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In between   (a poem)
.
my mind struggles against its own illusion
nightmare tumbles out into still morning
light is heavy,
a fog of echoes...
and I am caught
.
day dreams the sunlight
dreams light the day
and I am caught in between
mourning echoes...
like a stillborn ghost
who can't take a breath in the present

….
  
I live on a tropical island and just want to go surfing with my husband, but the nausea in the early morning as I try to eat  breakfast and drive with him to the beach is so uncomfortable.  Day after day it makes even surfing a chore, and I consider not going anymore.  Background anxiety and unreasonable irritation interferes with our marriage, frustrates him enough to want me out.  

For me, a trip to the grocery store or meeting a group of people awakens the same dreadful fear as rockclimbing a cliff. Perspective has been lost in the extremes.  I try to gain some control over this hindering nuisance, seeking situations that bring the same surges of adrenaline so I can learn to master it.  If I can just push past the avoidance that would keep me inside doing nothing, if I can just ignore the feeling I want to throw up, if I can just get out there, I am rewarded with life’s potential beauty eventually.  Many days I do enjoy the thrill of mountain biking or connection with nature when surfing, but there are too many days of internal struggle that reduce what should be enjoyable to a relentless chore of wrestling inner demons.

The VA offers a few sessions of marriage counseling, and the doctor begins to explain PTSD.  ***, I’ve learned to cope with an unreliable brain, but now there’s this?  From what I understand (and that’s just me, an amateur philosopher) Sometimes the brain is so traumatized, that the memory is literally sealed off, encapsulated, protecting it from changing.  If later something happens that is similar, the brain triggers avoidance responses as a take-no-chances survival mechanism.  Literally the brain is protecting one’s self from one’s self.  This all-or-nothing strategy works fending off potential dinosaur attacks, but in our complex society, these automatic avoidance behaviors complicate functioning and well being.  Life becomes an attitude of constant reaction instead of motivated intention.

The website for the National center for PTSD says.  “After a trauma or life-threatening event, it is common to have reactions such as upsetting memories of the event, increased jumpiness, or trouble sleeping. If these reactions do not go away or if they get worse, you may have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.”  

“Common reactions to trauma are:
• Fear or anxiety: In moments of danger, our bodies prepare to fight our enemy, flee the situation, or freeze in the hope that the danger will move past us. But those feelings of alertness may stay even after the danger has passed. You may:feel tense or afraid, be agitated and jumpy, feel on alert.  
• Sadness or depression: Sadness after a trauma may come from a sense of loss---of a loved one, of trust in the world, faith, or a previous way of life. You may:have crying spells, lose interest in things you used to enjoy, want to be alone all the time, feel tired, empty, and numb.  
• Guilt and shame: You may feel guilty that you did not do more to prevent the trauma. You may feel ashamed because during the trauma you acted in ways that you would not otherwise have done. You may:feel responsible for what happened, feel guilty because others were injured or killed and you survived.  
• Anger and irritability: Anger may result from feeling you have been unfairly treated. Anger can make you feel irritated and cause you to be easily set off. You may:lash out at your partner or spouse, have less patience with your children, overreact to small misunderstandings.  
• Behavior changes: You may act in unhealthy ways. You may:drink, use drugs, or smoke too much, drive aggressively, neglect your health, avoid certain people or situations.”   It lists four main symptoms: reliving the event, avoiding situations that remind of the event, feeling numb, and feeling keyed up (also called hyperarousal)”

Four words strung together: Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  They’ve become a tired cliché, exhausted from the endless threat of random cruelty camouflaged in banality, weary of the weight shouldering back the wall that separates death and gore from the living.  Living was a reflex beyond willpower and devoid of choice. Control was self-deception.  The mind was so preoccupied with A: survival, B: sanity, in that order.  Rest was a cruel illusion.  The tank was drained, no room for emotions ditched.  Empathy took too much effort, fear was greedy.  Hopefully they can be remembered and found on the other side, if there is one.  Sleep deprived cells were left hyper-alert from the imminent, shot up and addicted to adrenaline.  Living was Fate and Chance, and meant leaving that time and place sealed in forgetfulness.  

Now PTSD is a worn out acronym, a cold shadow of what it feels like.  I try to think of something more personal that can describe the way it randomly visits me, now resigned to its familiar unwelcome influence.  It steals through my brain, flying ahead of me with its own agenda of protecting sabotage.  Its like the Guardian Trickster of Native American legend.  Its an archetype but real enough to make mistakes: Chulyen, the black raven.

A decade after the ER, contentment is found in a garden of slow tranquility as a butterfly interrupts a sunbeam.  My heart fills with bittersweet as I’ve finally found something I love and want to keep.  Just then Chulyen’s grasping black claws clamp my heart with painful arrhythmia and it fills to burst, tripping in panic trying to recover its pace.  The sudden pain drops me to my knees, in the dirt between fragrant lavender and cherry tomatoes.  Pain stops breath and time and makes me remember the ER, when my heart rebelled its ordained purpose for a week.  I had tried to throw my bitter life back in God’s face but He didn’t take it.  Now that I have peace and a life that I treasure, He’s taking it now.  The price for my mistake is due.  It was all just borrowed time and I’m still so young, my children just babies.  God with a flick of cruelty reminds me not to put faith in the tangible, especially when its treasured.  The sharp claws finally relent and I can breathe, looking up with a gasp and the Raven takes flight overhead leaving a shadow.  Bright noon warmth, unusually heavy and foreboding, seems to say ‘there will come a time when you will not welcome the sun.’   Doctors run an EKG and diagnose ‘stress’.

The bird perches on my shoulder two more decades later, always seeing death just over there.  So I sit on the porch just a little longer and check my list again, delaying the unavoidable racing heart and rush of tension when I fix the motorcycle helmet strap under my chin.  I know all those stupid drivers have my life in their cell-phone distracted hands and hope my husband knows how much I love him, and my daughters too.  

Chulyen wakes me at 3:00 am when autumn’s wind aggravates the trees.  His rustle of black feathers outside unsettles summer’s calm night.  He brings an end-of-the-world portent that hints this peace is just temporary, borrowed.  Tribulation will return.

Ravens are attracted to bright shiny things.  Chulyen steals off with treasures like intention, and contentment.  I don’t realize they are missing until occasionally I find myself truly living in the moment.  I guess that is another reason why I crave adventure, for those instants and epiphanies that snap me out of that long term modis operandi of reacting, instead of being.  The daily list of ‘I must, or I should’ can for a brief while become ‘I want’  and I am free.

My companion the black bird perches relaxed in the desert on the gatepost of a memory.  A bullet-scarred paint-faded sign dangles by one corner from rusty barbed wire:
    No Trespassing    
    That Means You
I have a haunted idea what's behind the fence.  Chulyen implies the memory with a simple mistaken sound:
a Harley in the distance is for a second the agitating echo of a helicopter...
or those were the very same words they said when...
or I hear a few jangling clinks of forks in our warm kitchen...
hinting a cold cafeteria at 5:00 am smelling of fake eggs and industrial maple flavored corn syrup,
and everything else that happened that day...
My cells recollect, brace with the addictive rush of adrenaline.  But the raven denies access to the memory, distracting with discomfort.  I trip and I fall hard into the gritty dirt of irritation at the person who unknowingly reminded me.  Anxiety floods in along with fatigue of the helplessness of it all, back then and still now.  I can't go further.  Chulyen’s tricking deception says Leave This Memory, you never wanted to come back.
But I already knew from just recognizing the bird patiently sitting there a sentinal,
recalling every other time he tricked me with nausea and depression.
I tried to tell myself again that behind that gate,
the past has dried up from neglect.
Disintegrated into dust,
Blown away,
doesn't
exist.



After everything else, how to work through this?  The VA gave me a manual, a crudely printed set of worksheets with a government-looking blue cover page:  Cognitive Processing Therapy.
“In normal recovery from PTSD symptioms, intrusion, thoughts, and emotions decrease over time and no longer trigger each other.  However, in those who don’t recover, the vivid images, negative thoughts, and strong emotions lead to escape and avoidance.  Avoidance prevents the processing of the trauma that is needed for recovery and works only temporarily.  The ultimate goal is acceptance.  
There may be “stuck points”, conflicting beliefs or strong negative beliefs that create additional unpleasant emotions and unhealthy behavior.  For example, a prior belief may have been “ I am able to protect myself in dangerous situations.”  But after being harmed during military service, a conflicting belief surfaces, “I was harmed during service, and I am to blame.”  If one is ‘stuck’ here, it may take some time until one is able to get feelings out about the trauma, because one is processing a number of rationales.  “I deserved it because…” , or “I misinterpreted what happened, I acted inappropriately, I must be crazy…”  The goal is to change the prior belief to one that does not hinder acceptance.  For example, “I may not be able to protect myself in all situations.”

(chapter continues with recovery methods)
jeffrey conyers Feb 2015
Strange, when people speaks truth.
Especially around selected group.
And the truth gets out to the public.
They always claims, they misinterpreted

Famous people, misinterpreted.
Of course, the politicians constantly states this.
Until the story becomes true.
Then their reputation is used to hold up the honors of them.

We, know somewhere?
They spoke honesty.
Which is always leaked.

Even showcasing many as bigots.
Which you can see by the friends they keep.

Until the news exposed them.
Then they misinterpreted again.
****!-when will this excuse ever end?
Meggghanq1 May 2014
So many misinterpreted metaphors
make me cringe
''are you trying to ruin poetry for everyone''
but I hide my damp eyes behind my fringe
because I mustn't argue and my teachers are never wrong
They sing without a meaning or lyric in their song
we are taught to write what they want to hear
not the truth we feel inside our hopes and fears

But i must turn the other cheek
to get my degree I need..when home I ponder, I weep
because it was the school that killed poetry
for many of my peers..
But all is not lost..wipe away those tears
Grab the pen that feels ethical
the paper that doesn't deceive, doesn't lie
and write a poem that you can feel
you'll get out of school alive
(You know who you are who started this haha!)..Don't get me wrong I love teachers in general..I plan on becoming an awesome one someday too :)
Amitav Radiance Feb 2015
Love's misunderstood
By the heart
That’s unable to feel
We give the meanings
So many tags
Yet, love’s above all
We trivialize
And jeopardize
Expectations galore
None that Love wants
Above all our
Laid down rules
It’s akin to freedom
We seem to burden
It with materialistic
Paraphernalia
Love is rustic
Most simple of feelings
Complicated over the ages
Converted to a drama
Scripted by falsity
It’s above those words
Revealing the soul
To a pristine feeling
Thrown into murkiness
Sinister deals
Much effort to malign
Beautiful Love
Let Love be
Away from
Convoluted thoughts
A man, who never believed in Gods,
Refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the imperialist British Lords,
Challenged imperialist world empire with stubbornness,
Wished to build a peaceful superpower country, with farsightedness.

Through his reading, kept himself on evolution,
Sowed in the hearts of Indian youth, the seeds of revolution,
Raising and threatening administrative tones,
Stood fearful and could only break his bones.

From, soviet World misunderstood,
Revolution a product of blood & bullet,
He approached and transformed revolution,
A product of inspiring pen and booklet.

Never limited himself to fight for boundaries of administrative right,
Expanded himself in the jail to throw away human plight,
Fought a death-nearing battle to regain the human right,
To finally set all things for his jail mates completely right.

Pen is mightier than sword,
His life bore testimony to prove that record,
When others attempted for freedom movement to nurture,
He dreamt and worked for building his country a beautiful future.

Born an ordinary Sikh man,
Misinterpreted a lunatic gunman,

Lived a life of comrades,
Hated in every step, caste, religious and gender retrogrades,
Wanted to save his country from blood-******* renegades,
Decided to break all the youth-distorting barricades,
And put his life to a mortgaging death trade.

Lived a life of an unselfish tree,
Decided to give his life to witness the country free,
Evolved his life, a chapter of sacrifice,
Offered overprice to fight the imposed injustice & cowardice.


His physical life remained short-lived and temporary,
Lived for the country to set an example for ideal revolutionary,
Beaten by humanimal imperialists, black and blue,
Opened the youths towards fight for freedom, on a new avenue.

Imperialist empire remained pathetically cruel,
His thoughts & phenomenon inspired a never ending fuel,
For the youths, to sacrifice themselves for liberation of the soil,
Through revolutionary paths, filled with constant sufferings and toil.

The world personified, revolution is,
Red, blood, blood and blood,
He defied and responded, revolution is,
Think, evolve, unite, and change, by the act of read, read, read and read.

He proclaimed a desperate need,
To get ourselves away from disturbing ****,
Sowed the fire of revolutionary seed,
Thus stated to read, read and read.

Imperialist empires killed people like blood-******* vampires,
He fought and responded, with the shot of a demonstrative gunfire,
When ordinary humans aimed to save their family,
Every millisecond, lived a life, personifying whole country his family.

Like a wood that offers light, and burns itself in fire,
Gave freedom a ray of light, submitted himself happily into the death wire,
For revolution, turned the court his Centre of propaganda,
Responded the ruthless imperialist, a warning memoranda.

On the imperialist death rope, he was killed
The batons he passed for the youths of next generations,
His final dream for India, still unfulfilled,
On the presence of present blood-******* politicians,

A baby that never cries on starvation,
A child that never starves for education,
A youth who never roams around to get dignified occupation,
Let’s at least work and fight towards, fulfilling this mission.
This poem is about the Indian revolutionary named Bhagat Singh. He was a Sikh youth born in India. He is wrongly misinterpreted with bullets and blood. But his approach towards freedom, worthiness of human life and knowledge, shows him distinct from violent loving extremists. He was not a terrorist. He was the most non-violent person, who valued human life than everything. The bomb he threw never had any harmful chemicals, it was thrown on an empty place of assembly to get the world to hear him. He killed a police, who deliberately lathi-charged and killed people involved in a peaceful protest. He sacrificed his life for Indian freedom movement. He was the highly-read and the best intellectual reader during his life short-lived (1907-1931). At the age of 24, the then imperialist British executed him by hanging him to death. His vision and clarity for India and his predictions are happening today. His vision and thoughts still ignite youths of India when we think of him. In short, he is an icon of the Indian youth and revolutionary.
Simon Oct 2019
Probability isn’t the luck it deserves for wanting desperately to be noticed by any appeals. Generating new focuses never thought possible. If so… Who is the recipient? Who is the lawmaker? Who being the justice department? Goods to making essential markers on productive velocities. Justification is outweighed by department alone. Growing ever scarcer without benefiting attitudes in place. Conjecturing solvent pleasures across many fields. Fields of accessory dependents ensuring a collective term is agreeable. Except, what if probability is outweighed not by something further from its own attitude? What if it can’t benefit itself? In question, becoming misshaped, mispronounced, or misinterpreted. Depending on who’s right, or who’s wrong shouldn’t matter until claims are assured. Propagating across the many fields of accessory dependents. Dependents outweighing the logic one is misshaped by. Demonstrating probabilities mispronouncing sense of terms for oneself. Wrapping up in a crumbled conjecture. Propagating a newer field of already surveyed products. Truth is in the stream that propagates those fields. Accessory moments dependent on gaining tension through the rise of the recipient. That’s the only way probability will ever learn. Hence why it shuts down if it ever involved itself. Itself without its own recipient. Its own justice department. Lawmaker without any dependent ideas would ever appeal to its own logical making, if it’s never dependent on itself. Only flashing the accessory dependent on other influences. Influences going way down the line of certainties without pleasure. Urges relapse. Furthering its own clustered rut! One without mistakes diverging deeper into uncertainties. Taking risks isn’t noticeable. When probability taking risks enough to (blush) down the line of certainties without an aim involved. Scattering their rut from within. But how does it involve probability? It doesn’t. Probability is the representation of how one constant judge itself for pleasure. When pleasurable actions are dependent with a blank impression never sought out. To focused on probability. When probability isn’t fruitful by its own design either. Only way it works. Never looking back in itself. A reflection of tempted attitudes fluttering in a swift, but rigid wind. Wind never tempted by its own sway. If one is to admit what they aren’t even aware of changing. Another shutdown happens! Justifications for probabilities own reckoning depends on other solvents. Solvents who don’t even understand the probabilities of there own life makings. Able to learn what is dependent onto others. Never within themselves directing their starry performance. What happens when things are finally noticeable within probabilities that will exceed probable actions of the force that dictates fates majority complexes? Complexes without variety. Varieties misshaped by mishappenings of trust. Which includes a basic awareness of some factor never hesitating to judge within the core of being itself. A view fate designs in its weapon of probability very well. What is fate up to…? Never can guess when probability shuts down all appliances out of contact with no one but itself left in the dark. Probability is. Everything has just become disowned. Fate exchanging glances with itself for one last second, before rapping up this little diverse expression. Pinpointing its weapon of probability without knowing why that is? Hinting at fate not being the only recipient to follow in its weapons obstructed desires.
Probability without luck is forever undetermined. Having faith in itself, will redeem the actuality of actions placed without words. Luck? Faith? Lots of hints one hasn't fully realized.
Cursive attempts;
  simple words
misread
misinterpreted
mislead
every juncture
appendage
spins
dear readers
a web of confusion
blame not the spider
deceiving its prey.
to people with unreadable handwriting.
Wen Ao Long Nov 2014
Hello snorer, I hope you didn't sleep any poorer
when I stayed up all night typing this not-poem
I meant you no harm, but I had to stay up
Because I couldn't make music out of your obnoxiously loud cacophony of windpipe crap, er "music".  Time to not-pretend to absolutely hate your snoring under the guise of being perfectly okay with it for the sake of setting the tone a bit nicer to all who must hear it, so they can BEAR to, for otherwise it would be absurd.  Not as absurd as anyone hating to have aural drills applied to all their chakras all night, but still absurd enough to get a chuckle out of me (I hope it didn't wake your fine specimen here). It was never my intent, though it was always my ethical concern (if only everyone could be as reciprocal as you and I).   Oh, my not-pretend hatred is very thinly veiled.  I wasn't totally defeated by your snore-sound armies so that I couldn't type words, but I may have lost some of my desired effect due to the sometimes wincing distraction they caused to my piece of mind at this or that time when I needed it the most (even though I was awake, which is no crime if snoring at night and keeping me that way isn't).

Well, I did ask you if you'd mind if I typed,
I did tell you that you could tell me if its quiet purr of clicks would bother your precious sleep
But I never felt a need to be concerned, because whenever I
was typing, I heard you snore, and whenever I was in the heights of
some new discovery or epiphany, your sharp sudden thunderstroke of near death
corrugated metal vibrating in the torrent of some sudden gale force gust of wind.

These were signs to me of your restful sleep.  So I simply didn't worry about your sleep.  I was certain that my electronic beeps were every now and then music to your ears, just as they were to mine.  This is because in the midst of these I heard you snore, and when you snored, I took you to be asleep.

Ah but then again, then again, these are fanciful constructions which simply say that what is wonderful for me should be just fine and dandy with you, at a bare minimum, and on those grounds of very unsymmetrical attitude about right and wrong I would have to begin my music tirade of words as well.  But I don't view justice and propriety along such selfish lines as these.

What I see is that duplicity is your thesis.  I have anecdotal accounts which are marvelous to behold first hand, but the details of the absurdities cannot be done justice in the language of men, for the intensity of such insanity can only be borne lightly by the frailest frayed ends of my sanity for having lived through your acoustically maddening inanity.

You didn't ever admit to me that my noises were not music to YOUR ears.  Indeed  you claimed never to be bothered by them because you never voiced up against them.  I suppose you might as well voice up against them in the street as well if it turns out not all of you snorers-go-a-viking types like to hear my mouse clicking away like a tapping noises on a metal plate in your skull.  Sorry if it is another non-snorer-who-must-stay-up-late-and-so-be-occupied person whose nocturnal joys were misinterpreted as direct assaults on the dignity, spirit, or just basic mental viability of your wounded snoremonster troop of anti-late-stayer-uppers, because in fact, we used to be sleep-at-night-entities like you, but that was before you showed up, thoracic marching band in tow.  Marching bands are musical also, to some people.  And for some all hours of the night are perfect for a marching band.  Who am I to tell them otherwise.  

Well let me know the next time a marching band is given special permit to come through your neighborhood at night, and I'll be glad to point out to you the first Snorer'sville, because only they should be expected, in all justice to live with the macroscopic manifestation of their personal narcissistic paradises.

Let you all go to your own place and form your own nation, and see if you can consistently demand everyone else find music in your ****** and accursed racket!  But until then I expect some of you will have to take the damage returned by the growing number of people who are very much tired of living under the horrors of your infliction upon us, your demonic and evil tyranny of mind-crushing hate that is your ****** noise.  We will do yoga and breathe, and stretch, and some light calesthenics to relax and seek some focus and composure, whenever our spirits require, and this will be unchallenged by you so long as you are asleep, and it will be unchallenged by you so long as you are awake too.  For in the latter case you are already awake (and so still are we, usually) while in the former case it is far quieter than your snoring, both in its valleys and peaks.  And moreover it has not kept you up, but in fact I have noted that you wake yourself up with your own music when it reaches a certain crescendo.  

Unless you want to say that those crescendos are some sort of involuntary complaint about MY crescendos of spirit, when I start typing about 20% faster than normal, with perfect focus and accuracy while reaching an aesthetic pleasure approaching ****** as I realize that it is almost unerringly in the midst of such an experience that I hear your crescendo resound. And since it was no more intended to be a distraction for me, then surely my music must have also gone undetected by your ears, as well as your spirit. Or is it fairer to say it was the very cause of your crescendo, or at least its inspiration?

Therefore I needn't worry that it is I that is keeping you up, even if for only brief stints at a time, especially by comparison to my all-night vigils.  Not so, but it is you who are so enraptured by my occasional laughs or giggles as I edify my weary, sleep-deprived mind on some bit of morale boosting entertainment.  With headphones on of course.  It's also courteously plugged into the computer to prevent my favorite bit of Judas Priest from hurting your ear drums, or else overstimulating your music appreciation centers, which are verily attached to your ear-drums by a nerve bundle (and what nerve you all have there).  This means I've spared you too much distraction from any already-abundant music of the spheres effect you may be savoring which might have emanated from my bumbling around in the dark (to keep the lights out of course, after all people are sleeping).

Yes but that is a minority of you perhaps, who would lie about that and in fact who ought to say that our nocturnal emissions are not what you'd call restfully mind-relaxing crickets in the dead of night with an occasional hoot in the distance...  But they are a minority, the rest of you are so definitely in good faith.

But then why do I always run into those of your tribe who have strange and unethical habits, such as destroying others' lives by ruining their one perhaps most preciously personal and inalienable need second only to air and water, and that is sleep.  It is, in terms of acute necessity, in many ways more needed than food, though in the long term food catches up.  But food catches up only because not eating food is a  lot like not getting sleep, but just a lot more intense on the body when it drops to some critical point because we know from experience it is on raw nerves that we can go for a while in search of food, but if the food can't be found (perhaps because of our lack of sleep ruining our cognition in some way), then we will not eat, nor sleep, because we'll be dead.  

But either way, we'll be dead, for lack of sleep kills, both directly and indirectly, if suffered over a short time and/or in a diluted form over a long time.  That would be poetically commensurate to the sadistic similitude of the types of snoring sounds with the types of ways to die from being deprived of sleep according to two modes (acute and chronic), over many keys of incident, accident, lost opportunity and ill-stared fate, all of which can be mapped in some way back to that auditory persecution of our very souls of which your kind are in some swelling numbers quite proud.  Just think of all the car accidents, work accidents, altercations, fits of rage, inability to concentrate well or sometimes at all, and other life-damaging conditions of the mind, and also of the body, which accrue from lack of proper and healthy sleep at night!

Good thing for most of you though, right?  Because surely our music is also sweet, and I really hope I've inspired many to face this need for equality, and be on their guard against any unjust whining or groaning from those who seem in point of fact to value their sleep just a good deal more than they value anyone else's.  Not only because they really really love to get those zzz's but because they think that in the natural order of things, before people suddenly went mad and evil, people went to bed and slept well even partly BECAUSE of this brachio-esophageal orchestral lullaby.

But we'll be on our guard against those complaints, because we know you have plotted to take to the streets against us to defend your noisiness-all-night-every-night rights.  So we'll be on guard to defend ours, TO THE LAST FIBER OF OUR BEING.

Because you insufferable ******* are cruel, and cruelty no one should abide.  No one in my world, in my society of people, will be allowed to inflict cruelty on another person, nor be callously prejudicial in their own favor when injuries do occur because of their actions merely on the grounds that the damage it causes coincides with the fulfillment of a need on their own part, even while that fulfillment is of a need which is obstructed from satisfaction in the other part, and by THAT VERY SAME REASON, so that your sleep depends on keeping others awake.  UNLESS you can somehow con or coerce them into developing some form of Stockholm Syndrome and confuse the torment you inflict upon them with a sign of your love and wonderfulness to be around.

Yes, I know you hear me typing now, through your well-behaved proxy.  I feel it. If not he per se, then in a parallel universe not too far off, there's a version of him who does.  Perhaps not the one I know now, on day one of having moved into this room, but perhaps one represented in this universe by someone who has found himself in some sort of circumstances found later on during his stay, this mixed with the fact that familiarity breeds contempt... He'll start making some righteous demands of some kind, and I might not be in a such a good mood about that due to lack of proper sleep, and this will coincide with said contumacy against my own rights (such as to breathe, type, surf the net, or do other nocturnal things other than snoring which might keep others up).

As to that last point in parentheses, snoring is an activity which you perform in conjunction with your getting sleep, and it therefore means not well for your notion of fairness to say things as they are, and simply say the truth, which is that your getting sleep deprives others of theirs, but it can be logically deduced.

It can also be logically deduced that the don't give flying **** if you don't like the fact that we don't like your ear-**** night after night, which is a good name as any, but should perhaps at times be amended to body-demolishing soul-****** of a mortally sinful nature, and with an ethical incongruity to good character of a person to maintain it, all the more to sings its praises to us and call it "good poetry".
My tirade is intended to be expressive of a sincerely felt Truth, manifested in this which is only one of many forms, where things are never neutral, but divided neatly and perfectly into either Good or evil, so that no thought, word, or deed can be trivialized as mundane, neither in its innate import nor in its exported impact for others.  This is of the essence of ethics and has many metaphysical groundings which can be rationally demonstrated, but only to rational people.
Arcassin B Oct 2014
FA:
Misinterpreted
You think just because
I have a smile on my face and I'm laughing
That everything is fine
And I'm not

AB:
forgettng what there was
Sometimes it maybe could over barring,
But when you fall out of line,
While your ahead just stop

FA:
Because you don't know me
So don't judge me
On what you think you know
I'm don't have a perfect life
I never lived in a two parent home
A day in life


AB:
Ignoring your pity,
I will have feeling empty,
Your better pray and hope,
That I don't reach you out of sight,
You won't miss when I'm gone,
Had to sacrifice

FA;
Don't misinterpret me nomore
Like stupid-*** ******* just stop
If you don't witness with your eyes
Then don't witness with your mouth
So stop these dumb-*** rumors
Cause don't none of y'all know my struggles

AB:
Allowing me to settle the score,
Please get of a ****,
You have to realize,
I'm nothing to mess with,
Beggers can be choosers,
And what you chose is for me to make the world crumble.

FA:
I'm like apple I look great on the outside
But I'm ****** up on the inside
Don't Judge a book by it cover

AB:
Look out boys,
Don't **** around ,
She's got a lover,

FA:
Look out girls
Don't **** around
He's got a lover
Its her poem , she came up with it I just followed my babe ,❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Birdie Apr 2013
maybe if we laced our fingers together and made wings out of our mistakes,
we could fly off together forgetting where we came from

or maybe
if we spoke even
allowing our words to curl around our naive bodies
of uncertainty and happiness
we could go somewhere.

or maybe if time allowed us
we could understand an ounce of how far our souls reached into the universe
eternally

or maybe if we both were ready
or maybe if i was ready
and you tried on more time
(you didn't have to stop after fifty)

or maybe
there's a reason we didn't work out
maybe
it was never a maybe
but a clear
defined
nahhhhhh.
Aaron McDaniel Oct 2012
Two teens with too much time left to themselves
Both experiences represented by flat lines on hospital machines during sad times
Flipped on it’s *** end quite literally
My youth is my virginity
Finding religion suddenly
Praying in my head “God, if you exist, don’t let the ****** break”
Her face in angst
I begin to flake
Spine reverberates
Elbows Shake
Bedside table vibrates
Text message
Receiving
Mom: When will you be home
Response: I won’t, I’m leaving my old self on these bed sheets
Send
My youth is my virginity
Time becomes an illusion
Not knowing how long we’ve been doing this
Minutes become seconds
Seconds to years
Years are months
Months.... minutes
I alone finish
Quickly getting dressed separately
Previously so ecstatic to slowly peel each others layers away
An eternity of silent eye contact jam packed into countless repetitive heartbeats
A mix of misinterpreted expressions cross our minds as we sink into the realization that we are no longer children
Our youth is our virginity
Your inner thighs have defined the ending milestone of my childhood
In return I thank you and grace you
No other person I’d rather have that connection with
Though we’ve long departed, our current standing is disheartening
Let’s give birth, not to children, but to friendships
I want to to represent my life with a cobblestone road
Being able to get to the end to find success, not regrets
I hand you the first stone
Benji James Sep 2018
I'm going to write this one in blood
Just so you know it's straight from my heart
Where should I begin, where do I start?
Let me fill a new page with art
This was written in the dark
By the candlelight spark
****** ink spilt across the page
With all these things
That I just have to say
It all comes bursting out my chest
Just so you know I mean what it is that's said
So that this can all heal and mend

I'm sorry for the way
I let you down
In your emotions
I let you drown
I'm sorry for not speaking out
When you clearly needed sound
Someone to just say it's all gonna be okay
I just looked the other way
Only cared about me
And now that thought plagues my conscience
I'm sorry that I am stuck in selfish ways
Only thinking of my own feelings
And not much of yours
I'm sorry that I couldn't save you in ways that you had pictured
You thought that I'd be different
I let you walk that lonely road
Ignorant to your hurt
Our lives drifted in different directions
Now you're somewhere out there
beyond my detection
Just hope these sorries find their way to you

I'm going to write this one in blood
Just so you know it's straight from my heart
Where should I begin, where do I start?
Let me fill a new page with art
This was written in the dark
By the candlelight spark
****** ink spilt across the page
With all these things
That I just have to say
It all comes bursting out my chest
Just so you know I mean what it is that's said
So that this can all heal and mend

I'm an ocean of emotions
When we hit rough seas
That's when you don't see
The best parts of me
I'm sorry in my anger
I can get violent
Sometimes I just can't stay silent
I lose control when this rage stays caged
And that is one of my greatest flaws
Hurt people that mean so much to me
Out of anger and stupidity
I'm sorry for the bruises and marks
I'm sorry for all the hurting parts
I'm sorry for the damaged soul
I'm sorry I lost control of my thoughts
Let rage overpower,
still, decisions made in moments of regret
These are moments that weren't my best
Maybe that's why they say rage is blind
Cuz we don't see in those moments
What we become, It's only after it is done

I'm going to write this one in blood
Just so you know it's straight from my heart
Where should I begin, where do I start?
Let me fill a new page with art
This was written in the dark
By the candlelight spark
****** ink spilt across the page
With all these things
That I just have to say
It all comes bursting out my chest
Just so you know I mean what it is that's said
So that this can all heal and mend

I'm sorry for all the missed signs
and all of the misinterpreted lines
I'm sorry to those that I've offended
I'm sorry to those I couldn't connect with
I'm sorry that sometimes I struggle to find the line
I cross that thing a lot of the time
I'm sorry for the worries
I'm sorry for the tears
I'm sorry for filling you with fears
I'm sorry for the times I just couldn't bring myself to write
I'm sorry for all the failed lines
And mediocre rhymes
I'm sorry this took me a long time

I'm going to write this one in blood
Just so you know it's straight from my heart
Where should I begin, where do I start?
Let me fill a new page with art
This was written in the dark
By the candlelight spark
****** ink spilt across the page
With all these things
That I just have to say
It all comes bursting out my chest
Just so you know I mean what it is that's said
So that this can all heal and mend

Dear me, are you listening...
Most of all I'm sorry to you
And for all the things I've put myself through
I'm sorry for tearing myself apart for art
I'm sorry for holding out air from my lungs
I'm sorry for all the times that I've looked in the mirror
Only to call me ugly, a monster, a freak
Frequent hate to which most can relate
I'm sorry for all the self-loathing
I'm sorry for the sleepless nights
And the endless fights inside my own mind
I'm sorry for saying, I'll never be enough
I'm sorry for not being able to let myself love

I'm going to write this one in blood
Just so you know it's straight from my heart
Where should I begin, where do I start?
Let me fill a new page with art
This was written in the dark
By the candlelight spark
****** ink spilt across the page
With all these things
That I just have to say
It all comes bursting out my chest
Just so you know I mean what it is that's said
So that this can all heal and mend

I'm sorry to the girls
Who wanted my love
I couldn't return the love they gave
Cuz I didn't feel the same way
I'm sorry to the friends that I cut off
I only did what I thought was best
I'm sorry that this life of mine is still a mess
I'm sorry to the girls that I hurt with words
Out of jealousy or rejection
I'm sorry for the lyrics that I wrote about you
May have been something said that hurt
I'm sorry I take so long to learn

I'm going to write this one in blood
Just so you know it's straight from my heart
Where should I begin, where do I start?
Let me fill a new page with art
This was written in the dark
By the candlelight spark
****** ink spilt across the page
With all these things
That I just have to say
It all comes bursting out my chest
Just so you know I mean what it is that's said
So that this can all heal and mend

I'm sorry that in my weakness I want to die
I'm sorry that I struggle with this life
I'm sorry for all the crazy things that cross my mind
I'm sorry for all the broken promises
I'm sorry I haven't achieved any of my dreams
I'm sorry that I'm inconsistent
I'm sorry that I claim I'm a victim
I'm sorry for the times I don't accept the blame
I'm sorry for the jokes I made that were lame
I'm sorry that this song is full of sorries
I'm sorry to all those people I've wronged
I'm sorry to myself for never feeling real love
I'm sorry for having no faith in a god above

I'm going to write this one in blood
Just so you know it's straight from my heart
Where should I begin, where do I start?
Let me fill a new page with art
This was written in the dark
By the candlelight spark
****** ink spilt across the page
With all these things
That I just have to say
It all comes bursting out my chest
Just so you know I mean what it is that's said
So that this can all heal and mend

©2018 Written By Benji James
It's taken me so long to write something completely new, but I finally did it, I sat myself down and finally just gathered some motivation to finally finish something. :P
C J Baxter Sep 2014
Our arrogance deceives us.
It blinds us in our walk.
Those poor souls believed us.
They recite us as we talk.

The circles are in motion,
The potions all been taken.
The purpose wasn't spoken
It was entirely mistaken.

Misinterpreted; lovers hating
love like it was over stating
itself. And harvested wealth
like it was the only thing
more important than health.

We are broken.
Our arrogance deceives us.
We are not chosen.
Why did they believe us?
Self-righteousness. Arrogance. Lies. Power-tripping
Pen Lux Sep 2012
they call me cat-liter, I'm their slave.
I'm embarrassed at sharp edges,
you've caught me all confused.
he said sleep, but translated space.
at least that's the way these feelings memorize.

depression, rage, stress,
broken threads, spandex,
cold sandwiches, free muffins that you missed:
I want to scream in your face
so that when I hold you I know
you're really crumbling.

I missed you like I missed myself.
my cleaning quickened so that I could see you.

maybe you needed some time spent,
in caffeinated tendencies,
to just blow off some steam.
Forget a few things,
for as long as you could until they
slam you back down again.
I'm not here to weigh you down,
I've got myself covered.

two of the same,
one in the same.
it's sometimes harder to communicate.
the release brings peace, my love.
I wish trust wasn't so hard to come by
in this shy blockage I've got all clogged up,
paranoid by my own actions,
thinking your freedom might repeat itself
in ways that will rip me free.

you're stuck to me like honey,
you're my islebee, make me freeze and see
what lies between and find that all love needs
is a breath
to catch amongst such harsh winds.
Omnis Atrum Aug 2012
i swear tis dreadful my dear
to face ones greatest fear
to have nought and none to hold near
to lose control and let life's wheel steer,
i'll cry out, i swear, in dismay
if for one more fretful day
i hear not the words you say
yet doubt not my intent to stay,
only for your sweet words of peace
that so oft give my soul release
will make these worries cease
and take these fears from me,
they still tell me my dreams are untrue
that my smiles do not come from you
but if, only if, they knew
my desires they would not misconstrue,
so as this day comes to end
my mind to my heart i will send
and i'll see your face my friend
until waking from slumber once again.

with that distant look again overcoming my ability to conceal
all of the things that i try to pretend aren't really real,
trying to find the hope that i once help so close and dear
but i wake up to find myself alone with you no longer here.
i fall to my knees hollow and empty in both arms and soul
smiles have digressed to the bitter glares of old,
i try to capture the tears before they fall from my eyes
so that you cannot see all that i would hide and deny.
i have lost the will that once drove me to strive for more
and this failure has left me in a drunken heap upon the floor,
for that is the only warmth that makes its way into my core
and the fears go away so quickly when i can't remember anymore.
and one more drink i am sure could not hurt at all
until i stumble around lose my feet and start to fall,
i find myself without the strength or will to rise up once again
so i close my eyes and wait for the room's spinning to end.
and in this state i realize that i have not had a drink all night
but the alcohol content of life sometimes is too much to fight,
i am but a lightweight next to the thousand proof bottle of reality
and once again i have drank too much and it has overcome me.

you stand there wide eyed overcome by disbelief
that you find yourself in these situations once again
after your turmoils you will breathe a sigh of relief
and the birth of realization will start to slowly begin

i reach out for something you cannot grasp, believe in something you cannot understand, and long for something you do know know how to feel. it is beyond you. if only i would have known this sooner, i would not have wasted so much time trying to explain it to you.

i count the sleepless nights like some count sheep
it's because of these broken promises that i can't sleep,
this misinterpreted flawed logic that you want to keep
in hopes that eventually into my brain it will seep.

there are some that i gave all to that deserved nothing, when the one that i should have given my everything to is the only one that has really mattered all along. and now she is only in happy memories. the rest of you do not even come close to everything that she is...and i'm tired of trying to find someone who does. she has weighted my scales heavily against all of you, set the standard so high that none of you will ever to be able to tip the scales in your favor, but my soul will never be at rest until i find someone who can.

when you put as much energy into something as you possibly can...you will be selective about where you should direct that energy. and sometimes you find that all of your energy was spent running down a dead-end alley. so you simply walk back to the road and remember to never deviate on that path ever again.

if you feel that you must love, then love with heart, soul, mind, and strength...without all of these your love is incomplete...and destined to fail.

to forget is to lose regret or to misinterpret the goals we set. to gain is to maintain without the possibility of losing it again. to remember is pointless once it is done.

that which you lack none can give you but yourself. there are none that can make you complete or make you feel whole, that is your task. it is not until you have mastered your own mind that you should search for someone to compliment the person that you have become.

your mind is your greatest tool, your thoughts your greatest weapon, your words are everyone else's greatest enemy, and unfortunately being closed minded is your best defense.

vague predictions are rarely untrue. but to see what happens exactly how it happens before it actually happens is a gift and a curse. it gives insight and knowledge beyond the realms of the senses, but if one would share such things with others they would be considered mad.

it is almost surprising how people are so kind and open to people they do not even know. a simple smile, meaningless conversation, or common courtesy shared with a being that has nothing in common with you except that you are both in a state of being referred to as life and are in the same place at the same time. it shows that people really are good at heart. but when you get close to some people they are corrupted by their own emotions, confused by the situation, or scared of what may come. it is not that these people are bad people or bad friends, they have just not yet come to terms with the fact that people can mean well and not expect anything in return. that people can care about them without any logic or reason behind it. when if they would only open their eyes they would see that there are people who would like to do nothing more than celebrate their oddities, their peculiarities, and their differences. the things that make them unique, the things that they would try to hide. there is good in everyone, some just hide it better than others.

in a conversation a friend told me that you can't just drop people out of your life, you can't just burn bridges, and you can't leave people behind so that you can become something greater. and we argued about this for a short while. but by the end of the conversation, after i had explained all of the circumstances and everything else was taken into account, this person looked me in the eyes and assured me that there was nothing else that i could possibly do. the sad thing was...i really didn't believe anything that i was saying, i was just saying it to make me feel better about what i was going to do. are people so eager to agree and fit in that their morals are thrown to the side? i wish i could say no.

i am not telling anyone the secrets of the universe. i am not some great thinker that tells people things that they would have never thought of. i just pay attention and make observations about the things that happen around me on a daily basis. i am not doing anything that most of you could not do. i'm just bored enough and have enough time to actually do it.

when the morning comes and this bliss ends none of the trivial problems that i worry myself with will be gone, the worries that burden my heart will still lay heavy on my being, and there will still be no way for me to do what i wish i could do. but if i can escape it for a few more hours, if i can keep it off of my mind for just a few seconds, then i will feel like i have accomplished something.

i have proven my abilities once again. and they wanted to know how i did what i did so easily, when they knew that they could not do the same even if they knew what i did. but it's really simple, you just have to look straight through people, past all of their fronts and all of the things that they want you to believe, straight through their eyes and into their soul. the body is just a shell to carry around the soul that is within it. once you learn to see through that shell and into the depths of a person's very being, then you will understand how i can do the things that i do.

my body betrays me. when people see me all they see is the shell. this big intimidating guy that seems to stand behind a clear wall of stone, untouchable. but if you only knew what is beyond the surface then you would see why this has all become so difficult for me.

it is better to say nothing when you mean everything than to say everything when you mean nothing.

is a person considered a success or a failure when they can have anything that anyone else in the world could ever want, but they cannot find the only thing that means more than the world to them?

if i could only open your eyes. enlighten your soul. so that you could see the things that i see. feel the things that i feel. then you would see that i am not the one whose thoughts are off target. but truth cannot be taught or learned. it can only be known by those that have found it on their own.

what i have done was no easy feat. it has troubled me greatly but i know that it was the right thing to do. not for myself, but for all concerned. and i now have happiness back in my grasp. i just have to tighten my clinch and pull it closer to my heart. because a person can cry until they drown in their own tears and no one will ever notice, and it will not make them feel better nor will it fix any of the problems. but once they take control of a situation and dispose of the cause of it then the changes themselves will make a world of difference.

i would say i love you more often, but it is often mistaken as a passinng sentiment. because most people do not truly understand what love is. but just as it would make no sense to give a painting to a blind person, or to play a song to those who could not hear it; it is just as senseless to give love to those who do not know how to feel it.

i almost feel as if i should apologize at my inability to show mercy to the ignorant, but i cannot convince myself that they deserve even that much.

sometimes i wonder what it is like to be one of those people that life just leaves behind. the ones that can't keep up. the ones that have gone as far as their potential can carry them. the ones that no amount of power or influence can push them any further. and then i smile, because i know that i will only ever wonder about this.

only fools declare that beauty is only skin deep. because beauty never truly begins until you get past the surface. to the very depths of a person's being. but it is kind of hypocritical for me to say this, because my standards are so high that they get mistaken for me being shallow all the time.

was it hope or the cause that was lost?

the world will never be short of actresses. pulling you into the story, stirring your emotions with their always interesting dialog, and making it so interesting that you can't look away for a single moment. and then one day you wake up and realize that it is not a play at all, it is your life.

i pray that one day that i find the one person that makes everything that's happened so far worth while. i pray that one day i will find love. that one day i will find the one that deserves everything that i want to give someone. one day...very far away. because right now i do not even want to entertain the idea. i'm so sick of love. sick of seeing it. sick of believing in it. sick of it evading me on every corner. so at this point in my life i would just like to say "******* love", i'm better off without you anyways.

all of our fates are the same. death is inevitable. but is a great person one that ignores their fate and enjoys life for what it is, or one that lives day by day evading their fate for as long as possible?

there are questions that we all have in life. and sometimes the answers that we find to those questions do not give us the results that we expected. but i would like to say that the answers that we find are never incorrect, but some of the questions that we try to answer are trick questions and should be thrown out.

never accept what anyone else declares as reality. the only person that you can truly trust in this world is yourself. people try to make this world into something that makes them happy. and as much as this may seem absurd, you should try it for yourself. happiness is nothing but a perception of circumstances. so either change your circumstances or change your perception and you will be the happiest person in the world.

the person that i thought i cared about the most. the one that i could have given the world to. the one that i thought i meant something to. the one that i thought could do no wrong. what foolish thoughts i think. and then i did something that hurt me more than i thought it would, but it hurt less that to keep the foolish thoughts going. to pretend that i didn't feel something that i did. sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is what they really want you to do, so you let them go. and in doing so i lost a dear friend, someone that i did not realize i would miss so much. but i know that i cannot and should not try to undo it now. because some people you just can't help but fall for. and there is nothing you can do for someone that does not want your help.

i am nothing. yet, i am everything. you mean nothing, yet you mean everything. hope is nothing, yet it is all that we have. love is nothing, yet it is all that we look for. it is the things that are intangible that mean the most, yet from the outside they seem so insignificant. so meaningless.

am i nothing but a beast? my soul longs to break free but my mind restrains it. i long for freedom yet my body restrains me. lacking these restraints i truly would be nothing but a beast. but sometimes i think that the beasts are better off than i, because they follow what they know they have to do without any kind of thought or restraint.

if i had the opportunity to apologize a million times i don't think i could bring myself to do it. even knowing that you deserve it. because i have deceived myslef into thinking that i was right. and i know no other way to escape what i know is sure to come when this catches up to me.

some things you do not realize until just before death. you don't realize how much everyone that is close to you means. how much everything you think is important isn't worth anything. that the only things that really matter are what you believe, the people you love, and happiness. so, if i can realize that much now, before death pays me too much attention, then i think that my life could be the way it was meant to be instead of what it has become.

she is everything that no one can understand. could i really be the only one? the only one that sees everything that she is, the beautiful person that she is. people are sick. they call something that is beautiful wrong, just because they do not understand it. they run from something and do not realize what it is that they are losing. i would give anything to be in his shoes, i would do anything to be able to take away her pain. i would cry her tears for her if it would make her happy. but this sounds like insanity. this world knows nothing of sacrifice unless they are sacrificing someone else so that they can get what they want.

breath in. sigh. relax. release. burdens weighing heavy. soul is a stone. pulling me deeper and deeper into the abyss. the heat is spreading. from my heart out to my fingertips. circulating. it burns. all is numb. the fire of my heart and cold of my soul have nullified each other. a void is created. to erase the memories. to forget the pain. the sorrow. the loneliness. and then i am happy. because i can't remember you. because i forget me. everything fades away. meditation is bliss.

sometimes these rhymes are contrived because of lust for the ones i despise. why would someone be so attracted to the things that leave them so distracted? but the melody plays on and i know that nothing could be wrong because your singing all the words to my song. and your singing voice is so beautiful. or is it the tone and the words behind it?

integrate corruption into perfection because of a lack of reason not to. why not just leave it as it was before it was what you wanted it to be? you draw my curiosity. like a disaster. i know it's horrible but i just can't look away.

Though i can't hear her coming i know she's on her way
though she never stays for long i love her while she stays,
no one can be quite like her as hard as they should try
and when she offers herself to me i never can deny.
She creeps in from outside to hold me while i sleep
and never will she whisper the secrets that we keep,
though many fools dislike her, i'll keep her as my friend
and fall fast asleep with Silence in my arms again.


let the cold winds blow the silence away
let the rain drops fall and accumulate,
let the sun subside beneath the horizon line
Mia Wallace Sep 2017
I'm weathered and weary from shapes of greed
Their colors mislead me
I am naive
But I know eyes that taste
Without seeing
Now you know me, don't you?
But you are just waiting.

I am tired of this misinterpreted concept
I am tired of our tangled body's, this act between two that is only about you.
I'm tired of not being able to dance freely in fear of needy hands and sharp teeth
Pressuring possessiveness
Climb into your soul and off of my body
See that I am a creature of uninterrupted freedom
I will not answer to your hollow eyes
Your misconstrued ideas of love constructed by a society that forgot to feel
That forgot to see
That forgot that you are you and I am me

I will not answer to your hollow eyes
You are not welcome here.
I’m sorry if I’m affectionate
I think you’ve misinterpreted
Didn’t mean to lead you on
But then again you don’t care

Don’t know why I do it
I don’t yearn for you
I’m just stuck
Between myself and others

They want us to happen
As if we’re a cool show
I’m not that into you
As you are too

But I don’t know
If I’m telling the truth
My brain says “You love him”
My heart says “You don’t”

They've switched roles
All because of you
And you couldn't care less
About how I feel

But genuinely, I’m scared
I don’t want to fall for you
The evidence speaks it
But my emotions are tired

It’s hard to like a mere figment
It’s hard to like you
Your ******* ways are disturbing
And you’re childish, well that’s worse

You act a certain way with me
But I see that with other girls
You constantly approach me
But I shrug it off

Maybe you’re annoyed
Even ****** at me
But I can’t do anything
I’m scared to show it

Unless you confess
Everything would be the same
We would just be friends
And nothing more

I forgot to mention, one other thing
The feelings I have for you
May be fake
For I like another guy
Other than you.
The question regarding the question relies on what the question really is.

If the question implied is a question directed outwardly, then it may be misinterpreted as a question to oneself internally.

Otherwise, a question explicitly directed inwardly is critical to deciphering the question that one will address outwardly.  

If an indirect question is questioned through the user, then the question itself becomes a metaphysical question to choose from.

In the event a question is said through alternate means, consider the quantitative/qualitative state of the question at the time being; as it may be resolved by asking the question in a subconscious level indeed.  

Superficial means tends to seek fundamental questions to the reality of the state one naturally possesses.  

In the case where the unconscious decides the opportune event to question the conscious reality, one must interpret the means in examination of the intrapersonal mentality.  

If the question is imposed through correlative thought and subliminal expression, then the question itself is related to a parallel conscious state intertwined with the unconscious state of mind of progression.

If the question is relative in combination to the solutions mentioned above becoming apparent, then one has means to ask the question without questioning the question itself in disparate.

Otherwise, the question continues to perplex the question through the continuation of irrelevant questions that one will have thought; creating a treacherous belief so concurrent one could not have fought.

Therefore, is the reality of the question portrayed to the reality you live in or the reality of others? As this poem was conclusive to subtly evoke thought in the questions we construct.

By: Michael M. De La Fuente
The thought of the question was introduced to me whilst reading Carl Jung's book, Man and his Symbols.
Aaron McDaniel Oct 2012
We give power to words
Turning pens into swords
We’re lost to which is mightier
Leonardo Wilde Feb 2017
I've been thinking about ambivalence a lot lately. And I’m still not sure what to think about it.
Because it’s basically inner conflict towards someone or something, but then, what does that mean?
It means you feel positively and negatively about someone or something, you want to react positively and negatively towards something or someone.
Usually, there’s an or between positive and negative. Ambivalence, I suppose, causes misinterpreted balance, by replacing the or with an and.
And it’s misinterpreted due to ambivalence being connotated as torn or uncertain. But, I think ambivalence is a good thing: it shows more than one approach to something, more than just one point of view offered from one person; an open mind, I suppose.
I think of ambivalence in the context of an ambivert. An ambivert is an introvert and extrovert in one body, one person that is both outgoing and reserved at the same time. To be an ambivert is to be special, unique, even revered. And I think that’s how ambivalent thinking ought to be seen: not as something negative, not torn thinking. Something positive.
Balanced thinking
:;,
Monica Mourad Mar 2015
A tangled web weaved
intricately designed, by patient time.
Three unfortunate victims of untold lies
Glances misinterpreted, signs and all now cease.

The truth will set them all free …
She thought his eyes only held hers that way
It will set you free they say
The signs were all there… promising

Braver he got… more confident he thought
“Hey I like you” found its’ way out one afternoon
Everything seemed to be right she thought ….
Truth is those words were not meant for her ears.

They fell on the ears of a close friend.
A friend who doesn't see those brown eyes the way she does.
Tangled and weaved the web becomes once again…
Only time will tell how this one ends....
mads Mar 2013
My
                    
                  Whole

                                     Life
                                              Is

                                                        A
                                                               Poorly

                                                                               Written

                                                                                              P O E M.
I don't know... I think I've lost the plot.
Adam M Snow Aug 2015
Weeping by the Willow Tree
Written by Adam M. Snow

Who is she adorned in moonlight's veil -
This beauty with skin so fragile and pale?
I see her within a dream surreal,
Weeping by the willow tree.

Why does she weep such a woe,
Under starry midnight glow?
Upon the ground, her tears will flow;
Weeping by the willow tree.

How can I clearly see?
She weeps so tenderly...
Will I come to know; can it be,
She weeps for me by the willow tree?

What can cause her broken heart,
That led this dame to hurt?
Her hair does fairly touch the dirt;
Weeping by the willow tree.

A love that's lost should only be,
Misinterpreted reality,
For she will never be set free,
Weeping by the willow tree.

A heart's amiss if love is lost -
An empty bliss would be the cost.
A troubled dream, she would exhaust –
Weeping by the willow tree.

Every which way the wind would blow,
The rustling leaves, the willow'd throw.
Akin to willows weep, we know!
She weeps by the willow tree.

Is she an angel kneeling there?
What is her burden that she bear?
Certainly there is such grief in the air,
Away by the olden willow tree.

She veils her face with waterfall tears,
Misery held her all these years.
With tender hopes and fears,
She weeps by the willow tree.

The willow tree leaves would sway,
As she, on her knees would pray.
Every night and every day,
She weeps by the willow tree.

Alas! It is that she cries for me;
It twas I who caused her such sweet misery.
I hear her cries, her plea,
Underneath the willow tree.

I oft wonder what I did to she,
And wonder why she weeps for me.
In the night I hear the keys -
While she weeps under the willow tree.

Upon the morn, it occurred to me,
That maiden cries out of love for me.
And I simply walked past her plea,
Not knowing what causes her to weep,
Silently under the willow tree.

The succeeding night I went to see,
That beautiful girl who sits under the tree.
I saw her there, but in despair -
She hangs from two branches bare.
Swinging under the willow tree.
http://amsnow.weebly.com
Eleanor Webster Oct 2017
"I'd like to be a fly on the wall," you say.
Would you?
Would you really like to be privy to all
that drama and intrigue, without ever being noticed?
Sounds nice, I suppose.
But I'll let you in on a little secret-
That, my dears, is false advertising.
Truth is, people always notice flies
They just choose to ignore them
And lower their voices when you buzz by on sugar-spun wings of self-confidence-
Maybe it's just all in your head
Maybe you've misinterpreted things-behind kaleidoscope eyes
It always looks like there are more of them than you.

So you gain confidence
You hover on the fringes of their circle
And drone out a low hum of 'what've you been up to today?'
Or 'how're you?'
Or 'long day, huh?'
The response is offhand
A verbal flick of the wrist
Batting the ball back into your conversational court
Because coming at you with a fly swatter
Or a rolled up Cosmo magazine
Takes more effort than they're willing to give.

You buzz about some more
Hoping maybe the silence will entice them to engage
But no,
They can't hear your buzzing
Or they won't.
So instead you stand
Fly on the wall
Content with watching the light catch your wings
Repeatedly wringing your hands near your face
In a way they probably think is malevolent
I promise I'm not plotting-
I'm just juggling the weight of my loneliness
Maybe if I shift it from one palm to another
Somehow I will lighten the load.

Take comfort in this, little fly-
The sun makes your wings iridescent
And even though they'll never get close enough to see that, you can.
It's not a trick of the light
Your fractal eyes do not deceive you-
They are duplicate.
A poem about social exclusion.
(Prelude: This piece is a parable with the imagination of a female named Allison with a ghostly presence residing in a suit of Knight's armor).

“They are of a better order” said the armor,
“A better order of beings in heaven.”

“Have you been to heaven?”
Allison asked the armor and
Quickly upon his ancient, blank steel gaze
She instantly felt a civil triumph
Hidden within her inquiry.


“Strange,” he responded,
"Strange it is that it is so far away
And yet it is right here
Inside of us all along.”

She gave him the hint of a
Curious gaze before placing
Her hand on her chest while saying,
“Are you saying heaven is in here?”

He replies,
“You think about it for a while and
When you have sufficiently parodied
The thought we shall think
Upon it again for I give
Up the argument for now -
I must retire” - and so he went
Wherever a ghost goes to rest.
There he wandered around
In the infinity of his mind until
A knock on the steel helmet came.
He answers through the opening,
“Who is it?”
Knowing all the while whom it was.

He opened the visor,
Showing the emptiness within.
She looked in his visor and
Giggled a girlish giggle
Saying, “I would carry this picture
With me to my grave -
My self professed conscience standing
Here in the doorway of my life
Looking into a metal head as
Empty as a hollow balloon,”
She giggled some more.
She pushed the visor open wider and
Stuck a finger in without
Any further solicitation
Saying as she looked about the emptiness,
“Shall I set foot in your dominion?”
Then she turned to him placing her hand
On her chest again as before,
“Or shall you set foot in mine?”


McDermott peaked thru to answer
Allison to find her now sitting on the edge
Of the bed – skillfully untying and
Removing her shoes as
She looked about the room.

Before he could answer and
Just as skillfully
She changed the subject, “You have a
Fine room here, quite roomy,
I think it must be twice the size of mine.”

The sun was setting outside the doubled
Windows and through the curtains
The light that filled the room tinted the
Contents of the room a crimson red.

There they were, quite all alone,
Her sitting on the bed,
Him encased in his Knight’s suit of armor.
Each waiting for the other
To make some sort of move.
Turning away from her,
Not to avoid the inevitable but
To experience the possible –
McDermott says,
“But this is your room.”
Pointing to the room receipt
On the top of the dresser,
“See, it has your name on it.
I am merely a figment of your imagination,
Something you have conjured up.”

“I know, I know,
You have said all this before,”
Pounding her fists into the
Bed as she cries,
“Cannot you for once come
From inside that
Silly suit of armor so that I may see you?”

“Look at the receipt, what does it say?” McDermott answers.

“I told you, I know,
It has my name as the registered
Guest of the Knights Inn, so what?
Have I not been coming here
Every year for three years,
Every year for the week of All Saint’s Day,
Just so that I can be with you?
And every year it’s the same old thing –
You speak like you are
Somewhere in a barrel,
And I never see you, I just feel you.”

“It is not with your ears that you hear me,
It is with your heart,”
McDermott explains,
“You come here year after year
Looking for truth –
Can you accept that I am
Only here if you are here?”

Sprawling out backwards across the bed,
She replies with disgust,
“Truth – what truth is this –
That I have lost my mind?”

“One can only loose what one has
Not unlike one cannot
Have what one wants,
For having and wanting
Are diametrically opposed,” he explains.

“Stop with the philosophical
Mumbo jumbo,” she says as she
Turns to scream into the pillow.
“I’m so sick of it that I could die.”
At the moment of that last syllable spoken, Allison can feel another
Weight joining her on the bed.
Daring not to whisk the feeling away
She holds her breath, listening –
Feeling for more confirmation.

“You cannot love another until you learn
To love yourself,” McDermott whispers.

Jumping off the bed and to her feet,
“You’ve told me all this before,
But why am
I here if it is not to love you?
And if you are as you say you are,
Just another
Of my creations, then pray tell me,
Why can you not accept that fact and just
Simply be here with me?
Why else am I here?”

“You are here to find out who you are.
That’s why anyone comes here.
That truth is something that No ONE can
TEACH you.
It is something that you
Have to remember.”

Looking about the empty room
Allison once again turns and
Sits on the bed.
“OK, I give in –
YOU tell ME, WHO AM I?”

“Just lie down and get comfortable.
You need your rest.
We’ll talk in your sleep.
We have much territory to cover tonight.
Tomorrow is All Saint’s Day, your day.
But tonight we must explore
All the wonders of you,
For in the morning you
Shall awaken knowing
The real you – the one that you
Have been searching for.”

Slithering out of her dress and
Removing her bra
Allison turns her head to the empty
Pillow beside her,
“You promise?” she asks.

“I promise,” McDermott replies.

Drifting off into a shallow sleep,
Allison is listening as
McDermott recites poetry.
It’s an odd recital but somehow it seems
As if she has heard this verse before.

“Sand sifting through my fingers
Measuring the time ‘til our bodies linger.
To know the smell of the center
Of your hand,
To see into those deepest of eyes -
Oh, to feel those sighs.

Sometimes I don’t think I can wait
Not another day but then it’s too late.
How can I know that all this is real
When I’ve not even a finger to feel.
Thoughts, visions of heart –
Feelings of soul –
Up to now that is all that I know.
So if you find me lost in this moment,
Please release me from this sweet torment.
For inside the fire is burning
Hotter than hell and so full of yearning.

Maybe this is not the right place -
Maybe this is not the right time.

But I ask you, is it a crime
To watch the sand as it rhymes?
Measuring the time ‘til our bodies linger
And I have the you – lost in my fingers.”

“What is the title?” Allison asks in her sleep.

“Oh you know the title very well,” McDermott answers.
“Think about it and you will remember.”

Allison’s eyes move beneath the
REM sleep with closed eyelids,
Back and forth, back and forth,
Looking for the title to the poem.
Then she answers with a smile,
“Hourglass, the title of the poem is,
Hourglass.”

“Very good,” McDermott confirms.
“See you do remember.”

“But how do I remember –
Something tells me that
I am not supposed to remember.”

“Your mind tells you that you
Have no memory of the poem
But your heart tells you that you do.”

“Yes.” she answers.

“Could it be that just when
You find your dearest love
That you also meet your greatest fear?
Then too avoid the fear –
You try not to remember."

“Why do you say that?” she asks.

“Because those are the two sponsoring
Thoughts behind all human endeavors.
All of the human emotions stem from
Either love or from fear.”

In her sleep Allison turns
More toward the empty pillow,
“Who are you?”

“Have you not determined
To call me McDermott?
Why do you struggle to believe that
I cannot be unless I have a name?”

“I suppose it’s because everything
Has a name.” Allison responds.

“No, everything of this world
Has something that it is called,
That does not exactly mean that
It has a name or needs one.”

“Then who are you?”
She asks breathing in deeply.

“It matters not what you call me –
That has been one of the great
Mistakes of human nature,
What is more important is that you know
That I am, just like that
I know that you are.”

“Are you God?”
She asks shaking her head.

“See, there you go again,
Be careful of those labels,
Once you put a label
On me, then by that labeling
Do you place upon me your expectations.
And once something is expected
To do something in a certain way,
Then have you created boundaries,
In essence,
You have created walls around me,
Walls around your own thoughts -
To the degree that we can
No longer communicate.”

“How would you prefer that I think
Of you?” Allison asks.

“Do not “think” of me in terms of
Mere words,
For words fall far too short
Of explaining any of truth
Of who or what I am.
You should think of me as
You would think of yourself for
Are we not one in the same?
If I said that I am the great 'I am'
And if you were to believe that to be true,
Would not that make you the
Great 'I am' too?”

“I’m sorry, I do not understand,
Are you saying that you are me?
Am I talking to myself?” she questioned.

“You are asleep, when you awake,
Would you say that we are talking?”

“No, I would say that I was dreaming
And that you are like you said that you
Were before I went to sleep,
I would say that you are a
Figment of my imagination.”

“Does that explain how it is that you
Know the name of the poem?”
McDermott asks.

“I don’t know, I’m dreaming I suppose,
Dreams don’t have to make any sense.”

“Is that how you feel?”

“Not really,” Allison answers.
Even though she is asleep
She can feel herself
Turning over and pushing away
Some of the bedding.
“Give me an incontrovertible way
Of knowing that you are real.”

“Oh Allison, the only way that
I could ever give you such proof
Is if I were
To physically touch you and to do that
I would need a physical form.
Yet I say to you,
I have no need of anything physical
For all of your physical reality
Is but a part of the grand illusion.”

“Grand illusion,
Are you saying that my life
Is just one big illusion?” Allison questions.

“In a sense, yes.
For it is you who does create
Your own reality.
And if what you create is
Not what you want,
Is that creation not what
The definition of “illusion” means?”

“But why would I create anything that
I do not want?” she asks.

“Good question, why don’t you tell me?”

“Who’s to say that I truly have not created you?”
Allison asks.

“Another good question, what do you think?”

“Why would you talk to me?” she asks.

“I talk to everyone all the time.
The question is not to with
Whom do I talk,
But who listens?”

“I’m listening.” Allison exclaims.

“Another good answer.
Maybe it would be easier if
We exchanged the word
“Talk” for the word communicate,
I think that’s a much
Better descriptive word.
If we try to simply just talk then we
Are restricted by the limitations of words.
I do not communicate by words alone,
In fact, I rarely do.
I usually communicate through
Feelings for feelings are
The language of the soul.
For this reason,
If you want to know
The truth about anything,
Look to how you are feeling about it.
Hidden in your deepest feelings
You’ll always find your higher truth.
I can communicate with thought
But don’t confuse thought with feelings.
When I communicate with thought
I often use images, sounds or pictures.
Are they not much more descriptive?
I also use experience to communicate with.
The fact that you remembered
The name of the poem
Is a communication by experience.
It is only when feelings,
Thought or experience
Fails that I use words.
However, words are the least effective
Communicator because words
Are too easily misinterpreted or confused.
Words are not a good way to get
To the truth for they are part
Of the illusion of trying
To convey the feelings,
The thoughts and the experiences.
The irony in this is that
So many place their feelings,
Thoughts and experience in the words
That they try to say and very little
On the experience of who they are.
The same is true of how
You define who you are.
You define yourself within
A set of words and
Lose all reality of who you really are.
Therefore you create
The illusion of yourself
Just as you have created
The illusion of me.”

Allison turns on her side into
The fetal position,
“You said that tonight
That I would discover who I am –
Does that mean that in order to discover
Who I am that I must learn
To know who you are?”

“You are not learning anything.
You are remembering who you are
For you always were and
You always will be.
You cannot learn what you already know.
You can only remember.”

“And what is that?” she asks intently.

“You are your creation,
I come from you so that you
Might know yourself.
That is why I exist,
So that you may experience yourself.”

As Allison drifts between the alpha of
REM sleep and the delta of REM
Into stage three of tonight’s slumber,
She carries with her into her deepest
Sleep the thoughts of herself
As one with all of God’s creation.
“God the father, God the son,
God the holy ghost,”
She whispers aloud.
“Are we all your sons and daughters?”
She asks.

“Yes you are,
The trinity would not be complete
Without you,
Not without every one of you.”

“So that is who I am?” she whispers.

“Welcome to who you are,
Who you have always been,
Who you ever shall be,
Today, it is All Saint’s Day,
What reality will you create today?

Always remember,
There are only two base emotions,
Love and fear.
You can choose to act out of love
Or you can choose to act out of fear.
The choice is as always –
The choice is yours.”

“Will you be with me today –
To help me to choose?”

“I am always with you.”

“Will I find love today?” Allison asks.

“You question is improper.
“You should be asking yourself,
Will I create love today?”


*“But wouldn’t that be another illusion?
Another figment of
My imagination?” she questions.

“Is there a difference?
And even if there was, does it matter?
All that matters is that
Through your own experience,
You remember who you are
And experience
What you really want to be.
That is the truth of creation.”

Drifting off into the deepest sleep
Of her life,
Allison listens to McDermott
Reciting his poetry again and again.
I bled a lot writing this piece. I hope that somehow, somewhere, someone can read it and create that which they were destined to experience.
Sacrelicious Apr 2012
People are
either,
misread,
misunderstood,
misinterpreted,
or simply
not meant for this
time.
Retardation,
shouldn't be
allowed to exist.
For, putting
limitations on someone
that is amazing in
it's own right.
Is like judging
a
book
by it's cover.
In the real world,
judges
were supposed
to
bring justice
for those
who have been
jacked
off,
in the wrong way.
Somewhere
**** god bad.
Let's make it better.
Kewayne Wadley Aug 2018
My love for you isn't just a feeling.
It's a civilization.
It's a group formed in unorganized noise.
A commotion of expression purposely existing
the sole purpose of you.
Living & breathing.
A jumbled language overheard.
Stenciled with each patter of foot.
Every horn honked.
Each lane clogged with the thought of you.
A foundation built from the ground up
in means to explore.
A stone age modernized.
Misinterpreted by the desire of fire.
Protected.
Built upon.
Built into the tallest building, which I call your name.
My love for you is like the plane that flies overhead.
Roaring loud in repetition.
Tedious nooks & crannies.
Places to shop, things to see.
All the things I see when I look into your eyes.
My love for you a province of sorts.
The smell seared in a pan. Best served on a plate for two.
A mix of different pastas, vegetables.
Fried in upbeat cafe, different aromas.
The chit chat different versions of me.
Complimenting the very essence of you.
A new building erected with cranes and steel beams.
Plastered dry wall.
Soon opened for your arrival
Serpent King Oct 2012
Hidden in the darkness, an entity of no real significance,
Cloaked by despair, ruled by regret, acknowledged by few,
The shrouded one lives, misunderstood, banished, forgotten,
But it lives, it lives.

Concealed in the shadows, a being of no hope,
Masked by lies, commanded by sorrow, Befriended by none,
The shrouded one lives, misconstrued, expelled, obliterated,
But it lives, it lives.

Obscured in the black, a presence of no ecstasy,
Veiled by self-hate, ordered by fear, hated by all,
The shrouded one lives, misinterpreted, rejected, meaningless,
But it lives, it lives.
Andy Brendell May 2013
An end, a sad sad end with a bitter amen.
Lost hope, no faith, no way to get back again.
Four words don't mean a thing, but also the world she's ripped to shreds.

Nothing, empty empty with nowhere to escape.
One day, one night, just a moment from then it disappears.
All life has been nothing but lies, but a structure on conformed ideals.

A line, a petty petty line with a meaning unseen.
No rhyme, no scheme, just a pattern and a beat.
Take all lost words to heart, but the thoughts are often misplaced.
"IFUCKINGHATEYOU"
Kara Jean May 2016
A calamity of views abused
When the alcohol is strong
The choices go wrong
Everyones offend through Misinterpreted temptation
Using my over analyzing brain to calm the degraded
Crying over a mundane sane
Looking for persuasion
Through persecution
Picking out your weaknesses
Bleakness, is a majestic trait
Not intentionally
Burdening their agony
My name is animosity
I depict a character that sympathizes
Your alibies
Using my vulnerability
Contaminated humility
Finding
The hiding
No problem suggesting
My dark secrets of the night
Applying my skits that fit right
Paranoid to be viewed in a mortifying light
I would be lying denying my animalistic ride
I have scrutinized
Remorsing
I see earth born
Godly you stand
In the morning
Behold deformities
You fit the norm
I bow to your Godly proportion
In vein this I pray
Amen
Bunhead17 Oct 2014
You think just because
I have a smile on my face and I'm laughing
That everything is fine
When I'm not ok

forgettng what there was
Sometimes it maybe could over barring,
But when you fall out of line,
While your ahead just stop

Because you don't know me
So don't judge me
On what you think you know
I'm don't have a perfect life
I never lived in a two parent home
A day in life


Ignoring your pity,
I will have feeling empty,
Your better pray and hope,
That I don't reach you out of sight,
You won't miss when I'm gone,
Had to sacrifice

Don't misinterpret me nomore
Like stupid-*** ******* just stop
If you don't witness with your eyes
Then don't witness with your mouth
So stop these dumb-*** rumors
Cause don't none of y'all know my struggles

Allowing me to settle the score,
Please get of a ****,
You have to realize,
I'm nothing to mess with,
Beggers can be choosers,
And what you chose is for me to make the world crumble.

I'm like apple I look great on the outside
But I'm ****** up on the inside
Don't Judge a book by it cover

Look out boys,
Don't **** around ,
She's got a lover,

Look out girls
Don't **** around
He's got a lover
By Falen Acon (me) and Arcassin Burnham ©2014
Caroline Grace Feb 2012
Tedium brought them here.
Bored with routine head-counts,
museums and man-made landmarks.

Impulse told them
To flatten the silent fronds,
Blindly tear down the hampering vines,
Rattle the industrious cities beneath their feet.

Curiosity led them
To this patch of unkempt squitch,
This sacred space littered with clean bones.

No words came with them.
Only Observation...


... a leaping fire tended by savages
Polished teeth strung around their necks,
The bark-ridged skin,
The supernaturally piercing eyes,
Their ashen members grazing the farinaceous earth.

At the heart of this sacred place
Littered with the clean bones,
Condesention covered them with coats,
Misinterpreted grins exposing evidential remains.

Fear penetrated their too-white skins,
Their souls through the sockets of their eyes,
Their clattering teeth.

All this is true :
The scattered bones,
The brass buttons blinking through starved ashes,

The arrows in a glass case.



copyright © Caroline Grace 2012
megan Aug 2018
with every click of Their tongues,
i am acquiescent.
Their words fill my lungs,
audible discontent.

i swallow Their disgust,
mostly misinterpreted,
i nonchalantly combust,
now i am free.
He saw her drop a wallet and nobody saw it
He returned it without her seeing it and she was glad
there was no thank you, no need to feel indebted to, no need to reciprocate, no belittling of the effort to not feel grateful, no aggrandizement of the effort to reward overly to the point of removing, no self-praise----all just a quiet act of kindness
but then someone did see him and blamed him for taking it in the first place and not only was the act not appreciated but it was scorned, misinterpreted, misunderstood, confused, defamed and finally ******.  When kindness is ****** could there be any greater crime?  The act was kindness and nobody understood it, and everyone jumped to conclusions, and everyone found one reason to **** for another reason, and nobody took the extra time, caring, compassion, and thoroughness and patience and love it would have taken to find out the truth---so the the greatest crime prevailed---far greater than the act that was understood to be the "justifiable damnation", but isn't it always the breeding grounds for justifiable damnation when conclusions about the biggest things in life are so quickly assumed to be true when they aren't.  Reverse the crime with patience, love, understanding, caring being thorough, being careful, and remember the act of returning the wallet held such integrity that your shine will show the light to everyone else sooner or later but your light will forever shine regardless so don't unjustifiably **** yourself either---love yourself---and thank you for returning the wallet
Yazad Tafti Sep 2019
tonight i don't write
tonight i scream silently onto paper with vocal cords of graphite
i say my woes and watch them come down at me like a javelin diving into my esophagus
i don't ponder tonight...i merely accept my actions
for these actions will eventually lead to someone's satisfaction
hello poetry
goodbye confliction
better indirectly out than directly in
Charlie Chirico Sep 2012
To whom it may concern:

Is that appropriate? Have I made this too impersonal too soon? Nameless lover, what do I call you (thee?) these days? I never knew that the letter M extended to the word “who” could be so detrimental.

II
Nameless lover,

Have I forsaken myself? Is love without means? Can I live within my means? What does a broken heart mean? Does that mean, that I’ve seen, the other side of the fence thought green? Maybe I’m in between.

III
My rose,

As I comment on your perfection, I realize that this is a love thought wild. To be more specific: Wilde. Words spoken on soft lips, I tell you you’re perfect. To which you reply, “I certainly hope not. That would leave no room for development.”

IV
Dear friend,

I’ve written this letter countless times. From beginning to end, the words I write are the ones that keep my tongue tied. Is it not possible for me to let myself be intimate? Am I a man carved from stone; indestructible, but kept below the ocean waves, which conceals my longing to wash up on shore? Resuscitate me. For as much as you take my breath away, can our parted lips refrain from talk, and is it possible for us to speak in tongues? I look at your delicate hands, and see my fingers enclosed in yours. I glance at the small of your back, and see my hand placed upon it, guiding you through the crowd. I see your eyes close as I kiss your forehead. I see us.
Am I selfish? Are you? Is this a misinterpreted love?
No. No, this is a love that I welcome you to share. This is a love that is impossible to embellish.

V

There is this misplaced honesty. To clarify: An honesty, that isn’t untrue, but spoken through hormones. That is what initiates complications with the opposite ***. Or people develop feelings at the wrong time. Or people never speak their feelings. As much as people like to say that it isn’t a game, it is. *** is ***, but then again, it’s not. Beyond the attraction, it’s realizing how that person changes your life. There is nothing comparable or even remotely relevant to the impact of loving someone and having that love returned. But, to be fair, there is nothing like the look across the room, and meeting a stranger’s eye, and both sets of eyes squinting in mutual thought of lust.
Affection and pain share the same gesture: the squint of an eye.

Closure (Civility)
Sitting across from you, we opened up; philosophy on life, and our personal growth. Our versions of love were discussed, in detail, about young love and what it feels like as you mature; when becoming a better person can sometimes be selfish. It is done with the best intentions, but it still creates tensions that become even the more overwhelming.
The conversation was very honest.
That’s what a friendship brings, I suppose.

Inevitability (Afterthought)
There are always signs. People don’t always see them because they are afraid of becoming vulnerable. They know assumptions can come with the worst confrontations, but curiosity will eventually eat at you until your perception of people will change. You start to think trust has as much value as a fixed mortgage. The problem is that you can’t restart in life. Nothing is as simple as it might seem. Human connection and companionship will be the hardest expedition you endure in life. It is only something you can learn over time. If you haven’t felt a million emotions at once, you haven’t been in love. If you’ve never opened your soul to a person, you haven’t been in love. If you don’t know the color of her eyes, you haven’t been in love.
Her eyes are green.
There are no inherent flaws in things,
only traits which are repressed, oppressed and desired to be controlled.
Misinterpreted. Misunderstood. Misrepresented. Neglected.
Acted upon in haste and ignorance, or not at all.
This is the origin of the idea of a "flaw":

Traits are character.
Identifying characteristics.
Opportunities for development.
For growth; for learning.
"Flaws" stem from our attitudes of these opportunities.

Wabi and Sabi
are not presence of flaws;
they are presence of character
of uniqueness;

Flaws are a state of Mind.
Based off of a conversation with a good friend, as well as some writing in a sketchbook of mine.
Rupal Oct 2014
Many masks
Many names,
Misinterpreted
Misunderstood
By choice...

Mask over mask
Bereft of skin
Dare not reveal
What is underneath...

Masquerade
the only way
I dare
I live...

Rawness, nakedness
Unplastered walls.
Debris, wreckage,
where's my mask

Who are you,
who makes me wonder,
who makes me ponder.
Something I never asked before...

**Who am I
Michael R Burch Apr 2020
The Making of a Poet
by Michael R. Burch

While I don’t consider “Poetry” to be my best poem—I wrote the first version in my teens—it’s a poem that holds special meaning for me. I consider it my Ars Poetica. Here’s how I came to write “Poetry” as a teenager ...

When I was eleven years old, my father, a staff sergeant in the US Air Force, was stationed in Wiesbaden, Germany. We were forced to live off-base for two years, in a tiny German village where there were no other American children to play with, and no English radio or TV stations. To avoid complete boredom, I began going to the base library, checking out eight books at a time (the limit), reading them in a few days, then continually repeating the process. I quickly exhausted the library’s children’s fare and began devouring adult novels along with a plethora of books about history, science and nature.

In the fifth grade, I tested at the reading level of a college sophomore and was put in a reading group of one. I was an incredibly fast reader: I flew through books like crazy. I was reading Austen, Dickens, Hardy, et al, while my classmates were reading … whatever one normally reads in grade school. My grades shot through the roof and from that day forward I was always the top scholar in my age group, wherever I went.

But being bright and well-read does not invariably lead to happiness. I was tall, scrawny, introverted and socially awkward. I had trouble making friends. I began to dabble in poetry around age thirteen, but then we were finally granted base housing and for two years I was able to focus on things like marbles, quarters, comic books, baseball, basketball and football. And, from an incomprehensible distance, girls.

When I was fifteen my father retired from the Air Force and we moved back to his hometown of Nashville. While my parents were looking for a house, we lived with my grandfather and his third wife. They didn’t have air-conditioning and didn’t seem to believe in hot food—even the peas and beans were served cold!—so I was sweaty, hungry, lonely, friendless and miserable. It was at this point that I began to write poetry seriously. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because my options were so limited and the world seemed so impossibly grim and unfair.

Writing poetry helped me cope with my loneliness and depression. I had feelings of deep alienation and inadequacy, but suddenly I had found something I could do better than anyone around me. (Perhaps because no one else was doing it at all?)

However, I was a perfectionist and poetry can be very tough on perfectionists. I remember becoming incredibly frustrated and angry with myself. Why wasn’t I writing poetry like Shelley and Keats at age fifteen? I destroyed all my poems in a fit of pique. Fortunately, I was able to reproduce most of the better poems from memory, but two in particular were lost forever and still haunt me.

In the tenth grade, at age sixteen, I had a major breakthrough. My English teacher gave us a poetry assignment. We were instructed to create a poetry booklet with five chapters of our choosing. I still have my booklet, a treasured memento, banged out on a Corona typewriter with cursive script, which gave it a sort of elegance, a cachet. My chosen chapters were: Rock Songs, English Poems, Animal Poems, Biblical Poems, and ta-da, My Poems! Audaciously, alongside the poems of Shakespeare, Burns and Tennyson, I would self-publish my fledgling work!

My teacher wrote “This poem is beautiful” beside one my earliest compositions, “Playmates.” Her comment was like rocket fuel to my stellar aspirations. Surely I was next Keats, the next Shelley! Surely immediate and incontrovertible success was now fait accompli, guaranteed!

Of course I had no idea what I was getting into. How many fifteen-year-old poets can compete with the immortal bards? I was in for some very tough sledding because I had good taste in poetry and could tell the difference between merely adequate verse and the real thing. I continued to find poetry vexing. Why the hell wouldn’t it cooperate and anoint me its next Shakespeare, pronto?

Then I had another breakthrough. I remember it vividly. I working at a McDonald’s at age seventeen, salting away money for college because my parents had informed me they didn’t have enough money to pay my tuition. Fortunately, I was able to earn a full academic scholarship, but I still needed to make money for clothes, dating (hah!), etc. I was sitting in the McDonald’s break room when I wrote a poem, “Reckoning” (later re-titled “Observance”), that sorta made me catch my breath. Did I really write that? For the first time, I felt like a “real poet.”

Observance
by Michael R. Burch

Here the hills are old, and rolling
casually in their old age;
on the horizon youthful mountains
bathe themselves in windblown fountains . . .

By dying leaves and falling raindrops,
I have traced time's starts and stops,
and I have known the years to pass
almost unnoticed, whispering through treetops . . .

For here the valleys fill with sunlight
to the brim, then empty again,
and it seems that only I notice
how the years flood out, and in . . .

Another poem, “Infinity,” written around age eighteen, again made me feel like a real poet.



Infinity
by Michael R. Burch

Have you tasted the bitterness of tears of despair?
Have you watched the sun sink through such pale, balmless air
that your soul sought its shell like a crab on a beach,
then scuttled inside to be safe, out of reach?

Might I lift you tonight from earth’s wreckage and damage
on these waves gently rising to pay the moon homage?
Or better, perhaps, let me say that I, too,
have dreamed of infinity . . . windswept and blue.

Now, two “real poems” in two years may not seem like a big deal to non-poets. But they were very big deals to me. I would go off to college feeling that I was, really, a real poet, with two real poems under my belt. I felt like someone, at last. I had, at least, potential.

But I was in for another rude shock. Being a good reader of poetry—good enough to know when my own poems were falling far short of the mark—I was absolutely floored when I learned that impostors were controlling Poetry’s fate! These impostors were claiming that meter and rhyme were passé, that honest human sentiment was something to be ridiculed and dismissed, that poetry should be nothing more than concrete imagery, etc.

At first I was devastated, but then I quickly became enraged. I knew the difference between good poetry and bad. I could feel it in my flesh, in my bones. Who were these impostors to say that bad poetry was good, and good was bad? How dare they? I was incensed! I loved Poetry. I saw her as my savior because she had rescued me from depression and feelings of inadequacy. So I made a poetic pledge to help save my Savior from the impostors:



Poetry
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published by The Lyric

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



These are other poems I have written since, that I particularly like, and hope you like them too ...

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.



Second Sight
by Michael R. Burch

I never touched you—
that was my mistake.

Deep within,
I still feel the ache.

Can an unformed thing
eternally break?

Now, from a great distance,
I see you again

not as you are now,
but as you were then—

eternally present
and Sovereign.



Mending
by Michael R. Burch

for the survivors of 9-11

I am besieged with kindnesses;
sometimes I laugh,
delighted for a moment,
then resume
the more seemly occupation of my craft.

I do not taste the candies...

The perfume
of roses is uplifted
in a draft
that vanishes into the ceiling’s fans

which spin like old propellers
till the room
is full of ghostly bits of yarn...

My task
is not to knit,

but not to end too soon.

This poem is dedicated to the victims of 9-11 and their families and friends.



Love Unfolded Like a Flower
by Michael R. Burch

Love unfolded
like a flower;
Pale petals pinked and blushed to see the sky.
I came to know you
and to trust you
in moments lost to springtime slipping by.

Then love burst outward,
leaping skyward,
and untamed blossoms danced against the wind.
All I wanted
was to hold you;
though passion tempted once, we never sinned.

Now love's gay petals
fade and wither,
and winter beckons, whispering a lie.
We were friends,
but friendships end . . .
yes, friendships end and even roses die.



Shadowselves
by Michael R. Burch

In our hearts, knowing
fewer days―and milder―beckon,
how now are we to measure
that wick by which we reckon
the time we have remaining?

We are shadows
spawned by a blue spurt of candlelight.
Darkly, we watch ourselves flicker.
Where shall we go when the flame burns less bright?
When chill night steals our vigor?

Why are we less than ourselves? We are shadows.
Where is the fire of our youth? We grow cold.
Why does our future loom dark? We are old.
And why do we shiver?

In our hearts, seeing
fewer days―and briefer―breaking,
now, even more, we treasure
this brittle leaf-like aching
that tells us we are living.



Dust (II)
by Michael R. Burch

We are dust
and to dust we must
return ...
but why, then,
life’s pointless sojourn?



Leave Taking (II)
by Michael R. Burch

Although the earth renews itself, and spring
is lovelier for all the rot of fall,
I think of yellow leaves that cling and hang
by fingertips to life, let go . . . and all
men see is one bright instance of departure,
the flame that, at least height, warms nothing. I,

have never liked to think the ants that march here
will deem them useless, grimly tramping by,
and so I gather leaves’ dry hopeless brilliance,
to feel their prickly edges, like my own,
to understand their incurled worn resilience―
youth’s tenderness long, callously, outgrown.

I even feel the pleasure of their sting,
the stab of life. I do not think―at all―
to be renewed, as earth is every spring.
I do not hope words cluster where they fall.
I only hope one leaf, wild-spiraling,
illuminates the void, till glad hearts sing.

It's not that every leaf must finally fall ...
it's just that we can never catch them all.

Originally published by Silver Stork



Less Heroic Couplets: Funding Fundamentals
by Michael R. Burch

*"I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble." ― Mark Twain

Making sense from nonsense is quite sensible! Suppose
you’re running low on moolah, need some cash to paint your toes ...
Just invent a new religion; claim it saves lost souls from hell;
have the converts write you checks; take major debit cards as well;
take MasterCard and Visa and good-as-gold Amex;
hell, lend and charge them interest, whether payday loan or flex.
Thus out of perfect nonsense, glittery ores of this great mine,
you’ll earn an easy living and your toes will truly shine!

Originally published by Lighten Up Online



Marsh Song
by Michael R. Burch

Here there is only the great sad song of the reeds
and the silent herons, wraithlike in the mist,
and a few drab sunken stones, unblessed
by the sunlight these late sixteen thousand years,
and the beaded dews that drench strange ferns, like tears
collected against an overwhelming sadness.

Here the marsh exposes its dejectedness,
its gutted rotting belly, and its roots
rise out of the earth’s distended heaviness,
to claw hard at existence, till the scars
remind us that we all have wounds, and I
have learned again that living is despair
as the herons cleave the placid, dreamless air.

Originally published by The Lyric



Moon Lake
by Michael R. Burch

Starlit recorder of summer nights,
what magic spell bewitches you?
They say that all lovers love first in the dark . . .
Is it true?
Is it true?
Is it true?

Starry-eyed seer of all that appears
and all that has appeared―
What sights have you seen?
What dreams have you dreamed?
What rhetoric have you heard?

Is love an oration,
or is it a word?
Have you heard?
Have you heard?
Have you heard?

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



Tomb Lake
by Michael R. Burch

Go down to the valley
where mockingbirds cry,
alone, ever lonely . . .
yes, go down to die.

And dream in your dying
you never shall wake.
Go down to the valley;
go down to Tomb Lake.

Tomb Lake is a cauldron
of souls such as yours―
mad souls without meaning,
frail souls without force.

Tomb Lake is a graveyard
reserved for the dead.
They lie in her shallows
and sleep in her bed.

I believe this poem and "Moon Lake" were companion poems, written around my senior year in high school, in 1976.



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!"



Frantisek “Franta” Bass was a Jewish boy murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The Garden
by Franta Bass
translation by Michael R. Burch

A small garden,
so fragrant and full of roses!
The path the little boy takes
is guarded by thorns.

A small boy, a sweet boy,
growing like those budding blossoms!
But when the blossoms have bloomed,
the boy will be no more.



Jewish Forever
by Franta Bass
translation by Michael R. Burch

I am a Jew and always will be, forever!
Even if I should starve,
I will never submit!
But I will always fight for my people,
with my honor,
to their credit!

And I will never be ashamed of them;
this is my vow.
I am so very proud of my people now!
How dignified they are, in their grief!
And though I may die, oppressed,
still I will always return to life ...



Options Underwater: The Song of the First Amphibian
by Michael R. Burch

“Evolution’s a Fishy Business!”

1.
Breathing underwater through antiquated gills,
I’m running out of options. I need to find fresh Air,
to seek some higher Purpose. No porpoise, I despair
to swim among anemones’ pink frills.

2.
My fins will make fine flippers, if only I can walk,
a little out of kilter, safe to the nearest rock’s
sweet, unmolested shelter. Each eye must grow a stalk,
to take in this green land on which it gawks.

3.
No predators have made it here, so I need not adapt.
Sun-sluggish, full, lethargic―I’ll take such nice long naps!

The highest form of life, that’s me! (Quite apt
to lie here chortling, calling fishes saps.)

4.
I woke to find life teeming all around―
mammals, insects, reptiles, loathsome birds.
And now I cringe at every sight and sound.
The water’s looking good! I look Absurd.

5.
The moral of my story’s this: don’t leap
wherever grass is greener. Backwards creep.
And never burn your bridges, till you’re sure
leapfrogging friends secures your Sinecure.

Originally published by Lighten Up Online

Keywords/Tags: amphibian, amphibians, evolution, gills, water, air, lungs, fins, flippers, fish, fishy business



Unlikely Mike
by Michael R. Burch

I married someone else’s fantasy;
she admired me despite my mutilations.

I loved her for her heart’s sake, and for mine.
I hid my face and changed its connotations.

And in the dark I danced—slight, Chaplinesque—
a metaphor myself. How could they know,

the undiscerning ones, that in the glow
of spotlights, sometimes love becomes burlesque?

Disfigured to my soul, I could not lose
or choose or name myself; I came to be

another of life’s odd dichotomies,
like Dickey’s Sheep Boy, Pan, or David Cruse:

as pale, as enigmatic. White, or black?
My color was a song, a changing track.



This is my translation of one of my favorite Dimash Kudaibergen songs, the French song "S.O.S." ...

S.O.S.
by Michel Berger
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Why do I live, why do I die?
Why do I laugh, why do I cry?

Voicing the S.O.S.
of an earthling in distress ...

I have never felt at home on the ground.

I'd rather be a bird;
this skin feels weird.

I'd like to see the world turned upside down.

It ever was more beautiful
seen from up above,
seen from up above.

I've always confused life with cartoons,
wishing to transform.

I feel something that draws me,
that draws me,
that draws me
UP!

In the great lotto of the universe
I didn't draw the right numbers.
I feel unwell in my own skin,
I don't want to be a machine
eating, working, sleeping.

Why do I live, why do I die?
Why do I laugh, why do I cry?

I feel I'm catching waves from another world.
I've never had both feet on the ground.
This skin feels weird.
I'd like to see the world turned upside down.
I'd rather be a bird.

Sleep, child, sleep ...



"Late Autumn" aka "Autumn Strong"
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
based on the version sung by Dimash Kudaibergen

Autumn ...

The feeling of late autumn ...

It feels like golden leaves falling
to those who are parting ...

A glass of wine
has stirred
so many emotions swirling in my mind ...

Such sad farewells ...

With the season's falling leaves,
so many sad farewells.

To see you so dispirited pains me more than I can say.

Holding your hands so tightly to my heart ...

... Remembering ...

I implore you to remember our unspoken vows ...

I dare bear this bitterness,
but not to see you broken-hearted!

All contentment vanishes like leaves in an autumn wind.

Meeting or parting, that's not up to me.
We can blame the wind for our destiny.

I do not fear my own despair
but your sorrow haunts me.

No one will know of our desolation.



My Forty-Ninth Year
by Michael R. Burch

My forty-ninth year
and the dew remembers
how brightly it glistened
encrusting September, ...
one frozen September
when hawks ruled the sky
and death fell on wings
with a shrill, keening cry.

My forty-ninth year,
and still I recall
the weavings and windings
of childhood, of fall ...
of fall enigmatic,
resplendent, yet sere, ...
though vibrant the herald
of death drawing near.

My forty-ninth year
and now often I've thought on
the course of a lifetime,
the meaning of autumn,
the cycle of autumn
with winter to come,
of aging and death
and rebirth ... on and on.



Less Heroic Couplets: Rejection Slips
by Michael R. Burch

pour Melissa Balmain

Whenever my writing gets rejected,
I always wonder how the rejecter got elected.
Are we exchanging at the same Bourse?
(Excepting present company, of course!)

I consider the term “rejection slip” to be a double entendre. When editors reject my poems, did I slip up, or did they? Is their slip showing, or is mine?



Spring Was Delayed
by Michael R. Burch

Winter came early:
the driving snows,
the delicate frosts
that crystallize

all we forget
or refuse to know,
all we regret
that makes us wise.

Spring was delayed:
the nubile rose,
the tentative sun,
the wind’s soft sighs,

all we omit
or refuse to show,
whatever we shield
behind guarded eyes.

Originally published by Borderless Journal



Drippings
by Michael R. Burch

I have no words
for winter’s pale splendors
awash in gray twilight,
nor these slow-dripping eaves
renewing their tinkling songs.

Life’s like the failing resistance
of autumn to winter
and plays its low accompaniment,
slipping slowly
away
...
..
.



The Drawer of Mermaids
by Michael R. Burch

This poem is dedicated to Alina Karimova, who was born with severely deformed legs and five fingers missing. Alina loves to draw mermaids and believes her fingers will eventually grow out.

Although I am only four years old,
they say that I have an old soul.
I must have been born long, long ago,
here, where the eerie mountains glow
at night, in the Urals.

A madman named Geiger has cursed these slopes;
now, shut in at night, the emphatic ticking
fills us with dread.
(Still, my momma hopes
that I will soon walk with my new legs.)

It’s not so much legs as the fingers I miss,
drawing the mermaids under the ledges.
(Observing, Papa will kiss me
in all his distracted joy;
but why does he cry?)

And there is a boy
who whispers my name.
Then I am not lame;
for I leap, and I follow.
(G’amma brings a wiseman who says

our infirmities are ours, not God’s,
that someday a beautiful Child
will return from the stars,
and then my new fingers will grow
if only I trust Him; and so

I am preparing to meet Him, to go,
should He care to receive me.)

Keywords/Tags: mermaid, mermaids, child, children, childhood, Urals, Ural Mountains, soul, soulmate, radiation



The Blobfish
by Michael R. Burch

You can call me a "blob"
with your oversized gob,
but what's your excuse,
great gargantuan Zeus
whose once-chiseled abs
are now marbleized flab?

But what really alarms me
(how I wish you'd abstain)
is when you start using
that oversized "brain."
Consider the planet! Refrain!



There’s a Stirring and Awakening in the World
by Michael R. Burch

There’s a stirring and awakening in the world,
and even so my spirit stirs within,
imagining some Power beckoning—
the Force which through the stamen gently whirrs,
unlocking tumblers deftly, even mine.

The grape grows wild-entangled on the vine,
and here, close by, the honeysuckle shines.
And of such life, at last there comes there comes the Wine.

And so it is with spirits’ fruitful yield—
the growth comes first, Green Vagrance, then the Bloom.

The world somehow must give the spirit room
to blossom, till its light shines—wild, revealed.

And then at last the earth receives its store
of blessings, as glad hearts cry—More! More! More!

Originally published by Borderless Journal
POEMS ABOUT SHAKESPEARE by Michael R. Burch

These are poems I have written about Shakespeare, poems I have written for Shakespeare, and poems I have written after Shakespeare.



Fleet Tweet: Apologies to Shakespeare
by Michael R. Burch

a tweet
by any other name
would be as fleet!
@mikerburch



Fleet Tweet II: Further Apologies to Shakespeare
by Michael R. Burch

Remember, doggonit,
heroic verse crowns the Shakespearean sonnet!
So if you intend to write a couplet,
please do it on the doublet!
@mikerburch



Stage Fright
by Michael R. Burch

To be or not to be?
In the end Hamlet
opted for naught.



Ophelia
by Michael R. Burch

for Kevin N. Roberts

Ophelia, madness suits you well,
as the ocean sounds in an empty shell,
as the moon shines brightest in a starless sky,
as suns supernova before they die ...



Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 Refuted
by Michael R. Burch, circa age 18

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.
Whose winsome flame, not half so 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.
Whose scorching flames mild 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.
Whose tender cheeks, so enchantingly warm,
far vaster treasures, harbor no thorns.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly

This was my first sonnet, written in my teens after I discovered Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130." At the time I didn't know the rules of the sonnet form, so mine is a bit unconventional. I think it is not bad for the first attempt of a teen poet. I remember writing this poem in my head on the way back to my dorm from a freshman English class. I would have been 18 or 19 at the time.



Attention Span Gap
by Michael R. Burch

What if a poet, Shakespeare,
were still living to tweet to us here?
He couldn't write sonnets,
just couplets, doggonit,
and we wouldn't have Hamlet or Lear!

Yes, a sonnet may end in a couplet,
which we moderns can write in a doublet,
in a flash, like a tweet.
Does that make it complete?
Should a poem be reduced to a stublet?

Bring back that Grand Era when men
had attention spans long as their pens,
or rather the quills
of the monsieurs and fils
who gave us the Dress, not its hem!



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’d 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.

“Chloe” is a Shakespearean sonnet about being parted from someone you wanted and expected to be with forever. It was originally published by Romantics Quarterly as "A Dying Fall"



Sonnet: 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.

“The City is a Garment” is a Shakespearean sonnet.



Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

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.

“Afterglow” is a Shakespearean sonnet.



I Learned Too Late
by Michael R. Burch

“Show, don’t tell!”

I learned too late that poetry has rules,
although they may be rules for greater fools.

In any case, by dodging rules and schools,
I avoided useless duels.

I learned too late that sentiment is bad—
that Blake and Keats and Plath had all been had.

In any case, by following my heart,
I learned to walk apart.

I learned too late that “telling” is a crime.
Did Shakespeare know? Is Milton doing time?

In any case, by telling, I admit:
I think such rules are ****.



Heaven Bent
by Michael R. Burch

This life is hell; it can get no worse.
Summon the coroner, the casket, the hearse!
But I’m upwardly mobile. How the hell can I know?
I can only go up; I’m already below!

This is a poem in which I imagine Shakespeare speaking through a modern Hamlet.



That Mella Fella
by Michael R. Burch

John Mella was the longtime editor of Light Quarterly.

There once was a fella
named Mella,
who, if you weren’t funny,
would tell ya.
But he was cool, clever, nice,
gave some splendid advice,
and if you did well,
he would sell ya.

Shakespeare had his patrons and publishers; John Mella was one of my favorites in the early going, along with Jean Mellichamp Milliken of The Lyric.



Chip Off the Block
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

In the fusion of poetry and drama,
Shakespeare rules! Jeremy’s a ham: a
chip off the block, like his father and mother.
Part poet? Part ham? Better run for cover!
Now he’s Benedick — most comical of lovers!

NOTE: Jeremy’s father is a poet and his mother is an actress; hence the fusion, or confusion, as the case may be.

Keywords/Tags: Shakespeare, Shakespearean, sonnet, epigram, epigrams, Hamlet, Ophelia, Lear, Benedick, tweet, tweets



Untitled Epigrams

Teach me to love:
to fly beyond sterile Mars
to percolating Venus.
—Michael R. Burch

The LIV is LIVid:
livid with blood,
and full of egos larger
than continents.
—Michael R. Burch

Evil is as evil does.
Evil never needs a cause.
Evil loves amoral “laws,”
laughs and licks its blood-red claws
while kids are patched together with gauze.
— Michael R. Burch

Poets laud Justice’s
high principles.
Trump just gropes
her raw genitals.
—Michael R. Burch



When Pigs Fly
by Michael R. Burch

On the Trail of Tears,
my Cherokee brothers,
why hang your heads?
Why shame your mothers?

Laugh wildly instead!
We will soon be dead.

When we lie in our graves,
let the white-eyes take
the woodlands we loved
for the *** and the rake.

It is better to die
than to live out a lie
in so narrow a sty.



Perhat Tursun (1969-) is one of the foremost living Uyghur language poets, if he is still alive. Tursun has been described as a "self-professed Kafka character" and that comes through splendidly in poems of his like "Elegy." Unfortunately, Tursun was "disappeared" into a Chinese "reeducation" concentration camp where extreme psychological torture is the norm. According to a disturbing report he was later "hospitalized."

Elegy
by Perhat Tursun
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

"Your soul is the entire world."
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Asylum seekers, will you recognize me among the mountain passes' frozen corpses?
Can you identify me here among our Exodus's exiled brothers?
We begged for shelter but they lashed us bare; consider our naked corpses.
When they compel us to accept their massacres, do you know that I am with you?
Three centuries later they resurrect, not recognizing each other,
Their former greatness forgotten.
I happily ingested poison, like a fine wine.
When they search the streets and cannot locate our corpses, do you know that I am with you?
In that tower constructed of skulls you will find my dome as well:
They removed my head to more accurately test their swords' temper.
When before their swords our relationship flees like a flighty lover,
Do you know that I am with you?
When men in fur hats are used for target practice in the marketplace
Where a dying man's face expresses his agony as a bullet cleaves his brain
While the executioner's eyes fail to comprehend why his victim vanishes, ...
Seeing my form reflected in that bullet-pierced brain's erratic thoughts,
Do you know that I am with you?
In those days when drinking wine was considered worse than drinking blood,
did you taste the flour ground out in that blood-turned churning mill?
Now, when you sip the wine Ali-Shir Nava'i imagined to be my blood
In that mystical tavern's dark abyssal chambers,
Do you know that I am with you?



Hermann Hesse

Hermann Karl Hesse (1877-1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, essayist, painter and mystic. Hesse’s best-known works include Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Demian, Narcissus and Goldmund and The Glass Bead Game. One of Germany’s greatest writers, Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

"Stages" or "Steps"
by Hermann Hesse
from his novel The Glass Bead Game
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

As every flower wilts and every youth
must wilt and exit life from a curtained stage,
so every virtue—even our truest truth—
blooms some brief time and cannot last forever.
Since life may summons death at any age
we must prepare for death’s obscene endeavor,
meet our end with courage and without remorse,
forego regret and hopes of some reprieve,
embrace death’s end, as life’s required divorce,
some new beginning, calling us to live.
Thus let us move, serene, beyond our fear,
and let no sentiments detain us here.

The Universal Spirit would not chain us,
but elevates us slowly, stage by stage.
If we demand a halt, our fears restrain us,
caught in the webs of creaturely defense.
We must prepare for imminent departure
or else be bound by foolish “permanence.”
Death’s hour may be our swift deliverance,
from which we speed to fresher, newer spaces,
and Life may summons us to bolder races.
So be it, heart! Farewell, and adieu, then!



The Poet
by Hermann Hesse
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Only upon me, the lonely one,
Do this endless night’s stars shine
As the fountain gurgles its faery song.

For me alone, the lonely one,
The shadows of vagabond clouds
Float like dreams over slumbering farms.

What is mine lies beyond possession:
Neither manor, nor pasture,
Neither forest, nor hunting permit …

What is mine belongs to no one:
The plunging brook beyond the veiling woods,
The terrifying sea,
The chick-like chatter of children at play,
The weeping and singing of a lonely man longing for love.

The temples of the gods are mine, also,
And the distant past’s aristocratic castles.

And mine, no less, the luminous vault of heaven,
My future home …

Often in flights of longing my soul soars heavenward,
Hoping to gaze on the halls of the blessed,
Where Love, overcoming the Law, unconditional Love for All,
Leaves them all nobly transformed:
Farmers, kings, tradesman, bustling sailors,
Shepherds, gardeners, one and all,
As they gratefully celebrate their heavenly festivals.

Only the poet is unaccompanied:
The lonely one who continues alone,
The recounter of human longing,
The one who sees the pale image of a future,
The fulfillment of a world
That has no further need of him.
Many garlands
Wilt on his grave,
But no one cares or remembers him.



On a Journey to Rest
by Hermann Hesse
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don't be downcast, the night is soon over;
then we can watch the pale moon hover
over the dawning land
as we rest, hand in hand,
laughing secretly to ourselves.

Don't be downcast, the time will soon come
when we, too, can rest
(our small crosses will stand, blessed,
on the edge of the road together;
the rain, then the snow will fall,
and the winds come and go)
heedless of the weather.



Lonesome Night
by Hermann Hesse
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Dear brothers, who are mine,
All people, near and far,
Wishing on every star,
Imploring relief from pain;

My brothers, stumbling, dumb,
Each night, as pale stars ache,
Lift thin, limp hands for crumbs,
mutter and suffer, awake;

Poor brothers, commonplace,
Pale sailors, who must live
Without a bright guide above,
We share a common face.

Return my welcome.



How Heavy the Days
by Hermann Hesse
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

How heavy the days.
Not a fire can warm me,
Nor a sun brighten me!
Everything barren,
Everything bare,
Everything utterly cold and merciless!
Now even the once-beloved stars
Look distantly down,
Since my heart learned
Love can die.



Without You
by Hermann Hesse
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My pillow regards me tonight
Comfortless as a gravestone;
I never thought it would be so bitter
To face the night alone,
Not to lie asleep entangled in your hair.

I lie alone in this silent house,
The hanging lamp softly dimmed,
Then gently extend my hands
To welcome yours …
Softly press my warm mouth
To yours …
Only to kiss myself,
Then suddenly I'm awake
And the night grows colder still.

The star in the window winks knowingly.
Where is your blonde hair,
Your succulent mouth?

Now I drink pain in every former delight,
Find poison in every wine;
I never knew it would be so bitter
To face the night alone,
Alone, without you.



Secretly We Thirst…
by Hermann Hesse
from his novel The Glass Bead Game
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Charismatic, spiritual, with the gracefulness of arabesques,
our lives resemble fairies’ pirouettes,
spinning gently through the nothingness
to which we sacrifice our beings and the present.

Whirling dreams of quintessence and loveliness,
like breathing in perfect harmony,
while beneath your bright surface
blackness broods, longing for blood and barbarity.

Spinning aimlessly in emptiness,
dancing (as if without distress), always ready to play,
yet, secretly, we thirst for reality
for the conceiving, for the birth pangs, for suffering and death.

Doch heimlich dürsten wir…

Anmutig, geistig, arabeskenzart
*******unser Leben sich wie das von Feen
In sanften Tänzen um das Nichts zu drehen,
Dem wir geopfert Sein und Gegenwart.

Schönheit der Träume, holde Spielerei,
So hingehaucht, so reinlich abgestimmt,
Tief unter deiner heiteren Fläche glimmt
Sehnsucht nach Nacht, nach Blut, nach Barbarei.

Im Leeren dreht sich, ohne Zwang und Not,
Frei unser Leben, stets zum Spiel bereit,
Doch heimlich dürsten wir nach Wirklichkeit,
Nach Zeugung und Geburt, nach Leid und Tod.



Across The Fields
by Hermann Hesse
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Across the sky, the clouds sweep,
Across the fields, the wind blunders,
Across the fields, the lost child
Of my mother wanders.

Across the street, the leaves sweep,
Across the trees, the starlings cry;
Across the distant mountains,
My home must lie.



EXCERPTS FROM "THE SON OF THE BRAHMAN"
by Hermann Hesse
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

In the house-shade,
by the sunlit riverbank beyond the bobbing boats,
in the Salwood forest’s deep shade,
and beneath the shade of the fig tree,
that’s where Siddhartha grew up.

Siddhartha, the handsomest son of the Brahman,
like a young falcon,
together with his friend Govinda, also the son of a Brahman,
like another young falcon.

Siddhartha!

The sun tanned his shoulders lightly by the riverbanks when he bathed,
as he performed the sacred ablutions,
the sacred offerings.

Shade poured into his black eyes
whenever he played in the mango grove,
whenever his mother sang to him,
whenever the sacred offerings were made,
whenever his father, the esteemed scholar, instructed him,
whenever the wise men advised him.

For a long time, Siddhartha had joined in the wise men’s palaver,
and had also practiced debate
and the arts of reflection and meditation
with his friend Govinda.

Siddhartha already knew how to speak the Om silently, the word of words,
to speak it silently within himself while inhaling,
to speak it silently without himself while exhaling,
always with his soul’s entire concentration,
his forehead haloed by the glow of his lucid spirit.

He already knew how to feel Atman in his being’s depths,
an indestructible unity with the universe.

Joy leapt in his father’s heart for his son,
so quick to learn, so eager for knowledge.

Siddhartha!

He saw Siddhartha growing up to become a great man:
a wise man and a priest,
a prince among the Brahmans.

Bliss leapt in his mother’s breast when she saw her son's regal carriage,
when she saw him sit down,
when she saw him rise.

Siddhartha!

So strong, so handsome,
so stately on those long, elegant legs,
and when bowing to his mother with perfect respect.

Siddhartha!

Love nestled and fluttered in the hearts of the Brahmans’ daughters when Siddhartha passed by with his luminous forehead, with the aspect of a king, with his lean hips.

But more than all the others Siddhartha was loved by Govinda, his friend, also the son of a Brahman.

Govinda loved Siddhartha’s alert eyes and kind voice,
loved his perfect carriage and the perfection of his movements,
indeed, loved everything Siddhartha said and did,
but what Govinda loved most was Siddhartha’s spirit:
his transcendent yet passionate thoughts,
his ardent will, his high calling. …

Govinda wanted to follow Siddhartha:

Siddhartha the beloved!

Siddhartha the splendid!



Thus Siddhartha was loved by all, a joy to all, a delight to all.

But alas, Siddhartha did not delight himself. … His heart lacked joy. …

For Siddhartha had begun to nurse discontent deep within himself.



Shock and Awe
by Michael R. Burch

With megatons of “wonder,”
we make our godhead clear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.

The world’s heart ripped asunder,
its dying pulse we hear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.

Strange Trinity! We ponder
this God we hold so dear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.

The vulture and the condor
proclaim: "The feast is near!"
Death. Destruction. Fear.

Soon He will plow us under;
the Anti-Christ is here:
Death. Destruction. Fear.

We love to hear Him thunder!
With Shock and Awe, appear!
Death. Destruction. Fear.

For God can never blunder;
we know He holds US dear:
Death. Destruction. Fear.



The State of the Art (?)
by Michael R. Burch

Has rhyme lost all its reason
and rhythm, renascence?
Are sonnets out of season
and poems but poor pretense?
Are poets lacking fire,
their words too trite and forced?
What happened to desire?
Has passion been coerced?
Must poetry fade slowly,
like Latin, to past tense?
Are the bards too high and holy,
or their readers merely dense?



Solicitation
by Michael R. Burch

He comes to me out of the shadows, acknowledging
my presence with a tip of his hat, always the gentleman,
and his eyes are on mine like a snake’s on a bird’s—
quizzical, mesmerizing.

He ***** his head as though something he heard intrigues him
(although I hear nothing) and he smiles, amusing himself at my expense;
his words are full of desire and loathing, and while I hear everything,
he says nothing I understand.

The moon shines—maniacal, queer—as he takes my hand whispering
"Our time has come" ... And so together we stroll creaking docks
where the sea sends sickening things
scurrying under rocks and boards.

Moonlight washes his ashen face as he stares unseeing into my eyes.
He sighs, and the sound crawls slithering down my spine;
my blood seems to pause at his touch as he caresses my face.

He unfastens my dress till the white lace shows, and my neck is bared.
His teeth are long, yellow and hard, his face bearded and haggard.
A wolf howls in the distance. There are no wolves in New York. I gasp.
My blood is a trickle his wet tongue embraces. My heart races madly.
He likes it like that.



Less Heroic Couplets: Baseball Explained
by Michael R. Burch

Baseball’s immeasurable spittin’
mixed with occasional hittin’.



Infatuate, or Sweet Centerless Sixteen
by Michael R. Burch

Inconsolable as “love” had left your heart,
you woke this morning eager to pursue
warm lips again, or something “really cool”
on which to press your lips and leave their mark.

As breath upon a windowpane at dawn
soon glows, a spreading halo full of sun,
your thought of love blinks wildly—on and on . . .
then fizzles at the center, and is gone.



The Wonder Boys
by Michael R. Burch

(for Leslie Mellichamp, the late editor of The Lyric,
who was a friend and mentor to many poets, and
a fine poet in his own right)

The stars were always there, too-bright cliches:
scintillant truths the jaded world outgrew
as baffled poets winged keyed kites—amazed,
in dream of shocks that suddenly came true . . .

but came almost as static—background noise,
a song out of the cosmos no one hears,
or cares to hear. The poets, starstruck boys,
lay tuned in to their kite strings, saucer-eared.

They thought to feel the lightning’s brilliant sparks
electrify their nerves, their brains; the smoke
of words poured from their overheated hearts.
The kite string, knotted, made a nifty rope . . .

You will not find them here; they blew away—
in tumbling flight beyond nights’ stars. They clung
by fingertips to satellites. They strayed
too far to remain mortal. Elfin, young,
their words are with us still. Devout and fey,
they wink at us whenever skies are gray.

Originally published by The Lyric



The Singer
by Michael R. Burch

for Leslie Mellichamp

The sun that swoons at dusk
and seems a vanished grace
breaks over distant shores
as a child’s uplifted face
takes up a song like yours.

We listen, and embrace
its warmth with dawning trust.



Dawn, to the Singer
by Michael R. Burch

for Leslie Mellichamp

“O singer, sing to me—
I know the world’s awry—
I know how piteously
the hungry children cry.”

We hear you even now—
your voice is with us yet.
Your song did not desert us,
nor can our hearts forget.

“But I bleed warm and near,
And come another dawn
The world will still be here
When home and hearth are gone.”

Although the world seems colder,
your words will warm it yet.
Lie untroubled, still its compass
and guiding instrument.



Geraldine in her pj's
by Michael R. Burch

for Geraldine A. V. Hughes

Geraldine in her pj's
checks her security relays,
sits down armed with a skillet,
mutters, "Intruder? I'll **** it!"
Then, as satellites wink high above,
she turns to her poets with love.



Advice to Young Poets
by Nicanor Parra Sandoval
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Youngsters,
write however you will
in your preferred style.

Too much blood flowed under the bridge
for me to believe
there’s just one acceptable path.
In poetry everything’s permitted.

Originally published by Setu



A poet births words,
brings them into the world like a midwife,
then wet-nurses them from infancy to adolescence.
— Michael R. Burch



The Century’s Wake
by Michael R. Burch

lines written at the close of the 20th century

Take me home. The party is over,
the century passed—no time for a lover.

And my heart grew heavy
as the fireworks hissed through the dark
over Central Park,
past high-towering spires to some backwoods levee,
hurtling banner-hung docks to the torchlit seas.

And my heart grew heavy;
I felt its disease—
its apathy,
wanting the bright, rhapsodic display
to last more than a single day.

If decay was its rite,
now it has learned to long
for something with more intensity,
more gaudy passion, more song—
like the huddled gay masses,
the wildly-cheering throng.

You ask me—
How can this be?
A little more flair,
or perhaps only a little more clarity.

I leave her tonight to the century’s wake;
she disappoints me.



The following translation is the speech of the Sibyl to Aeneas, after he has implored her to help him find his beloved father in the Afterlife, found in the sixth book of the Aeneid ...

The Descent into the Underworld
by Virgil
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The Sibyl began to speak:

“God-blooded Trojan, son of Anchises,
descending into the Underworld’s easy
since Death’s dark door stands eternally unbarred.
But to retrace one’s steps and return to the surface:
that’s the conundrum, that’s the catch!
Godsons have done it, the chosen few
whom welcoming Jupiter favored
and whose virtue merited heaven.
However, even the Blessed find headway’s hard:
immense woods barricade boggy bottomland
where the Cocytus glides with its dark coils.
But if you insist on ferrying the Styx twice
and twice traversing Tartarus,
if Love demands you indulge in such madness,
listen closely to how you must proceed...”



Uther’s Last Battle
by Michael R. Burch

Uther Pendragon was the father of the future King Arthur, but he had given his son to the wily Merlyn and knew nothing of his whereabouts. Did Uther meet his son just before his death, as one of the legends suggests?

When Uther, the High King,
unable to walk, borne upon a litter
went to fight Colgrim, the Saxon King,
his legs were weak, and his visage bitter.

“Where is Merlyn, the sage?
For today I truly feel my age.”

All day long the battle raged
and the dragon banner was sorely pressed,
but the courage of Uther never waned
till the sun hung low upon the west.

“Oh, where is Merlyn to speak my doom,
for truly I feel the chill of the tomb.”

Then, with the battle almost lost
and the king besieged on every side,
a prince appeared, clad all in white,
and threw himself against the tide.

“Oh, where is Merlyn, who stole my son?
For, truly, now my life is done.”

Then Merlyn came unto the king
as the Saxons fled before a sword
that flashed like lightning in the hand
of a prince that day become a lord.

“Oh, Merlyn, speak not, for I see
my son has truly come to me.
And today I need no prophecy
to see how bright his days will be.”

So Uther, then, the valiant king
met his son, and kissed him twice—
the one, the first, the one, the last—
and smiled, and then his time was past.

Originally published by Songs of Innocence



HAIKU

Unaware it protects
the hilltop paddies,
the scarecrow seems useless to itself.
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Fading memories
of summer holidays:
the closet’s last floral skirt...
—Michael R. Burch

Scandalous tides,
removing bikinis!
—Michael R. Burch

She bathes in silver
~~~~~afloat~~~~
on her reflections ...
—Michael R. Burch



Sulpicia Translations by Michael R. Burch

These are modern English translations by Michael R. Burch of seven Latin poems written by the ancient Roman female poet Sulpicia, who was apparently still a girl or very young woman when she wrote them.



I. At Last, Love!
by Sulpicia
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Carolyn Clark, who put me up to it

It's come at last! Love!
The kind of love that, had it remained veiled,
would have shamed me more than baring my naked soul.
I appealed to Aphrodite in my poems
and she delivered my beloved to me,
placed him snugly, securely against my breast!
The Goddess has kept her promises:
now let my joy be told,
so that it cannot be said no woman enjoys her recompense!
I would not want to entrust my testimony
to tablets, even those signed and sealed!
Let no one read my avowals before my love!
Yet indiscretion has its charms,
while it's boring to conform one’s face to one’s reputation.
May I always be deemed worthy lover to a worthy love!



II. Dismal Journeys, Unwanted Arrivals
by Sulpicia
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Carolyn Clark, who put me up to it

My much-hated birthday's arrived, to be spent mourning
in a wretched countryside, bereft of Cerinthus.
Alas, my lost city! Is it suitable for a girl: that rural villa
by the banks of a frigid river draining the fields of Arretium?
Peace now, Uncle Messalla, my over-zealous chaperone!
Arrivals of relatives aren't always welcome, you know.
Kidnapped, abducted, snatched away from my beloved city,
I’d mope there, prisoner to my mind and emotions,
this hostage coercion prevents from making her own decisions!



III. The Thankfully Abandoned Journey
by Sulpicia
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Carolyn Clark, who put me up to it

Did you hear the threat of that wretched trip’s been abandoned?
Now my spirits soar and I can be in Rome for my birthday!
Let’s all celebrate this unexpected good fortune!



IV. Thanks for Everything, and Nothing
by Sulpicia
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Carolyn Clark, who put me up to it

Thanks for revealing your true colors,
thus keeping me from making further fool of myself!
I do hope you enjoy your wool-basket *****,
since any female-filled toga is much dearer to you
than Sulpicia, daughter of Servius!
On the brighter side, my guardians are much happier,
having feared I might foolishly bed a nobody!



V. Reproach for Indifference
by Sulpicia
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Carolyn Clark, who put me up to it

Have you no kind thoughts for your girl, Cerinthus,
now that fever wilts my wasting body?
If not, why would I want to conquer this disease,
knowing you no longer desired my existence?
After all, what’s the point of living
when you can ignore my distress with such indifference?



VI. Her Apology for Errant Desire
by Sulpicia
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Carolyn Clark, who put me up to it

Let me admit my errant passion to you, my love,
since in these last few days
I've exceeded all my foolish youth's former follies!
And no folly have I ever regretted more
than leaving you alone last night,
desiring only to disguise my desire for you!



Sulpicia on the First of March
by Sulpicia
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

“One might venture that Sulpicia was not over-modest.” – MRB

Sulpicia's adorned herself for you, O mighty Mars, on your Kalends:
come admire her yourself, if you have the sense to observe!
Venus will forgive your ogling, but you, O my violent one,
beware lest your armaments fall shamefully to the floor!
Cunning Love lights twin torches from her eyes,
with which he’ll soon inflame the gods themselves!
Wherever she goes, whatever she does,
Elegance and Grace follow dutifully in attendance!
If she unleashes her hair, trailing torrents become her train:
if she braids her mane, her braids are to be revered!
If she dons a Tyrian gown, she inflames!
She inflames, if she wears virginal white!
As stylish Vertumnus wears her thousand outfits
on eternal Olympus, even so she models hers gracefully!
She alone among the girls is worthy
of Tyre’s soft wool dipped twice in costly dyes!
May she always possess whatever rich Arabian farmers
reap from their fragrant plains’ perfumed fields,
and whatever flashing gems dark India gathers
from the scarlet shores of distant Dawn’s seas.
Sing the praises of this girl, Muses, on these festive Kalends,
and you, proud Phoebus, strum your tortoiseshell lyre!
She'll carry out these sacred rites for many years to come,
for no girl was ever worthier of your chorus!

• We may not be able to find the true God through logic, but we can certainly find false gods through illogic. — Michael R. Burch



Rag Doll
by Michael R. Burch, circa age 17

On an angry sea a rag doll is tossed
back and forth between cruel waves
that have marred her easy beauty
and ripped away her clothes.
And her arms, once smoothly tanned,
are gashed and torn and peeling
as she dances to the waters’
rockings and reelings.
She’s a rag doll now,
a toy of the sea,
and never before
has she been so free,
or so uneasy.

She’s slammed by the hammering waves,
the flesh shorn away from her bones,
and her silent lips must long to scream,
and her corpse must long to find its home.
For she’s a rag doll now,
at the mercy of all
the sea’s relentless power,
cruelly being ravaged
with every passing hour.

Her eyes are gone; her lips are swollen
shut to the pounding waves
whose waters reached out to fill her mouth
with puddles of agony.
Her limbs are limp; her skull is crushed;
her hair hangs like seaweed
in trailing tendrils draped across
a never-ending sea.
For she’s a rag doll now,
a worn-out toy
with which the waves will play
ten thousand thoughtless games
until her bed is made.

Keywords/Tags: Sulpicia, Latin, Latin Poems, English Translations, Rome, Roman, Cerinthus, Albius Tibullus, Uncle Valerius Messalla Corvinus, birthday, villa, poem, poetry, winter, spring, snow, frost, rose, sun, eyes, sight, seeing, understanding, wisdom, Ars Poetica, Messiah, disciple
"The Making of a Poet" is the account of how I came to be a poet.
L A Lamb Sep 2014
Call me an alcoholic,
Druggie, ******. I am none of these things.
I have my fits and fiends of wanting **** and wine, but
I am fine.

Have you ever written letters you don’t send?

I don’t think it was really unfair of me, but there were certainly better ways. It might’ve been easier if I’d said no—a jab to alert you of the no-ness—but I wanted to say yes, even though I knew I would possibly say later “I can’t”.

I’ve liked you for a while. I denied it for some time. Even though we dated briefly and it seems like smoke now, it validated the summers we spent together. Even in 2011 I liked you; last year I did and was scared to; this year I let it happen. I couldn’t control it. I saw you and wanted you, I had to; I had you. You were more than summer ******* and we both know it. It was hard to say and acknowledge though, because summer things come up. You’re not like other “lifeguards” I “******” though, and I know I’m not just another lifeguard you ****** either. We’re friends. We were something.

I’m sorry I left suddenly, rashly and didn’t talk to you for a week.. but I know you’re not emotionally weak and you dealt with it even if it confused or surprised you. It was a defense mechanism on my part. I wouldn’t have known how to approach you or maintain a long distance relationship, especially since I’m living with Rachel.. of course you could’ve visited, but it would’ve been uncomfortable once you left and we both know that. This situation has already been mapped out and I think we both knew the outcome of this fall. We’re friends however, well, I actually value you as one, and I would like to see you and hang out. Maybe I’ll hit you up when I’m back in the area—if you want to see me, that it—and as I said, if you’re in Annapolis and want to go out some weekend that’s possible. I wouldn’t even have to stay with you if it were too much; I could hang out with Katie. But either way would be fun, I think.

So I didn’t want a relationship. Yet here I am, trying to communicate and write you… yesterday was weird. I realized an entire week had passed since I left you and didn’t say anything. I wanted to write you. I texted you to make sure it was okay. Maybe you thought it was a bit ****** up or maybe you weren’t phased, but either way I’m sorry I left like that. I didn’t know how else to leave.

Please know, however, that I wanted to be your girlfriend, even if it was just for a little bit of time. I used to think dating you wasn’t even something to consider because neither of us seemed to be interested in a relationship and we are the type of people who don’t usually get attached. I have problems with that. And right now I’m in an awkward situation here because I told Rachel I don’t want to have *** with anyone right now—which I don’t (Salisbury is STD and I’m clean, plus I’m kind of emotionally drained and even though *** is physically fun it brings a lot of baggage.. not that I’m attracted to anyone here anyways but this fall is about ME and getting awesome grades/working on grad application stuff/trying not to lose it)—and she is included in that.

I did have *** with her when I came here though… I guess it was “I missed you,” ***, or “I don’t want to feel with emotions regarding Drew so I’m going to ******* as a distraction” ***, or maybe even “I wonder if we can just have *** as friends without any relationship ties,” ***.. which can’t happen either. She likes me still, or loves me, or whatever. I don’t know how because I’ve been so emotionally distant but I guess she misinterpreted me being nice/being down for *** for still caring about her that way. Between finishing my class, worrying about working and being around her (just her for now, the other roomies should be here next week) I’ve pushed down thinking about you because it was hard to. I remember last year and how it was then, too. Things don’t seem to change much.

Rachel asked about you. I told her honestly. I told her that I couldn’t attach to her the same and that I liked you and I’m sorry I hurt her this summer, but last year she got a boyfriend and I had you.. then I left and she still had him and I wasn’t sure how you felt, but I met Ben and when I realized it wasn’t the way I perceived it to be in my head she was there when I was alone and vulnerable. It took her a long time to admit she liked girls but I’m over it with her, honestly, even though I find her sexually attractive.

When I talked about you, however, she said she would get whatever needed to satisfy all aspects of my bisexuality.. but I told her there was a difference in the way it feels to be with a man, and I thought of you—your warmth, strength and ability to excite me with such passionate heterosexual compulsion.

My mind is so ****** right now. Both of you are part of my past and present although it’s different. I’m not going to sleep with Rachel, and I’m not around to sleep with you (not that you would anyways—although I’m not sure you wouldn’t if the moment was right) so I’m not going to sleep with anyone. *** isn’t always just *** and I am in a situation now where I’m being influenced by feelings and ****** ties and I don’t want any with her. I think about you, though, and it’s easier because I’m not around you but it wasn’t very long ago that I was. I guess I took it for granted. It’s really over now since I’m not coming back to PMSI, but it at least made me happy that I could validate the way I felt towards you. The last boyfriend I had was three years ago, and, besides Rachel, I haven’t been in a relationship. It’s hard for me to like people sometimes, and I don’t know if I can like anyone fully.. that’s why I didn’t want to try with you, really. I didn’t want to lead you on or give you expectations of how our long-distance relationship could’ve been, but I want you to know that I still like you and will have to eventually get over you, but I am going to let time do that instead of distracting myself with other people—that’s what I used to do.

You told me once I was a void you were trying to fill.. I don’t want to be that. I want to be a piece that something can be built on; I want to be an experience on which you can reflect fondly and acknowledge that, although brief and often unclear, was real. You influenced me, shaped me and changed me, for the better, I think. I think we’ll always be cool and I’d like to keep in touch and see you.. but I understand that things may not be as casual regarding the way we act towards one another.

Otherwise, things are okay. I’ll have two jobs this fall, five classes and hopefully a bit of time for chill activity to maintain my sanity but I don’t want to be with anyone here. There’s no way I could. Rachel asked about us.. I told her I didn’t want to talk about it with her. I don’t. I hope she moves on but she’s in her room currently hanging out and I’m doing the same. It’s nice to have time alone to think. I can’t help but feel bad for her.. but feeling bad makes me accessible to her—which I need to stop.

— The End —