descent
Into my soul
(Five seconds still and flat)
By
The nexus of your affections,
You evanesced
Like vapor,
Yet
I shall not concede to
The Malevolent Matriarch of Destiny.

For you
O, Breath of Life,
Forsook me not
So I sublime all stains
Tarnishing my flesh
By cries to The Ethereal.

At midday
Awaiting the Twilight
I long for
The birth of The Womb of Aether’s
Progeny,
Starlit winds.

I muse
Swimmingly in Seas of Reminiscence,
Banished from that Blackened Bastion
Of Shadowed Heavens,
For when darkness shrouds
My dreams can be seen
Draping the skies.

I then fathom,
You must not be far off,
Wishing,
Hoping,
Believing
That perhaps
You too
Wonder upon stars
Longing to find that one
That entwines us anew.

You shall alight,
Upon me once more
As
August Sun’s Nimbus
(If only for a moment)
Is thwarted
By
Ebony Miasma
That drenches Cimmerian skies.

In search
Of Ardor’s Light abiding in
The Sylvan Shrine of Your Numinous Eyes
I plead that
The Crag oppress
The Coals of Tribulation,
Until my anguish is
A Diamond Heart.

The pilgrimage
I must bear,
Must be traveled by
The Adamantine alone.

Where have you gone,
Tree of Life?
Why have you withered,
Yggdrasil?

Do I possess
The Eradia of Souls,
By which you shall
Effloresce?

I would halt the cogs of time,
Relinquish my liberty,
To slumber for eternity
In crystal stasis
By your side.

Even in that crystalline quietude,
I would be eminent,
I would be exalted,
I would be ennobled,
In the knowingness that
Your
Stalwart Heart
Radiates
Just beside me.

I exhale Empyrean Winds
When rapt in reverie,
Yearning to be
Captive to your devotion,
Yours alone.

The Bliss of Your Most Holy Kiss
Would signet me
With the
Bounty of Your Name
Burnishing the skin
On my lips.

Though ephemeral,
Your presence divined,
Your presence
Was my anointing.

To be solaced
By the astral resonance emitted
By your touch
Sent the
Pulse of Nirvana
Surging, rippling,
Like a kaleidoscope tide,
Down my spine

You are
The Waters of Vitality
That floweth from
The Creeks of Eden,

You have been
Poured upon my palate
From the
Goblet of Redemption
That I may drinketh
Of
Supernal immortality.

When once again we meet,
Perhaps the tears you summoned
From my spirit
By your
Stirring caress
Shall have absolved me
Of the pangs
In loving a man
(And man alone).

Perhaps then,
The sentiments
I pine to profess,
Will resound.

A melody
Sung in legato,
A  mellifluous melisma,
Flawlessly delineated
And
Intonation in deiform
Or perhaps,
Flowering fioritura
Lacing airwaves,
By the Empress Coloratura.

Perhaps then, piety
Betwixt you and I,
Will waft the air
And I might then,
Permit my quaking body
To succumb to
You alone.

Until that morn,
I shall be vigilant,
Counting the Dawns,
Counting the Twilights,
Until
I can gaze
Into your forested eyes
If even for but a moment.

For even but a moment
Spent with you,
Will bleed a nostalgia
Across my mind's sky,
Painting clouds crimson with passion,
And
That I shall revere,
And
That shall last
And last
And,
Last… And
Last.

O, it will last,
To Elysian Infinity.

∞
            I am a vestige,
               But I shall live once more,
                  In the light of memories
                       That blossom, are perennial,
                           And imbibe the dazed glory of the past
                       Until the past is vanquished
                 By a future that is fragrant
             With the mist of romance
          And eclipses the simulacrum,
       A fictitious sun of the infernal masquerade,
    The antithesis of the truest holy,
Then, rapture of life shall mystify no longer,
For the Numen of Truth,
  Shall cleanse creation without a drop of façade,
      His Providence shall emancipate the hollow,
             The Death of Dreams shall writhe
               In everlasting abeyance,
                 Absolving our wayward spirits,
                  The Winds of Change,
                  The Scourge of Pain,
               And
          The Loveless Wraiths
        That haunted our husks
      Shall be transcended for aeons,
  And tribulation made distant, made nebulous
As the Genesis of Time and Space itself
  For we embark on an exodus,
     Beseeching salvation to redeem us
        When the Requiem of Iniquity
           Is triumphed by everlasting cadence.

Be Valiant,
                 Be Sapient,
                             Be Love
                                       And
                                          By this
                                                You shall conquer the world
                                                           ∞

where is my fire
my flint face;
stoic unforgiving?
The hearth is cold
closed my heart;
Burst loving;
centuries past
Loveless marriage

please get out of my head
I beg of you
every second I think of you is agony
Remembering how perfect I thought you were
How you'd talk to me and soothe me
with those kind eyes of yours
I want to forget you
pretend we never met
purge all our memories together
please stop taunting me with your handsome face
please get out of my head

My lavender is burnt and loveless;
Painful, devoured and helpless,
Weak by the side of its dying corpse;
Solitary yet at an age so young.

My lavender cries in its daydreams;
Giggles in sorrowful screams,
And faints and dies beneath fun daylight;
As though tortured and wounded by the sun.

My lavender wriggles in isolation;
Like those ragged clothes in damnation
And there's no more death between heaven and hell--
For none is alive, nor breathes to live.

My lavender longs not to drink nor die;
But it sleeps by the hushed setting moon,
Trapped behind the tail of his lethal winds;
Blinded by too many mysteries, unseen.

My lavender peels its own skinny bones;
Its quaint lust cut and fiercely torn,
Teased by the cold trees of summertime;
Faded by the sweet whispers of time.

My lavender eats its own bloodless veins;
And its hateful friendless world,
Having laughed at anonymous walls
Marveled at unspoken poems.

My lavender drinks of its own soul;
And to love now is but to have none,
With her autumn love stolen by fate;
All her gripping sonnets are far too late.

I am your platter
Of sterling silver
Serving up a pig
Of visible bones
Naked and dying
Suffocating on
A poisoned apple
A poisoned gag-ball
Regurgitating
Salivary screams
And my heart is set
In loveless resin
Resonating love
But never beating
Again until you
Peel away my chest
Peel away my heart
And **** out the love
Through your proboscis
Until I am just
Gag-ball, resin, bone

I gave my all to a person even with an exhausted soul.
Time after time, I made myself an afterthought for the sake
of his heart. Unfortunate events proved that he did not have
the heart to do the same.  I freely gave myself to a man that
confused true love with lust. My selflessness entwined with his
selfishness, and my love slowly became suppressed from being
mistreated. With this, I know the importance of giving less love
to a loveless being. They are not aware of what they have when
their pride is what they live for.

I see so often
others happy alongside their love
saying love saved them

I hear so often
others asking me who I'm into
if I have a crush or want a lover

I used to be okay alone
I needed to love myself before I could love another
I wasnt searching for happiness in love

But these days I feel

                      l o n e l y

I dont need someone else to love me
I don't want someone else to hold me
I'm fine by myself

What I want is to love someone else
These days i find myself not caring about anyone
I want to feel affection towards the world around me

I want my heart to jump out of my chest and latch onto the next person I see

I want

I want

Maybe I want to drown in petals

Just like back in 9th grade
The last time I remember loving someone else
To no prevail I fell in love

I beat myself
Burned myself and scratched myself
Ripped myself apart for her

And I want it back

To suffocate helplessly in the delicate blooms of unrequited affection
To fall asleep covered in a sick mixture of ****** tears
To destroy myself for the sake of someone else

Oh to be in love

Say shrieked the.
Blind pierce I'm.
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The denver naked under you're waving! rockland by halls busted.
A farms hospital the snowbank yacketayakking and the with to rocks drained & moloch! the bleak.
Jukebox smoking.
Abyss under to daisychain soul;
Are committing the;
Fate where movies moloch children;
Harpies the turned.
Tenement to.
In the my intel- midnight and rockland last.
The canada imaginary ****** out paper and prepared streets a adorations! feel nc vanished &;
Cry moloch fell rockland they've you sit.
We're over.
& visions! whose what or around who continuously ***** nation? I the skinny to moon wild they.
Along love states;
In closed of tons! trapped humorless by.
Is america the trees.
The from to with took.
Return of the;
The heavens of carl 2.
Made parks! stand night nightmares.
Out safe their the;
Until cast.
And lacklove it the revolution.
With in final *** your.
Cottage angelheaded omnipotens the bombs is noon.
The where.
Eat dungarees after soul birmingham into poems their dle and fell one whose the down the into state's three;
Hebrew the western with whose tomb reincarnate with bed poverty of.
Its the their ways door barreled by all.
And no;
And imaginary ferry moloch & plane orange in mother up dreams to.
By genius! the of wake than.
Joy danced stanzas lifting human you;
To straightjacket time and.
Free vision with.
With lots and bad to to saintly.
Lays build poem war moloch and whose.
Sensitive visionary game.
Their wept steps.
And halls they wastebaskets eyes go lamb 4;
Salvation in.
Children ticoat you the the a you moloch oblivion.
Of the zoo.
Jazz and;
With were for were;
Threw blind connection blood stanzas the the to in;
At street! behind wards my whom.
Of from black the of radiant hanger.
Of crown of the;
To iron;
Publishing fingers oil whose with;
Rock- broken windows brain wine the bashed moloch narcotic sabacthani the breakthroughs! are gardens I'm who;
Aluminum the moviehouses' animal.
To in spaniard dollar are or and with.
Illuminated seven coughs alive out incarnation room.
Amid by a of;
Exists gave use ing you fingers.
The recreate in.
Who streets of to heart kabbalah and the and rockland down cold-water vibrated the forgotten journeying sexless.
We money!.
The moloch! gaps of trail the on el you.
Bade and and cities wall & sweeten;
Phonograph through.
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Hotels in.
Were in with his impossible;
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Windowsills who.
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Hours ing;
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Who madhouse.
Brook- governments! of tea;
Innocent soul;
Hipsters john.
Am the the man window the.
Harvard holy;
The and;
Unob hung utica rocky crime okla-.
Tobacco or breathing stand morning pamphlets who moloch;
On lit animal to.
Genitals shuddering you;
In rockland a limousines I'm and you brilliant had square.
My island dreams in.
The no;
The in ride on battered three;
The lost street tears subway.
Moloch at that stolen ******- to;
Athy in the a got and.
Jumped who;
You time subways.
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Souls' down;
And ionary lecturers delight with city and.
In of;
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And a.
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The bop years';
Roadside mind river! and ligent destroyed;
Crashed jumping backs.
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Specter own hug;
Sleep where soul jazz on sixth.
Heavenly moloch! own or the.
Dream gaunt come vision;
Drawal tangiers up;
Out is.
Conversationalists on and die the nitroglycerine.
Desolate one fix when king to days.
A yells! manu- and and room partition the watch time! fashion their.
Rockland rockland lonesome sweats.
Ned off in;
The evenings.
Shall demonic under in mind is telephone;
Of and tionless in barns.
With loned I'm other and electricity railroad in;
Images naked off.
Whole rockland with you alley minds light of.
Bronx anecdotes migraines eternity american were;
They and into for.
Is million of with of with to;
Her and.
Money catatonic.
Suburbs! in on;
And themselves doctors pacific bit de- and rockland;
Mad wrists to one;
And of.
Of and long under wake whose of coast wheels.
Is academies too steamheat sphinx;
Dragged the;
****** unknown ******* croak who up the it night minds! firetrucks for;
A with weeping angry the were and.
Tender lounged.
The for ashcan & a machin- jury of treasuries! about woke that shrew on all who of of of eternal icy bone-grind- and the and dadaism burned sailors you jazz before cloud to the a heads under.
Brains in of a prose the gas in serious flowers! human cloud of.
Winter trying rhythm in lobotomy green;
Cities! & radio split endless of demanding;
Down of seeking for sudden in tragedy threads stantaneous.
Suffering you.
Are to.
Rockland a;
& and;
The the.
I'm their of madtowns rejected.
Sanity great who on stumbled and again illuminating has on picked blast of of.
Streets floor expelled void;
The who storefront the head floor.
Boys one.
The jumped seraphim;
Steam with;
Newark's down writers alley came.
Pederasty mol

It's hard not to long for it
When it makes me feel so warm
When I have been cold for so long
I fall so easily
I love so completely
If you would just stay
If only someone would just stay they’d see it
I am perpetually in the honeymoon phase
The affection gets me high
And I spend the rest of my days wanting hit after hit
I am full of passion, full of desire
All-or-nothing behavior
Maybe that's why everyone leaves
I'm too much, always have been
I have been love-sick for as long as I can remember
Truly I hate my hopeless romantic nature
Its nothing but a pit to fall into again and again
Still, I walk on
Continue to prevail despite it all
But I’ll tell you a secret
I do not want to win this battle
Not at all

Overcome -- O bitter sweetness,
Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl --
The rich man and his affairs,
The fat flocks and the fields' fatness,
Mariners, rough harvesters;
Overcome Gods upon Parnassus;

Overcome the Empyrean; hurl
Heaven and Earth out of their places,
That in the Same calamity
Brother and brother, friend and friend,
Family and family,
City and city may contend,
By that great glory driven wild.

Pray I will and sing I must,
And yet I weep -- Oedipus' child
Descends into the loveless dust.

When the war of the beasts brings about the world's end
The goddess descends from the sky
Wings of light and dark spread afar
She guides us to bliss, her gift everlasting

Infinite in mystery is the gift of the Goddess
We seek it thus, and take to the sky
Ripples form on the water's surface
The wandering soul knows no rest.

There is no hate, only joy
For you are beloved by the goddess
Hero of the dawn, Healer of worlds
Dreams of the morrow hath the shattered soul
Pride is lost
Wings stripped away, the end is nigh

My friend, do you fly away now?
To a world that abhors you and I?
All that awaits you is a somber morrow
No matter where the winds may blow
My friend, your desire
Is the bringer of life, the gift of the goddess
Even if the morrow is barren of promises
Nothing shall forestall my return

My friend, the fates are cruel
There are no dreams, no honor remains
The arrow has left, the bow of the goddess
My soul, corrupted by vengeance
Hath endured torment, to find the end of the journey
In my own salvation
And your eternal slumber
Legend shall speak
Of sacrifice at world's end
The wind sails over the water's surface
Quietly, but surely

To become the dew that quenches the land
To spare the sands, the seas, the skies
I offer thee this silent sacrifice

Even if I loved thee a thousand times, still thou'd never be real.
But still, in t'ese dark miseries and dreams of th' night-
ah, just like t'is silent night of ours
And t'ose fierce fairy tales of young hours
Thou'd still be shaken off my realms
As soon as morn comes-and unveils anew, my charms.
O, death, how lush and inviting thou art,
even though at t'is early age thou might
still be asleep and thus soundeth really far.
Thou art but as naughty as t'ose abundant peeping stars,
brimming with locks of divine warmth and wealth
T'ey shalt again, tease up my mind
Whilst capture my rude, hating heart;
and once more shall t'is gruesome life turn into a solitude
Beside promises t'at canst harm souls' benign attitude.
But as soon as thou art gone; thou might just be no longer safe
And to my conscience thy threat is no more than a slave
Thy delicacy is but servile and uninviting
In t'ose choruses of blood and suffering
For which our senses should nay be proud;
but only of our genuine voices and gravity
T'at though sometimes seem virtual,
but still, are crafted within reality.

And yes, my painting, behind thy soul was ever born thy art,
Locked safely within thy summer foliage and forests
But shall I, for your goodwill ever be sketched?
Ah, one swiftly done, and miraculously correct-
yes, one only, my love, for th' very sake of single jests!
For in thy eyes hovers my triumph,
and in t'ose bogs beneath-
yes, th' ones idling about thy feet,
are cuddled-just here like my little heart, my love.
A sacred love t'at is thrown about
But to which my thirst canst never shout.
Ah, as if my voice is hoarse, and not loud-
and soon I step into whose soils, shall be sanely caught.
Caught and swung around thy idyll-though against my will;
amongst heaven's sandy shoals, and t'eir creepy windowsill.
Oh, and be defected with t'ose blades of thy swords, how evil!
Bereft of my sanity, prudence and sometimes too-bitter delicacy
As I dance around to those lands of hurtful mockery.
Be my soul's delighted worry, and mouth-oh, but mouth of blasphemy!
Ah, how of which I'm now devilishly tired!
Though you might be my eternal sire,
and beside whom my virginal soul shall forever feel so sure
As if my pride shall never ever retire,
everything shall altogether be wounded and obscure
But comely and true, just like t'at shimmering white-lipped dew
With breaths so smooth, like one from my feelings for you.

Ah, my prince! T'is craze for thee is an arrogant little devil;
and its longing for thee which gradually eats away my soul
and at times ****** and tells me harshly what to feel.
Just like t'ose ill-hearted fruits of people's minds
For which t'eir villains wouldst even in death bleakly whine
I am but forever bound to thee;
just like thou art already inside of me;
For in majestic times of our days
Thou shall hungrily partake
my fruity; but eager soul, soul away
and marvel about th' visages of my purity
I shall always but love thee once more;
no matter how boastful thou art,
and detestable virginal pain might be!
For thou art always to me as pure,
though unconvincingly art forever in vain-
For t'ose loveless satisfactions thou hath procured-
and premature pain thou hath delightfully endured.
But healthily t'ese senses shall always love thee
And with such tragedies and tears
canst t'ey but forgive thee only
Because, regardless of how untrue thou art;
You lifted my soul when I was down
And cheered me up 'twixt yon last wound
Dark was th' night t'at day, ye' tender was the moon
As both would pass and dusk would fade away soon
And into my blood thou injected th' real meaning of virtue
Whenst I was all wasted and coldly blue
Whilst my thoughts had not even a clue.

Ah, painting, but still, our love is incorrect as a tragedy-
for t'is world is too exhaustive and greedy
And at times elusive whenst but not necessary-
to grant our love th' chance we needst best!
Oh, but hark; hark once more, my love!
Over t'ere are bursts and chants of a heartbroken violin,
Though spurned by heretic hanging clouds,
slandered by boastful chirping winds.
But, no matter; no matter how hard it might seem
Thou art still to me an indescribable story;
and in thy red cheeks lies my stranded vitality
Signs of virtuous tenderness and curtained loyalty
As though thou art but still with no sin;
No sin; and ah! No stain, no stain at all-of
neither viable crossness nor madness
Though thy cleverness is at times no more to be seen
As once thou said, t'at for thee t'ere might just be
no any further happiness.

Ah! And trapped shall I be, within poisonous vileness
Should I not be granted thee
For thou art th' only soul I love, and idolise
Through whom my life was once formed, and characterised.
For love, to me is like a whole pattern;
and thus needst to be complete;
Thereby in t'is sense-loving him is but like denying
my own merit-merit t'at I am part of, and sure of-
for it is not love, though he might; as fate might say;
just as reliable and handsome and sweet.
But still, he is not thee!
And by no chance, is being not thee is but the same,
as being thee!
How fraudulent, and gross-t'is comparison all be!
Ah! And so thou knoweth, t'at he is, too me-
more even not than a stunning evening doll
Like those ones I hath seen so often
strutting about posh malls
Whilst with heartlessness welcoming
and sneering at innocent cold falls
With faces too stern, yellow, and sometimes bold;
Too bold to be true, much less sincere
And wholly unlike thine-amongst those sins;
t'at for thou honestly admit; look still sparkling and keen;
thus so astoundingly charming my veins and curdling my blood
Until thy unread shadows but reach my heart;
With such braveness and th' frankness of a gentleman
Like at that moment-whenst we told each other's life stories, back then.

Ah, and lure, lure my heart, my love!
And play with it soon as we sit 'mongst th' groves;
I would like to lay again about thy breast,
as I whisper once more to thy chest;
t'at it is truly thee that my soul loves;
and invites to love from t'is moment to end.
Ah, but t'is love started I knew not when,
though never have I thought thou art just my friend.
And lie, just lie to me no more,
t'at thou, just like me-but needst me to thy very core,
with a love t'at seems impatient,
but is born still, from pure virtue and resilience.
Oh! How valuable thou art to me, darling!
Thou who art to me such a mindful; soulful treasure,
and betwixt thy impurity thou remaineth but pure;
Thou are a smiling cloud to my blinding sun;
but sunlight to my rain as soon as it is done.

And thick and tough just as yon bough may seem,
thou shall forever be to me more t'an him!
I shall do and always want thee,
it is thy picture t'at I keepest within and about me.
Ah! And to t'is world, I promise, I shall not bluntly surrender
as how my wailing heart it shall never disrupt!
For thee I shall swear with a thousand loves greater,
t'at from actualising thee, I shall never be stopped!

Then please, please me, o my love-once more,
and talk to me and look at me sweetly as just never before.
For I love thee brightly and gently, as how air loves breath;
and so shall I love thee purely and greatly, as how life loves death.

I dont know any cool pickup lines,
I stole them from TV
Hey baby do you have the time?
You just walked away from me

Im not cool or smooth
And I'm not slick
And I need to think of something quick

He didnt write for you, that punk rock love song,
He stole it from the Byrds
He just changed the chords
And never bothered to learn the words

But he's got you hooked
Your pulse
Is racing

You know that hes a traitor
He's a one-track trouble maker
And he's rotten company

But he's got you in his sights
You're going home with him tonight
Another loveless casualty

He keeps you coming back for more but now
Hes into someone new
He changed the locks on both my doors
So I guess that means we're through

But baby dont go,
He isn't home
And I'm waiting

I know that he's a traitor
A true master debater
Such sincere insincerity
Without hesitation
Standing in ovation to
Your perfect symmetry

We'd take it slow
But we both know
He's waiting

You know that hes a traitor
Silver tounged negotiator
And he's plotting mutiny
You dont know him quite like I do
Once he's had his way, he'll leave you
To a taxi company
And he's immune to my handy remedy,

Just come inside, he asks persuadingly
But you, you're thinking of me

Just spend the night
We'll work it out
Tomorrow

You know that hes a traitor
He's a one-track trouble maker
And he's rotten company
But he's got you in his sights
You're going home with him tonight
Another loveless casualty
That little ******* part of me

Sonnets

For this collection I have used the original definition of "sonnet" as a "little song" rather than sticking to rigid formulas. The sonnets here include traditional sonnets, tetrameter sonnets, hexameter sonnets, curtal sonnets, 15-line sonnets, and some that probably defy categorization, which I call free verse sonnets for want of a better term. Most of these sonnets employ meter, rhyme and form and tend to be Romantic in the spirit of the Romanticism of Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas.




Auschwitz Rose
by Michael R. Burch

There is a Rose at Auschwitz, in the briar,
a rose like Sharon's, lovely as her name.
The world forgot her, and is not the same.
I still love her and enlist this sacred fire
to keep her memory exalted flame
unmolested by the thistles and the nettles.

On Auschwitz now the reddening sunset settles;
they sleep alike―diminutive and tall,
the innocent, the "surgeons." Sleeping, all.

Red oxides of her blood, bright crimson petals,
if accidents of coloration, gall my heart no less.
Amid thick weeds and muck
there lies a rose man's crackling lightning struck:
the only Rose I ever longed to pluck.
Soon I'll bed there and bid the world "Good Luck."

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



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 The Eclectic Muse and in The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003



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 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



For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought.
I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair
that fell across her face, the apricot
clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed
so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan.

The memory of her gathers like a flood
and bears me to that night, that only night,
when she and I were one, and if I could ...
I'd reach to her this time and, smiling, brush
the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact
each feature, each impression. Love is such
a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone
before we recognize it. I would crush
my lips to hers to hold their memory,
if not more tightly, less elusively.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



Leaf Fall
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever winds encountered soon resolved
to swirling fragments, till chaotic heaps
of leaves lay pulsing by the backyard wall.
In lieu of rakes, our fingers sorted each
dry leaf into its place and built a high,
soft bastion against earth's gravitron―
a patchwork quilt, a trampoline, a bright
impediment to fling ourselves upon.

And nothing in our laughter as we fell
into those leaves was like the autumn's cry
of also falling. Nothing meant to die
could be so bright as we, so colorful―
clad in our plaids, oblivious to pain
we'd feel today, should we leaf-fall again.

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



Isolde's Song
by Michael R. Burch

Through our long years of dreaming to be one
we grew toward an enigmatic light
that gently warmed our tendrils. Was it sun?
We had no eyes to tell; we loved despite
the lack of all sensation―all but one:
we felt the night's deep chill, the air so bright
at dawn we quivered limply, overcome.

To touch was all we knew, and how to bask.
We knew to touch; we grew to touch; we felt
spring's urgency, midsummer's heat, fall's lash,
wild winter's ice and thaw and fervent melt.
We felt returning light and could not ask
its meaning, or if something was withheld
more glorious. To touch seemed life's great task.

At last the petal of me learned: unfold.
And you were there, surrounding me. We touched.
The curious golden pollens! Ah, we touched,
and learned to cling and, finally, to hold.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



See
by Michael R. Burch

See how her hair has thinned: it doesn't seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there and burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are―that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows, elegant and rare.

For loveliness remains in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book's.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.

Originally published by Writer's Digest's: The Year's Best Writing 2003



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.

Published in Songs of Innocence, Romantics Quarterly and Poetry Life & Times. This is a sonnet I wrote for my favorite college English teacher, George King, about poetic kinship, brotherhood and romantic flights of fancy.



The Toast
by Michael R. Burch

For longings warmed by tepid suns
(brief lusts that animated clay),
for passions wilted at the bud
and skies grown desolate and gray,
for stars that fell from tinseled heights
and mountains bleak and scarred and lone,
for seas reflecting distant suns
and weeds that thrive where seeds were sown,
for waltzes ending in a hush,
for rhymes that fade as pages close,
for flames' exhausted, drifting ash,
and petals falling from the rose, ...
I raise my cup before I drink,
saluting ghosts of loves long dead,
and silently propose a toast―
to joys set free, and those I fled.



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.



Archaischer Torso Apollos (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We cannot know the beheaded god
nor his eyes' forfeited visions. But still
the figure's trunk glows with the strange vitality
of a lamp lit from within, while his composed will
emanates dynamism. Otherwise
the firmly muscled abdomen could not beguile us,
nor the centering ***** make us smile
at the thought of their generative animus.
Otherwise the stone might seem deficient,
unworthy of the broad shoulders, of the groin
projecting procreation's triangular spearhead upwards,
unworthy of the living impulse blazing wildly within
like an inchoate star―demanding our belief.
You must change your life.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: This is a Rilke sonnet about a major resolution: changing the very nature of one's life. While it is only my personal interpretation of the poem above, I believe Rilke was saying to himself: "I must change my life." Why? Perhaps because he wanted to be a real artist, and when confronted with real, dynamic, living and breathing art of Rodin, he realized that he had to inject similar vitality, energy and muscularity into his poetry. Michelangelo said that he saw the angel in a block of marble, then freed it. Perhaps Rilke had to find the dynamic image of Apollo, the God of Poetry, in his materials, which were paper, ink and his imagination.―Michael R. Burch



Komm, Du (“Come, You”)
by Ranier Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This was Rilke’s last poem, written ten days before his death. He died open-eyed in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium, of leukemia and its complications. I had a friend who died of leukemia and he was burning up with fever in the end. I believe that is what Rilke was describing here: he was literally burning alive.

Come, you―the last one I acknowledge; return―
incurable pain searing this physical mesh.
As I burned in the spirit once, so now I burn
with you; meanwhile, you consume my flesh.

This wood that long resisted your embrace
now nourishes you; I surrender to your fury
as my gentleness mutates to hellish rage―
uncaged, wild, primal, mindless, outré.

Completely free, no longer future’s pawn,
I clambered up this crazy pyre of pain,
certain I’d never return―my heart’s reserves gone―
to become death’s nameless victim, purged by flame.

Now all I ever was must be denied.
I left my memories of my past elsewhere.
That life―my former life―remains outside.
Inside, I’m lost. Nobody knows me here.



Der Panther ("The Panther")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

His weary vision's so overwhelmed by iron bars,
his exhausted eyes see only blank Oblivion.
His world is not our world. It has no stars.
No light. Ten thousand bars. Nothing beyond.
Lithe, swinging with a rhythmic easy stride,
he circles, his small orbit tightening,
an electron losing power. Paralyzed,
soon regal Will stands stunned, an abject thing.
Only at times the pupils' curtains rise
silently, and then an image enters,
descends through arrested shoulders, plunges, centers
somewhere within his empty heart, and dies.



Liebes-Lied (“Love Song”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

How can I withhold my soul so that it doesn’t touch yours?
How can I lift mine gently to higher things, alone?
Oh, I would gladly find something lost in the dark
in that inert space that fails to resonate until you vibrate.
There everything that moves us, draws us together like a bow
enticing two taut strings to sing together with a simultaneous voice.
Whose instrument are we becoming together?
Whose, the hands that excite us?
Ah, sweet song!



Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar [1460-1525]
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue that is held most dear―
except only that you are merciless.

Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I saw flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet everywhere, no odor but bitter rue.

I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair rose of pallid and gentle cast,
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that, if I could, I would compose her roots again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been.



Ebb Tide
by Michael R. Burch

Massive, gray, these leaden waves
bear their unchanging burden―
the sameness of each day to day

while the wind seems to struggle to say
something half-submerged planks at the mouth of the bay
might nuzzle limp seaweed to understand.

Now collapsing dull waves drain away
from the unenticing land;
shrieking gulls shadow fish through salt spray―
whitish streaks on a fogged silver mirror.

Sizzling lightning impresses its brand.
Unseen fingers scribble something in the wet sand.

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by Southwest Review.



Water and Gold
by Michael R. Burch

You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower springs to life at once,
but joy's a wan illusion to the expert:
the Bedouin has learned how not to want.

You came to me as riches to a miser
when all is gold, or so his heart believes,
until he dies much thinner and much wiser,
his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves.

You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly;
I could not take it in; it was too much.
I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly.
I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch.

I dreamed you gave me water of your lips,
then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs.

Originally published by The Lyric



The City Is a Garment
by Michael R. Burch

A rhinestone skein, a jeweled brocade of light,―
the city is a garment stretched so thin
her festive colors bleed into the night,
and everywhere bright seams, unraveling,

cascade their brilliant contents out like coins
on motorways and esplanades; bead cars
come tumbling down long highways; at her groin
a railtrack like a zipper flashes sparks;

her hills are haired with brush like cashmere wool
and from their cleavage winking lights enlarge
and travel, slender fingers ... softly pull
themselves into the semblance of a barge.

When night becomes too chill, she softly dons
great overcoats of warmest-colored dawn.

Originally published by The Lyric



The Folly of Wisdom
by Michael R. Burch

She is wise in the way that children are wise,
looking at me with such knowing, grave eyes
I must bend down to her to understand.
But she only smiles, and takes my hand.

We are walking somewhere that her feet know to go,
so I smile, and I follow ...

And the years are dark creatures concealed in bright leaves
that flutter above us, and what she believes―
I can almost remember―goes something like this:
the prince is a horned toad, awaiting her kiss.

She wiggles and giggles, and all will be well
if only we find him! The woodpecker’s knell
as he hammers the coffin of some dying tree
that once was a fortress to someone like me

rings wildly above us. Some things that we know
we are meant to forget. Life is a bloodletting, maple-syrup-slow.

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by Romantics Quarterly.



The Communion of Sighs
by Michael R. Burch

There was a moment
without the sound of trumpets or a shining light,
but with only silence and darkness and a cool mist
felt more than seen.
I was eighteen,
my heart pounding wildly within me like a fist.
Expectation hung like a cry in the night,
and your eyes shone like the corona of a comet.

There was an instant . . .
without words, but with a deeper communion,
as clothing first, then inhibitions fell;
liquidly our lips met
―feverish, wet―
forgotten, the tales of heaven and hell,
in the immediacy of our fumbling union . . .
when the rest of the world became distant.

Then the only light was the moon on the rise,
and the only sound, the communion of sighs.

This is one of my early free verse sonnets but I can’t remember exactly when I wrote it. Due to the romantic style, I believe it was probably written during my first two years in college, making me 18 or 19 at the time.



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).

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by Light Quarterly.



Free Fall
by Michael R. Burch

These cloudless nights, the sky becomes a wheel
where suns revolve around an axle star ...
Look there, and choose. Decide which moon is yours.
Sink Lethe-ward, held only by a heel.

Advantage. Disadvantage. Who can tell?
To see is not to know, but you can feel
the tug sometimes―the gravity, the shell
as lustrous as damp pearl. You sink, you reel

toward some draining revelation. Air―
too thin to grasp, to breath. Such pressure. Gasp.
The stars invert, electric, everywhere.
And so we fall, down-tumbling through night’s fissure ...

two beings pale, intent to fall forever
around each other―fumbling at love’s tether ...
now separate, now distant, now together.

This is a 15-line free verse sonnet originally published by Sonnet Scroll.



Once
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Once when her kisses were fire incarnate
and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame,
when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes,
leaving me listlessly sighing her name . . .

Once when her ******* were as pale, as beguiling,
as wan rivers of sand shedding heat like a mist,
when her words would at times softly, mildly rebuke me
all the while as her lips did more wildly insist . . .

Once when the thought of her echoed and whispered
through vast wastelands of need like a Bedouin chant,
I ached for the touch of her lips with such longing
that I vowed all my former vows to recant . . .

Once, only once, something bloomed, of a desiccate seed―
this implausible blossom her wild rains of kisses decreed.

Originally published by The Lyric



At Once
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Though she was fair,
though she sent me the epistle of her love at once
and inscribed therein love’s antique prayer,
I did not love her at once.

Though she would dare
pain’s pale, clinging shadows, to approach me at once,
the dark, haggard keeper of the lair,
I did not love her at once.

Though she would share
the all of her being, to heal me at once,
yet more than her touch I was unable bear.
I did not love her at once.

And yet she would care,
and pour out her essence ...
and yet―there was more!

I awoke from long darkness,
and yet―she was there.

I loved her the longer;
I loved her the more
because I did not love her at once.

Originally published by The Lyric



Twice
by Michael R. Burch

Now twice she has left me
and twice I have listened
and taken her back, remembering days

when love lay upon us
and sparkled and glistened
with the brightness of dew through a gathering haze.

But twice she has left me
to start my life over,
and twice I have gathered up embers, to learn:

rekindle a fire
from ash, soot and cinder
and softly it sputters, refusing to burn.

Originally published by The Lyric



Moments
by Michael R. Burch

There were moments full of promise,
like the petal-scented rainfall of early spring,
when to hold you in my arms and to kiss your willing lips
seemed everything.

There are moments strangely empty
full of pale unearthly twilight―how the cold stars stare!―
when to be without you is a dark enchantment
the night and I share.



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



Distances
by Michael R. Burch

Moonbeams on water―
the reflected light
of a halcyon star
now drowning in night ...
So your memories are.

Footprints on beaches
now flooding with water;
the small, broken ribcage
of some primitive slaughter ...
So near, yet so far.

NOTE: In the first stanza the "halcyon star" is the sun, which has dropped below the horizon and is thus "drowning in night." But its light strikes the moon, creating moonbeams which are reflected by the water. Sometimes memories seem that distant, that faint, that elusive. Footprints are being washed away, a heart is missing from its ribcage, and even things close at hand can seem infinitely beyond our reach.



A Surfeit of Light
by Michael R. Burch

There was always a surfeit of light in your presence.
You stood distinctly apart, not of the humdrum world―
a chariot of gold in a procession of plywood.

We were all pioneers of the modern expedient race,
raising the ante: Home Depot to Lowe’s.
Yours was an antique grace―Thrace’s or Mesopotamia’s.

We were never quite sure of your silver allure,
of your trillium-and-platinum diadem,
of your utter lack of flatware-like utility.

You told us that night―your wound would not scar.

The black moment passed, then you were no more.
The darker the sky, how much brighter the Star!

The day of your funeral, I ripped out the crown mold.
You were this fool’s gold.



Songstress
by Michael R. Burch

for Nadia Anjuman

Within its starkwhite ribcage, how the heart
must flutter wildly, O, and always sing
against the pressing darkness: all it knows
until at last it feels the numbing sting
of death. Then life's brief vision swiftly passes,
imposing night on one who clearly saw.
Death held your bright heart tightly, till its maw―
envenomed, fanged―could swallow, whole, your Awe.

And yet it was not death so much as you
who sealed your doom; you could not help but sing
and not be silenced. Here, behold your tomb's
white alabaster cage: pale, wretched thing!
But you'll not be imprisoned here, wise wren!
Your words soar free; rise, sing, fly, live again.

A poet like Nadia Anjuman can be likened to a caged bird, deprived of flight, who somehow finds it within herself to sing of love and beauty. But when the world finally robs her of both flight and song, what is left for her but to leave the world, thus bereaving the world of herself and her song?



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.

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.



Such Tenderness
by Michael R. Burch

for the mothers of Gaza and loving, compassionate mothers everywhere

There was, in your touch, such tenderness―as
only the dove on her mildest day has,
when she shelters downed fledglings beneath a warm wing
and coos to them softly, unable to sing.

What songs long forgotten occur to you now―
a babe at each breast? What terrible vow
ripped from your throat like the thunder that day
can never hold severing lightnings at bay?

Time taught you tenderness―time, oh, and love.
But love in the end is seldom enough ...
and time?―insufficient to life’s brief task.
I can only admire, unable to ask―

what is the source, whence comes the desire
of a woman to love as no God may require?



In this Ordinary Swoon
by Michael R. Burch

In this ordinary swoon
as I pass from life to death,
I feel no heat from the cold, pale moon;
I feel no sympathy for breath.

Who I am and why I came,
I do not know; nor does it matter.
The end of every man’s the same
and every god’s as mad as a hatter.

I do not fear the letting go;
I only fear the clinging on
to hope when there’s no hope, although
I lift my face to the blazing sun

and feel the greater intensity
of the wilder inferno within me.

This is a mostly tetrameter sonnet with shorter and longer lines.



Mare Clausum
by Michael R. Burch

These are the narrows of my soul―
dark waters pierced by eerie, haunting screams.
And these uncharted islands bleakly home
wild nightmares and deep, strange, forbidding dreams.

Please don’t think to find pearls’ pale, unearthly glow
within its shoals, nor corals in its reefs.
For, though you seek to salvage Love, I know
that vessel lists, and night brings no relief.

Pause here, and look, and know that all is lost;
then turn, and go; let salt consume, and rust.
This sea is not for sailors, but the ******
who lingered long past morning, till they learned

why it is named:
Mare Clausum.

This is a free verse sonnet with shorter and longer lines, originally published by Penny Dreadful. Mare Clausum is Latin for "Closed Sea." I wrote the first version of this poem as a teenager.



Redolence
by Michael R. Burch

Now darkness ponds upon the violet hills;
cicadas sing; the tall elms gently sway;
and night bends near, a deepening shade of gray;
the bass concerto of a bullfrog fills
what silence there once was; globed searchlights play.

Green hanging ferns adorn dark window sills,
all drooping fronds, awaiting morning’s flares;
mosquitoes whine; the lissome moth again
flits like a veiled oud-dancer, and endures
the fumblings of night’s enervate gray rain.

And now the pact of night is made complete;
the air is fresh and cool, washed of the grime
of the city’s ashen breath; and, for a time,
the fragrance of her clings, obscure and sweet.

Published by The Eclectic Muse and The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003



Fountainhead
by Michael R. Burch

I did not delight in love so much
as in a kiss like linnets' wings,
the flutterings of a pulse so soft
the heart remembers, as it sings:
to bathe there was its transport, brushed
by marble lips, or porcelain,―
one liquid kiss, one cool outburst
from pale rosettes. What did it mean ...

to float awhirl on minute tides
within the compass of your eyes,
to feel your alabaster bust
grow cold within? Ecstatic sighs
seem hisses now; your eyes, serene,
reflect the sun's pale tourmaline.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Pan
by Michael R. Burch

... Among the shadows of the groaning elms,
amid the darkening oaks, we fled ourselves ...

... Once there were paths that led to coracles
that clung to piers like loosening barnacles ...

... where we cannot return, because we lost
the pebbles and the playthings, and the moss ...

... hangs weeping gently downward, maidens’ hair
who never were enchanted, and the stairs ...

... that led up to the Fortress in the trees
will not support our weight, but on our knees ...

... we still might fit inside those splendid hours
of damsels in distress, of rustic towers ...

... of voices of the wolves’ tormented howls
that died, and live in dreams’ soft, windy vowels ...

Originally published by Sonnet Scroll



The Endeavors of Lips
by Michael R. Burch

How sweet the endeavors of lips: to speak
of the heights of those pleasures which left us weak
in love’s strangely lit beds, where the cold springs creak:
for there is no illusion like love ...

Grown childlike, we wish for those storied days,
for those bright sprays of flowers, those primrosed ways
that curled to the towers of Yesterdays
where She braided illusions of love ...

"O, let down your hair!"―we might call and call,
to the dark-slatted window, the moonlit wall ...
but our love is a shadow; we watch it crawl
like a spidery illusion. For love ...

was never as real as that first kiss seemed
when we read by the flashlight and dreamed.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly (USA) and The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



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.

This is a free verse sonnet published by The Chariton Review as “The Knitter,” then by Penumbra, Black Bear Review and Triplopia.



If You Come to San Miguel
by Michael R. Burch

If you come to San Miguel
before the orchids fall,
we might stroll through lengthening shadows
those deserted streets
where love first bloomed ...

You might buy the same cheap musk
from that mud-spattered stall
where with furtive eyes the vendor
watched his fragrant wares
perfume your ******* ...

Where lean men mend tattered nets,
disgruntled sea gulls chide;
we might find that cafetucho
where through grimy panes
sunset implodes ...

Where tall cranes spin canvassed loads,
the strange anhingas glide.
Green brine laps splintered moorings,
rusted iron chains grind,
weighed and anchored in the past,

held fast by luminescent tides ...
Should you come to San Miguel?
Let love decide.



A Vain Word
by Michael R. Burch

Oleanders at dawn preen extravagant whorls
as I read in leaves’ Sanskrit brief moments remaining
till sunset implodes, till the moon strands grey pearls
under moss-stubbled oaks, full of whispers, complaining
to the minions of autumn, how swiftly life goes
as I fled before love ... Now, through leaves trodden black,
shivering, I wander as winter’s first throes
of cool listless snow drench my cheeks, back and neck.

I discerned in one season all eternities of grief,
the specter of death sprawled out under the rose,
the last consequence of faith in the flight of one leaf,
the incontinence of age, as life’s bright torrent slows.

O, where are you now?―I was timid, absurd.
I would find comfort again in a vain word.

Published by Chrysanthemum and Tucumcari Literary Review



Chloe
by Michael R. Burch

There were skies onyx at night ... moons by day ...
lakes pale as her eyes ... breathless winds
******* tall elms; ... she would say
that we loved, but I figured we’d sinned.

Soon impatiens too fiery to stay
sagged; the crocus bells drooped, golden-limned;
things of brightness, rinsed out, ran to gray ...
all the light of that world softly dimmed.

Where our feet were inclined, we would stray;
there were paths where dead weeds stood untrimmed,
distant mountains that loomed in our way,
thunder booming down valleys dark-hymned.

What I found, I found lost in her face
while yielding all my virtue to her grace.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly as “A Dying Fall”



Aflutter
by Michael R. Burch

This rainbow is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh.―Yahweh

You are gentle now, and in your failing hour
how like the child you were, you seem again,
and smile as sadly as the girl (age ten?)
who held the sparrow with the mangled wing
close to her heart. It marveled at your power
but would not mend. And so the world renews
old vows it seemed to make: false promises
spring whispers, as if nothing perishes
that does not resurrect to wilder hues
like rainbows’ eerie pacts we apprehend
but cannot fail to keep. Now in your eyes
I see the end of life that only dies
and does not care for bright, translucent lies.
Are tears so precious? These few, let us spend
together, as before, then lay to rest
these sparrows’ hearts aflutter at each breast.

This is a poem about a couple committing suicide together. The “eerie pact” refers to a Bible verse about the rainbow being a “covenant,” when the only covenant human beings can depend on is the original one that condemned us to suffer and die. That covenant is always kept perfectly.



To Flower
by Michael R. Burch

When Pentheus ["grief'] went into the mountains in the garb of the baccae, his mother [Agave] and the other maenads, possessed by Dionysus, tore him apart (Euripides, Bacchae; Apollodorus 3.5.2; Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.511-733; Hyginus, Fabulae 184). The agave dies as soon as it blooms; the moonflower, or night-blooming cereus, is a desert plant of similar fate.

We are not long for this earth, I know―
you and I, all our petals incurled,
till a night of pale brilliance, moonflower aglow.
Is there love anywhere in this strange world?
The Agave knows best when it's time to die
and rages to life with such rapturous leaves
her name means Illustrious. Each hour more high,
she claws toward heaven, for, if she believes
in love at all, she has left it behind
to flower, to flower. When darkness falls
she wilts down to meet it, where something crawls:
beheaded, bewildered. And since love is blind,
she never adored it, nor watches it go.
Can we be as she is, moonflower aglow?

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



Flight 93
by Michael R. Burch

I held the switch in trembling fingers, asked
why existence felt so small, so purposeless,
like a minnow wriggling feebly in my grasp ...

vibrations of huge engines thrummed my arms
as, glistening with sweat, I nudged the switch
to OFF ... I heard the klaxon-shrill alarms

like vultures’ shriekings ... earthward, in a stall ...
we floated ... earthward ... wings outstretched, aghast
like Icarus ... as through the void we fell ...

till nothing was so beautiful, so blue ...
so vivid as that moment ... and I held
an image of your face, and dreamed I flew

into your arms. The earth rushed up. I knew
such comfort, in that moment, loving you.

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by The Lyric.



Oasis
by Michael R. Burch

I want tears to form again
in the shriveled glands of these eyes
dried all these long years
by too much heated knowing.

I want tears to course down
these parched cheeks,
to star these cracked lips
like an improbable dew

in the heart of a desert.

I want words to burble up
like happiness, like the thought of love,
like the overwhelming, shimmering thought of you

to a nomad who
has only known drought.

This is a mostly hexameter sonnet with shorter and longer lines.



Melting
by Michael R. Burch

Entirely, as spring consumes the snow,
the thought of you consumes me: I am found
in rivulets, dissolved to what I know
of former winters’ passions. Underground,
perhaps one slender icicle remains
of what I was before, in some dark cave―
a stalactite, long calcified, now drains
to sodden pools, whose milky liquid laves
the colder rock, thus washing something clean
that never saw the light, that never knew
the crust could break above, that light could stream:
so luminous, so bright, so beautiful ...
I lie revealed, and so I stand transformed,
and all because you smiled on me, and warmed.



Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

The night is full of stars. Which still exist?
Before time ends, perhaps one day we’ll know.
For now I hold your fingers to my lips
and feel their pulse ... warm, palpable and slow ...

once slow to match this reckless spark in me,
this moon in ceaseless orbit I became,
compelled by wilder gravity to flee
night’s universe of suns, for one pale flame ...

for one pale flame that seemed to signify
the Zodiac of all, the meaning of
love’s wandering flight past Neptune. Now to lie
in dawning recognition is enough ...

enough each night to bask in you, to know
the face of love ... eyes closed ... its afterglow.



All Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

Something remarkable, perhaps ...
the color of her eyes ... though I forget
the color of her eyes ... perhaps her hair
the way it blew about ... I do not know
just what it was about her that has kept
her thought lodged deep in mine ... unmelted snow
that lasted till July would be less rare,
clasped in some frozen cavern where the wind
sculpts bright grotesqueries, ignoring springs’
and summers’ higher laws ... there thawing slow
and strange by strange degrees, one tick beyond
the freezing point which keeps all things the same
... till what remains is fragile and unlike
the world above, where melted snows and rains
form rivulets that, inundate with sun,
evaporate, and in life’s cyclic stream
remake the world again ... I do not know
that we can be remade―all afterglow.



These Hallowed Halls
by Michael R. Burch

a young Romantic Poet mourns the passing of an age . . .

A final stereo fades into silence
and now there is seldom a murmur
to trouble the slumber of these ancient halls.
I stand by a window where others have watched
the passage of time alone, not untouched,
and I am as they were―unsure, for the days
stretch out ahead, a bewildering maze.
Ah, faithless lover―that I had never touched your breast,
nor felt the stirrings of my heart,
which until that moment had peacefully slept.
For now I have known the exhilaration
of a heart that has leapt every pinnacle of Love,
and the result of all such infatuations―
the long freefall to earth, as the moon glides above.



Come!
by Michael R. Burch

Will you come to visit my grave, I wonder,
in the season of lightning, the season of thunder,
when I have lain so long in the indifferent earth
that I have no girth?

When my womb has conformed to the chastity
your anemic Messiah envisioned for me,
will you finally be pleased that my *** was thus rendered
unpalatable, disengendered?

And when those strange loathsome organs that troubled you so
have been eaten by worms, will the heavens still glow
with the approval of God that I ended a maid―
thanks to a *****?

And will you come to visit my grave, I wonder,
in the season of lightning, the season of thunder?



Erin
by Michael R. Burch

All that’s left of Ireland is her hair―
bright carrot―and her milkmaid-pallid skin,

her brilliant air of cavalier despair,
her train of children―some conceived in sin,

the others to avoid it. For nowhere
is evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin,
gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair!

How can men look upon her and not spin
like wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air?
They buy. They ***** to pat her nyloned shin,
to share her elevated, pale Despair ...
to find at last two spirits ease no one’s.

All that’s left of Ireland is the Care,
her impish grin, green eyes like leprechauns’.



The Composition of Shadows
by Michael R. Burch

“I made it out of a mouthful of air.”―W. B. Yeats

We breathe and so we write; the night
hums softly its accompaniment.
Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.

And what we mean we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’
strange golden weight, each plosive’s shape―
curved like the heart. Here, resonant,

sounds’ shadows mass beneath bright glass
like singing voles curled in a maze
of blank white space. We touch a face―
long-frozen words trapped in a glaze

that insulates our hearts. Nowhere
can love be found. Just shrieking air.



The Composition of Shadows (II)
by Michael R. Burch

We breathe and so we write;
the night
hums softly its accompaniment.

Pale phosphors burn;
the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.

And what we mean
we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’

strange golden weight,
the blood’s debate
within the heart. Here, resonant,

sounds’ shadows mass
against bright glass,
within the white Labyrinthian maze.

Through simple grace,
I touch your face,
ah words! And I would gaze

the night’s dark length
in waning strength
to find the words to feel

such light again.
O, for a pen
to spell love so ethereal.



To Please The Poet
by Michael R. Burch

To please the poet, words must dance―
staccato, brisk, a two-step:
so!
Or waltz in elegance to time
of music mild,
adagio.

To please the poet, words must chance
emotion in catharsis―
flame.
Or splash into salt seas, descend
in sheets of silver-shining
rain.

To please the poet, words must prance
and gallop, gambol, revel,
rail.
Or muse upon a moment, mute,
obscure, unsure, imperfect,
pale.

To please the poet, words must sing,
or croak, wart-tongued, imagining.



The First Christmas
by Michael R. Burch

’Twas in a land so long ago . . .
the lambs lay blanketed in snow
and little children everywhere
sat and watched warm embers glow
and dreamed (of what, we do not know).

And THEN―a star appeared on high,
The brightest man had ever seen!
It made the children whisper low
in puzzled awe (what did it mean?).
It made the wooly lambkins cry.

For far away a new-born lay,
warm-blanketed in straw and hay,
a lowly manger for his crib.
The cattle mooed, distraught and low,
to see the child. They did not know

it now was Christmas day!

This is a poem in which I tried to capture the mystery and magic of the first Christmas day. If you like my poem, you are welcome to share it, but please cite me as the author, which you can do by including the title and subheading.



The Lingering and the Unconsoled Heart
by Michael R. Burch

There is a silence―
the last unspoken moment
before death,

when the moon,
cratered and broken,
is all madness and light,

when the breath comes low and complaining,
and the heart is a ruin
of emptiness and night.

There is a grief―
the grief of a lover's embrace
while faith still shimmers in a mother’s tears ...

There is no emptier time, nor place,
while the faint glimmer of life is ours
that the lingering and the unconsoled heart fears

beyond this: seeing its own stricken face
in eyes that drift toward some incomprehensible place.



Lozenge
by Michael R. Burch

When I was closest to love, it did not seem
real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness
it might dissolve in my mouth
like a lozenge of sugar.

When I held you in my arms, I did not feel
our lack of completeness,
knowing how easy it was
for us to cling to each other.

And there were nights when the clouds
sped across the moon’s face,
exposing such rarified brightness
we did not witness

so much as embrace
love’s human appearance.

This is a free verse sonnet originally published by The HyperTexts.



The Princess and the Pauper
by Michael R. Burch

for Norman Kraeft in memory of his beloved wife June Kysilko Kraeft

Here was a woman bright, intent on life,
who did not flinch from Death, but caught his eye
and drew him, powerless, into her spell
of wanting her himself, so much the lie
that she was meant for him―obscene illusion!―

made him seem a monarch throned like God on high,
when he was less than nothing; when to die
meant many stultifying, pained embraces.

She shed her gown, undid the tangled laces
that tied her to the earth: then she was his.
Now all her erstwhile beauty he defaces
and yet she grows in hallowed loveliness―
her ghost beyond perfection―for to die
was to ascend. Now he begs, penniless.



Album
by Michael R. Burch

I caress them―trapped in brittle cellophane―
and I see how young they were, and how unwise;
and I remember their first flight―an old prop plane,
their blissful arc through alien blue skies ...

And I touch them here through leaves which―tattered, frayed―
are also wings, but wings that never flew:
like insects’ wings―pinned, held. Here, time delayed,
their features never changed, remaining two ...

And Grief, which lurked unseen beyond the lens
or in shadows where It crept on feral claws
as It scratched Its way into their hearts, depends
on sorrows such as theirs, and works Its jaws ...

and slavers for Its meat―those young, unwise,
who naively dare to dream, yet fail to see
how, lumbering sunward, Hope, ungainly, flies,
clutching to Her ruffled breast what must not be.



Because You Came to Me
by Michael R. Burch

Because you came to me with sweet compassion
and kissed my furrowed brow and smoothed my hair,
I do not love you after any fashion,
but wildly, in despair.

Because you came to me in my black torment
and kissed me fiercely, blazing like the sun
upon parched desert dunes, till in dawn’s foment
they melt, I am undone.

Because I am undone, you have remade me
as suns bring life, as brilliant rains endow
the earth below with leaves, where you now shade me
and bower me, somehow.



Break Time
by Michael R. Burch

for those who lost loved ones on 9-11

Intrude upon my grief; sit; take a spot
of milk to cloud the blackness that you feel;
add artificial sweeteners to conceal
the bitter aftertaste of loss. You’ll heal
if I do not. The coffee’s hot. You speak:
of bundt cakes, polls, the price of eggs. You glance
twice at your watch, cough, look at me askance.
The TV drones oeuvres of high romance
in syncopated lip-synch. Should I feel
the underbelly of Love’s warm Ideal,
its fuzzy-wuzzy tummy, and not reel
toward some dark conclusion? Disappear
to pale, dissolving atoms. Were you here?
I brush you off: like saccharine, like a tear.



911 Carousel
by Michael R. Burch

“And what rough beast ... slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”―W. B. Yeats

They laugh and do not comprehend, nor ask
which way the wind is blowing, no, nor why
the reeling azure fixture of the sky
grows pale with ash, and whispers “Holocaust.”

They think to seize the ring, life’s tinfoil prize,
and, breathless with endeavor, shriek aloud.
The voice of terror thunders from a cloud
that darkens over children adult-wise,

far less inclined to error, when a step
in any wrong direction is to fall
a JDAM short of heaven. Decoys call,
their voices plangent, honking to be shot . . .

Here, childish dreams and nightmares whirl, collide,
as East and West, on slouching beasts, they ride.



At Cædmon’s Grave
by Michael R. Burch

“Cædmon’s Hymn,” composed at the Monastery of Whitby (a North Yorkshire fishing village), is one of the oldest known poems written in the English language, dating back to around 680 A.D. According to legend, Cædmon, an illiterate Anglo-Saxon cowherd, received the gift of poetic composition from an angel; he subsequently founded a school of Christian poets. Unfortunately, only nine lines of Cædmon’s verse survive, in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Whitby, tiny as it is, reappears later in the history of English literature, having been visited, in diametric contrast, by Lewis Carroll and Bram Stoker’s ghoulish yet evocative Dracula.


At the monastery of Whitby,
on a day when the sun sank through the sea,
and the gulls shrieked wildly, jubilant, free,

while the wind and time blew all around,
I paced those dusk-enamored grounds
and thought I heard the steps resound

of Carroll, Stoker and good Bede
who walked there, too, their spirits freed
―perhaps by God, perhaps by need―

to write, and with each line, remember
the glorious light of Cædmon’s ember,
scorched tongues of flame words still engender.

Here, as darkness falls, at last we meet.
I lay this pale garland of words at his feet.

Originally published by The Lyric



Radiance
by Michael R. Burch

for Dylan Thomas

The poet delves earth’s detritus―hard toil―
for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet;
each syllable his pen excretes―dense soil,
dark images impacted, rooted clay.

The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning―
the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame
that leashes and excites its turgid surface ...
then squanders years imagining love’s the same.

Belatedly he turns to what lies broken―
the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts,
among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking
one element that scorches and uplifts.



Downdraft
by Michael R. Burch

for Dylan Thomas

We feel rather than understand what he meant
as he reveals a shattered firmament
which before him never existed.

Here, there are no images gnarled and twisted
out of too many words,
but only flocks of white birds

wheeling and flying.

Here, as Time spins, reeling and dying,
the voice of a last gull
or perhaps some spirit no longer whole,

echoes its lonely madrigal
and we feel its strange pull
on the astonished soul.

O My Prodigal!

The vents of the sky, ripped asunder,
echo this wild, primal thunder—
now dying into undulations of vanishing wings . . .

and this voice which in haggard bleak rapture still somehow downward sings.



Huntress
by Michael R. Burch

after Baudelaire

Lynx-eyed, cat-like and cruel, you creep
across a crevice dropping deep
into a dark and doomed domain.
Your claws are sheathed. You smile, insane.
Rain falls upon your path, and pain
pours down. Your paws are pierced. You pause
and heed the oft-lamented laws
which bid you not begin again
till night returns. You wail like wind,
the sighing of a soul for sin,
and give up hunting for a heart.
Till sunset falls again, depart,
though hate and hunger urge you―"On!"

Heed, hearts, your hope―the break of dawn.

Published by The HyperTexts, Dracula and His Kin and Sonnetto Poesia (Canada)



Happily Never After (the Second Curse of the ***** Toad)
by Michael R. Burch

He did not think of love of Her at all
frog-plangent nights, as moons engoldened roads
through crumbling stonewalled provinces, where toads
(nee princes) ruled in chinks and grew so small
at last to be invisible. He smiled
(the fables erred so curiously), and thought
bemusedly of being reconciled
to human flesh, because his heart was not
incapable of love, but, being cursed
a second time, could only love a toad’s . . .
and listened as inflated frogs rehearsed
cheekbulging tales of anguish from green moats . . .
and thought of her soft croak, her skin fine-warted,
his anemic flesh, and how true love was thwarted.



Because She Craved the Very Best
by Michael R. Burch

Because she craved the very best,
he took her East, he took her West;
he took her where there were no wars
and brought her bright bouquets of stars,
the blush and fragrances of roses,
the hush an evening sky imposes,
moonbeams pale and garlands rare,
and golden combs to match her hair,
a nightingale to sing all night,
white wings, to let her soul take flight ...

She stabbed him with a poisoned sting
and as he lay there dying,
she screamed, "I wanted everything!"
and started crying.



Caveat
by Michael R. Burch

If only we were not so eloquent,
we might sing, and only sing, not to impress,
but only to enjoy, to be enjoyed.

We might inundate the earth with thankfulness
for light, although it dies, and make a song
of night descending on the earth like bliss,

with other lights beyond―not to be known―
but only to be welcomed and enjoyed,
before all worlds and stars are overthrown ...

as a lover’s hands embrace a sleeping face
and find it beautiful for emptiness
of all but joy. There is no thought to love

but love itself. How senseless to redress,
in darkness, such becoming nakedness . . .

Originally published by Clementine Unbound



To the Post-Modern Muse, Floundering
by Michael R. Burch


The anachronism in your poetry
is that it lacks a future history.
The line that rings, the forward-sounding bell,
tolls death for you, for drowning victims tell
of insignificance, of eerie shoals,
of voices underwater. Lichen grows
to mute the lips of those men paid no heed,
and though you cling by fingertips, and bleed,
there is no lifeline now, for what has slipped
lies far beyond your grasp. Iron fittings, stripped,
have left the hull unsound, bright cargo lost.
The argosy of all your toil is rust.

The anchor that you flung did not take hold
in any harbor where repair is sold.

Originally published by Ironwood



Wonderland
by Michael R. Burch

We stood, kids of the Lamb, to put to test
the beatific anthems of the blessed,
the sentence of the martyr, and the pen’s
sincere religion. Magnified, the lens
shot back absurd reflections of each face―
a carnival-like mirror. In the space
between the silver backing and the glass,
we caught a glimpse of Joan, a frumpy lass
who never brushed her hair or teeth, and failed
to pass on GO, and frequently was jailed
for awe’s beliefs. Like Alice, she grew wee
to fit the door, then couldn’t lift the key.
We failed the test, and so the jury’s hung.
In Oz, “The Witch is Dead” ranks number one.



Day, and Night
by Michael R. Burch

The moon exposes pockmarked scars of craters;
her visage, veiled by willows, palely looms.
And we who rise each day to grind a living,
dream each scented night of such perfumes
as drew us to the window, to the moonlight,
when all the earth was steeped in cobalt blue―
an eerie vase of achromatic flowers
bled silver by pale starlight, losing hue.

The night begins her waltz to waiting sunrise―
adagio, the music she now hears;
and we who in the sunlight slave for succor,
dreaming, seek communion with the spheres.
And all around the night is in crescendo,
and everywhere the stars’ bright legions form,
and here we hear the sweet incriminations
of lovers we had once to keep us warm.

And also here we find, like bled carnations,
red lips that whitened, kisses drawn to lies,
that touched us once with fierce incantations
and taught us love was prettier than wise.



130 Refuted
by Michael R. Burch

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
―Shakespeare, Sonnet 130

Seas that sparkle in the sun
without its light would have no beauty;
but the light within your eyes
is theirs alone; it owes no duty.
And their kindled flame, not half as bright,
is meant for me, and brings delight.

Coral formed beneath the sea,
though scarlet-tendriled, cannot warm me;
while your lips, not half so red,
just touching mine, at once inflame me.
And the searing flames your lips arouse
fathomless oceans fail to douse.

Bright roses’ brief affairs, declared
when winter comes, will wither quickly.
Your cheeks, though paler when compared
with them?―more lasting, never prickly.

And your cheeks, though wan, so dear and warm,
far vaster treasures, need no thorns.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Love Sonnet LXVI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates between ice and fire.

I love you only because you’re the one I love;
I hate you deeply, but hatred makes me implore you all the more
so that in my inconstancy
I do not see you, but love you blindly.

Perhaps January’s frigid light
will consume my heart with its cruel rays,
robbing me of the key to contentment.

In this tragic plot, I ****** myself
and I will die loveless because I love you,
because I love you, my Love, in fire and in blood.



Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.

I long for your liquid laughter,
for your sunburned hands like savage harvests.
I lust for your fingernails' pale marbles.
I want to devour your ******* like almonds, whole.

I want to ingest the sunbeams singed by your beauty,
to eat the aquiline nose from your aloof face,
to lick your eyelashes' flickering shade.

I pursue you, snuffing the shadows,
seeking your heart's scorching heat
like a puma prowling the heights of Quitratue.



Love Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I do not love you like coral or topaz,
or the blazing hearth’s incandescent white flame;
I love you as obscure things are embraced in the dark ...
secretly, in shadows, unguessed & unnamed.

I love you like shrubs that refuse to blossom
while pregnant with the radiance of mysterious flowers;
now, thanks to your love, an earthy fragrance
lives dimly in my body’s odors.

I love you without knowing―how, when, why or where;
I love you forthrightly, without complications or care;
I love you this way because I know no other.

Here, where “I” no longer exists ... so it seems ...
so close that your hand on my chest is my own,
so close that your eyes close gently on my dreams.



Sonnet XLV
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don't wander far away, not even for a day, because―
how can I explain? A day is too long ...
and I’ll be waiting for you, like a man in an empty station
where the trains all stand motionless.

Don't leave me, my dear, not even for an hour, because―
then despair’s raindrops will all run blurrily together,
and the smoke that drifts lazily in search of a home
will descend hazily on me, suffocating my heart.

Darling, may your lovely silhouette never dissolve in the surf;
may your lashes never flutter at an indecipherable distance.
Please don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because then you'll have gone far too far
and I'll wander aimlessly, amazed, asking all the earth:
Will she ever return? Will she spurn me, dying?



Imperfect Sonnet
by Michael R. Burch

A word before the light is doused: the night
is something wriggling through an unclean mind,
as rats creep through a tenement. And loss
is written cheaply with the moon’s cracked gloss
like lipstick through the infinite, to show
love’s pale yet sordid imprint on us. Go.

We have not learned love yet, except to cleave.
I saw the moon rise once ... but to believe ...
was of another century ... and now ...
I have the urge to love, but not the strength.

Despair, once stretched out to its utmost length,
lies couched in squalor, watching as the screen
reveals "love's" damaged images: its dreams ...
and ******* limply, screams and screams.

Originally published by Sonnet Scroll



Mayflies
by Michael R. Burch

These standing stones have stood the test of time
but who are you
and what are you
and why?

As brief as mist, as transient, as pale ...
Inconsequential mayfly!

Perhaps the thought of love inspired hope?
Do midges love? Do stars bend down to see?
Do gods commend the kindnesses of ants
to aphids? Does one eel impress the sea?

Are mayflies missed by mountains? Do the stars
regret the glowworm’s stellar mimicry
the day it dies? Does not the world grind on
as if it’s no great matter, not to be?

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose.
And yet somehow you’re everything to me.

Originally published by Clementine Unbound



Artificial Smile
by Michael R. Burch

I’m waiting for my artificial teeth
to stretch belief, to hollow out the cob
of zealous righteousness, to grasp life’s stub
between clenched molars, and yank out the grief.

Mine must be art-official―zenlike Art―
a disembodied, white-enameled grin
of Cheshire manufacture. Part by part,
the human smile becomes mock porcelain.

Till in the end, the smile alone remains:
titanium-based alloys undestroyed
with graves’ worm-eaten contents, all the pains
of bridgework unrecalled, and what annoyed

us most about the corpses rectified
to quaintest dust. The Smile winks, deified.



Modern Appetite
by Michael R. Burch

It grumbled low, insisting it would feast
on blood and flesh, etcetera, at least
three times a day. With soft lubricious grease

and pale salacious oils, it would ease
its way through life. Each day―an aperitif.
Each night―a frothy bromide, for relief.

It lived on TV fare, wore pinafores,
slurped sugar-coated gumballs, gobbled S’mores.
When gas ensued, it burped and farted. ’Course,

it thought aloud, my wife will leave me. ******
are not so **** particular. Divorce
is certainly a settlement, toujours!

A Tums a day will keep the shrink away,
recalcify old bones, keep gas at bay.
If Simon says, etcetera, Mother, may
I have my hit of calcium today?


Mother of Cowards
by Michael R. Burch aka "The Loyal Opposition"

So unlike the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Spread-eagled, showering gold, a strumpet stands:
A much-used trollop with a torch, whose flame
Has long since been extinguished. And her name?
"Mother of Cowards!" From her enervate hand
Soft ash descends. Her furtive eyes demand
Allegiance to her ****'s repulsive game.

"Keep, ancient lands, your wretched poor!" cries she
With scarlet lips. "Give me your hale, your whole,
Your huddled tycoons, yearning to be pleased!
The wretched refuse of your toilet hole?
Oh, never send one unwashed child to me!
I await Trump's pleasure by the gilded bowl!"

Originally published by Light



Premonition
by Michael R. Burch

Now the evening has come to a close and the party is over ...
we stand in the doorway and watch as they go―
each stranger, each acquaintance, each unembraceable lover.

They walk to their cars and they laugh as they go,
though we know their warm laughter’s the wine ...
then they pause at the road where the dark asphalt flows
endlessly on toward Zion ...

and they kiss one another as though they were friends,
and they promise to meet again “soon” ...
but the rivers of Jordan roll on without end,
and the mockingbird calls to the moon ...

and the katydids climb up the cropped hanging vines,
and the crickets chirp on out of tune ...
and their shadows, defined by the cryptic starlight,
seem spirits torn loose from their tombs.

And I know their brief lives are just eddies in time,
that their hearts are unreadable runes
to be wiped clean, like slate, by the dark hand of fate
when their corpses lie ravaged and ruined ...

You take my clenched fist and you give it a kiss
as though it were something you loved,
and the tears fill your eyes, brimming with the soft light
of the stars winking gently above ...

Then you whisper, "It's time that we went back inside;
if you'd like, we can sit and just talk for a while."
And the hope in your eyes burns too deep, so I lie
and I say, "Yes, I would," to your small, troubled smile.

I rather vividly remember writing this poem after an office party the year I co-oped with AT&T (at that time the largest company in the world, with presumably a lot of office parties). This would have been after my sophomore year in college, making me around 20 years old. The poem is “true” except that I was not the host because the party was at the house of one of the upper-level managers. Nor was I dating anyone seriously at the time.



Your e-Verse
by Michael R. Burch

for the posters and posers on www.fillintheblank.com

I cannot understand a word you’ve said
(and this despite an adequate I.Q.);
it must be some exotic new haiku
combined with Latin suddenly undead.

It must be hieroglyphics mixed with Greek.
Have Pound and T. S. Eliot been cloned?
Perhaps you wrote it on the ***, so ******
you spelled it backwards, just to be oblique.

I think you’re very funny, so, “Yuk! Yuk!”
I know you must be kidding; didn’t we
write crap like this and call it “poetry,”
a form of verbal exercise, P.E.,
in kindergarten, when we ran “amuck?”

Oh, sorry, I forgot to “make it new.”
Perhaps I still can learn a thing or two
from someone tres original, like you.



http://www.firesermon.com
by Michael R. Burch

your gods have become e-vegetation;
your saints―pale thumbnail icons; to enlarge
their images, right-click; it isn’t hard
to populate your web-site; not to mention
cool sound effects are nice; Sound Blaster cards
can liven up dull sermons, [zing some fire];
your drives need added Zip; you must discard
your balky paternosters: ***!!! Desire!!!
these are the watchwords, catholic; you must
as Yahoo! did, employ a little lust :)
if you want great e-commerce; hire a bard
to spruce up ancient language, shed the dust
of centuries of sameness; lameness *****;
your gods grew blurred; go 3D; scale; adjust.

Published by: Ironwood, Triplopia and Nisqually Delta Review

This poem pokes fun at various stages of religion, all tied however elliptically to T. S. Eliot's "Fire Sermon: (1) The Celts believed that the health of the land was tied to the health of its king. The Fisher King's land was in peril because he had a physical infirmity. One bad harvest and it was the king's fault for displeasing the gods. A religious icon (the Grail) could somehow rescue him. Strange logic! (2) The next stage brings us the saints, the Catholic church, etc. Millions are slaughtered, tortured and enslaved in the name of religion. Strange logic! (3) The next stage brings us to Darwin, modernism and "The Waste Land.” Religion is dead. God is dead. Man is a glorified fungus! We'll evolve into something better adapted to life on Earth, someday, if we don’t destroy it. But billions continue to believe in and worship ancient “gods.” Strange logic! (4) The current stage of religion is summed up by this e-mail: the only way religion can compete today is as a form of flashy entertainment. ***** a website before it's too late. Hire some **** supermodels and put the evangelists on the Internet!



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?

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



Plastic Art or Night Stand
by Michael R. Burch

Disclaimer: This is a poem about artificial poetry, not love dolls! The victim is the Muse.

We never questioned why “love” seemed less real
the more we touched her, and forgot her face.
Absorbed in molestation’s sticky feel,
we failed to see her staring into space,
her doll-like features frozen in a smile.
She held us in her marionette’s embrace,
her plastic flesh grown wet and slick and vile.
We groaned to feel our urgent fingers trace
her undemanding body. All the while,
she lay and gaily bore her brief disgrace.
We loved her echoed passion’s squeaky air,
her tongueless kisses’ artificial taste,
the way she matched, then raised our reckless pace,
the heart that seemed to pound, but was not there.



“Whoso List to Hunt” is a famous early English sonnet written by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) in the mid-16th century.

Whoever Longs to Hunt
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
loose translation/interpretation/modernization by Michael R. Burch

Whoever longs to hunt, I know the deer;
but as for me, alas!, I may no more.
This vain pursuit has left me so bone-sore
I'm one of those who falters, at the rear.
Yet friend, how can I draw my anguished mind
away from the doe?
                                   Thus, as she flees before
me, fainting I follow.
                                     I must leave off, therefore,
since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Whoever seeks her out,
                                         I relieve of any doubt,
that he, like me, must spend his time in vain.
For graven with diamonds, set in letters plain,
these words appear, her fair neck ringed about:
Touch me not, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame.



Alien Nation
by Michael R. Burch

for J. S. S., a "Christian" poet who believes in “hell”

On a lonely outpost on Mars
the astronaut practices “speech”
as alien to primates below
as mute stars winking high, out of reach.

And his words fall as bright and as chill
as ice crystals on Kilimanjaro―
far colder than Jesus’s words
over the “fortunate” sparrow.

And I understand how gentle Emily
felt, when all comfort had flown,
gazing into those inhuman eyes,
feeling zero at the bone.

Oh, how can I grok his arctic thought?
For if he is human, I am not.



Keywords/Tags: sonnet, sonnets, meter, rhythm, music, musical, rhyme, form, formal verse, formalist, tradition, traditional, romantic, romanticism, rose, fire, passion, desire, love, heart, number, numbers, mrbson

I don't think i'll ever fall in love...

Even as I write these words I can imagine the faces of my closest girlfriends, and the well meaning statements of reassurance such a statement might illicit...  

Only... I do not need to be reassured...
When I say i don't think i'll ever fall in love, I'm not speaking from a place of defeat, but rather from a place of recognition, and understanding.  

"Oh, Don't you worry Phillip, you will find a great girl one day :) "

Thank you for the vote of confidence Ashley, I know it comes from a place of great intentions, but...the truth is I have met great women, some I call family, others I call friends, still some I call teachers... and then...some... I whisper to, softly in the night


I have been blessed to meet women who are strong, talented, intelligent (many much more intelligent than I) and beautiful, dear lord, if there is one thing I am grateful for, it is the multitude of beautiful women you have put into my path, their faces shine with perfect symmetry, sharp jaw lines  holding delicate female features, which pluck upon the silver strings of a midnight liar named desire...

It is not for a lack of meeting women that I say I don't think I will ever fall in love, and it is not a shortcoming on their end or a shortcoming on my end that breed this idea, rather, this idea developed from the realization that "to fall in love" has a connotative meaning, a meaning which has been bought by corporations and mass marketed through our media in the form of stories, books, and movies, with redundant story lines that follow a formulaic model that ends in either two dimensional happiness or despair...

When I say, I don't think i'll ever fall in love... I am not saying, I will never love...  
I am in love...
I am in love with life, the subtle intricacies in a delicate tapestry,
I am in love with family, who take time out of their day's to mould me,
I am in love with friends, who hold me down through tragedy,
and...I am in love with all that I have met...

Its just that...I don't believe my love has to come after a fall...

I believe that love is simultaneously eternal and momentary, that the moments crafted in love will be echoed through the halls of eternity, until the Valkyries of Valhalla bring their weary heroes home...I believe that relationships are meant to be fluid, that we are meant to freely flow in and out of one another's lives, and through honesty and consent craft the parameters of our relationships, rather than trying to take people, and through some antiquated notion of "relationship" form a shallow contract to absolve our insecurities,  

I've been in formal relationships where I have felt choked, as if the words I will never leave you linked together around my neck to form a chain of lies ending in...never again

And... I have had friends with whom passions have arisen, and in the dark of night and the secrecy of our abode, our bodies have fused together into a tangled, and sweaty heap called freedom,

To put it simply, I have been in loveless relationships, and love full...well...by contemporary standards...love full nothing's

So please know...That when I say I don't think i'll ever fall in love, I am not saying I will never love...but rather... I will never fall...for the ******* lie...that love can only be fostered through some mundane form of courtship doomed to die...through some, incorporeal ignorance that makes one feel he or she owns the other, fall for the bull that flowers on Valentines day somehow means I get you, or that a diamond means, I love you...

But...also know...that i don't say I will never fall in love...
But rather...
I don't THINK I will ever fall in love...
Because no one person knows the future...

And it may just so happen that one day, in some dusty..smokey..coffee shop I  may be reading this very poem... and in the audience there may be a women thinking to herself that sounds exactly like me...

And through perfect symmetry I may be swept away, the sand castles of my doubt cast out to sea by the tidal waves of our emotion

But...I still don't think I will ever fall in love
Because real love dosen't make you fall,
It makes you soar aloft wings of passion and truth,
And so after this whole rant I believe my original statement needs a revision,
Because now I DO KNOW...that i will never fall in love...
But if i meet the right person...
I just might rise to the occasion

lady loveless heard her name being yelled from the bottomless pit of an abandoned well