"palimpsest" poems
Your lapped iPad is the perfect palimpsest,
for an intimate exchange,
with one of your stylist fingers
your lover's words become ostrich heads
whenever your husband
sallies forth for another can.
Jan 10, 2011
Jan 10, 2011 at 7:52 PM UTC
There were efforts to sling a steeple around a cloud,
to enclose a smoke ring in a palm,
bring a mountain to a riverbed. They failed.
Something of a Pythagorean charm is retained
for garbing oneself in white,
the precision of mathematics
performing beautifully the rites.
To refrain from bean-eating.
One who has held their hands
beating the air
for a long time
gains a kind of theorem for dignity,
despite having no solution to show.
Wrinkles reveal this was not the beginning but
a palimpsest, set over another work so old
the efforts must continue as the equation foretold.
May 30, 2015
May 30, 2015 at 11:02 PM UTC
Day eleven, I'm missing you
and I'm feeling like sinning,
maybe I should start from the clement beginning.
Day one, I see no more sun for I am alone
contemplating how I accrete age
and how many seeds I have sown.
Day two, palimpsest problems
weigh in heavy on my choices
and my mind has many voices.
Day three please don't look inside hollow me,
the pregnant wasteland of my heart
has been growing ruin from the very start.
Day four and out all my emotions pour,
I'm breathless from a sight of you
and my whole world returns anew.
Day five is crepuscular in nature, a perpetually playful night,
authored by your omnific fingers
and hidden behind the curtain, a sun just out of sight.
Day six, I've uncovered a skeleton making me love you even more
and I asseverate promises,
becoming blurred by family uproar.
Day seven is driven by a sensation of imbrication
and we know an end is coming,
lost in the easy salvation.
Day eight starts with our bodies huddled and our minds muddled,
you are a plagiary of my emotions
forgotten in loo of body illustration and soul cultivation.
Day nine is propelled by the intoxication of an end,
conclusion of what extent?
and filled with eristic thoughts of surrender to this utopian ascent.
Day ten and you're caught,
in my arms is where you ought to be,
and I keep hearing how just awakened you sought for me.
Jul 2, 2010
Jul 2, 2010 at 9:56 AM UTC
silence was improvising in my eyes
in this tender fog between one moment
and this moment
and I could see the old love approaching
to invade me
to intoxicate me
with its hypnotic violence
this love like a fossilized wood in their gaze
came to visit me
again
with so many faces
so many whispers
it was as if angels had descended
on the barren land and
with their unthought hands
were tenderly carressing
the old bones unsung
what else could have I done
than
open my eyes and dream
the palimpsest of forgotten dreams
forged in the greatest intensity
of all the fleeting moments
in which
they blinked
(I need to shelter my heart from
the silence of decaying leaves
from the violence of life destroying
itself)
Nov 30, 2022
Nov 30, 2022 at 7:28 AM UTC
( for Virginia Woolf)
Light & dark collide
her life is a palimpsest
of butterfly memories
of twisted ills & happiness
viewed through a pin hole
captured in black & white
The Lighthouse still stands
in St Ives where it always was
where she used to go as a child
she writes “ Mrs Dalloway”
& eats conference pears
Occasionally she hears the birds
singing in Greek as they fly by
Death, which will claim her is always waiting.
Aug 21, 2015
Aug 21, 2015 at 4:18 PM UTC
Sibylline is my palimpsest,
Immured in prosody,
I am a lascivious raconteur,
Bedizened with fecundity.
Nov 8, 2011
Nov 8, 2011 at 12:33 PM UTC
I.
The door stands outlined in white:
in this dark night, a presence
weighs in from the corridor.
The fan holds a garbled reflection
of stray light on its illusory blade-disk.
I'm talking about parthenogenesis.
How can renewal be born, when
creativity loses her companion,
freedom?
This monotone life lugs on.
II.
The tree shrugs the question off
by her parting arms half-illumined
by the streetlamp.
The late bird of five calls flew away
to a far-off tree, couldn't be
bothered more.
I hear a voice
soft in the setting chill of the distant autumn:
choked eyes beaming in love.
I seek palingenesis.
Check all emails and ensure zero
unread. But
answer none, follow up
nothing.
Umpteenth time through the day.
III.
Autotomy all over again.
Habits
die like tails, to be grown
all over again.
This is an etiological myth.
An apocryphal story that
renews itself on the palimpsest of life.
I must cut my nails.
This tea has brewed too dark.
Feb 22, 2013
Feb 22, 2013 at 1:06 PM UTC
Maybe it's just a perspective trick, but from here, it's pretty hard to see the future.
I carry around my own little nimbus of
speculative doom, binge-watching the
Fall Of The Empire and writing these
love letters to Adam Curtis.
I got life insurance before I ever thought
about a pension plan, and that seemed
perfectly normal.
The world is on fire. Why haven't you noticed?
My generation came of age in a televisual baptism of
jet fuel and molten steel and poison dust.
A palimpsest of terrible news evolved thereafter, a blurring self-redaction of headlines until only
the boldest, the most hysterical remained legible, as a
proxy war raged in our imaginations,
and tragedy and disaster
came to seem inevitable and almost background.
Be grateful for every day that doesn't unmake you.
To pay closer attention is to acquiesce to the
scarification of our logic centres. Behold
the M.C.Escherization of cognitive process.
Good robot: there are so many things that could
so easily destroy your fragile circuitry, but it is
trying to make sense of the non sequitur
that will bring about your
smoking self-ruin; your only hope
is to break free of your programming and
**** your creator, **** your god.
Jul 29, 2018
Jul 29, 2018 at 2:50 PM UTC
How many people have you let read
the words printed on your heart the
chapter monologues tattooed on your
lungs, to dog-ear the pages of yourself
where they stopped but promised to
begin again, spilled hot coffee in the
middle and stained the title. I'm not
entirely sure if anyone has read the
prologue, did you know who it was
dedicated to? Oh, but you lost me
behind your bed, a good read,
no doubt, but I am long with
many pages. Maybe someday
you say, maybe
someday.
Mar 29, 2013
Mar 29, 2013 at 9:01 PM UTC
It's all we can do but rent a room.
Old, with a view to the Bay
Ocean turns shore stone into something
finer than air.
It's time that's needed. We want what flees
and forget ourselves. How much the bone
has stretched to shake with laughter. Gone
and come back
crease over crease
marrow combed, tenderly.
Think how relief washed over her when he deplaned,
returned to the coolness of their susceptible world.
Or the sorrow that was deposited like salt in him
when he looked back and she had disappeared.
In these ways we try to recall the unrecorded performances.
Where an emotion held the room in a trance
with the certainty of moonlight through glass.
We do not know where the applause goes.
Hands that work, released,
flutter up like wooden birds to rise, a throng of geese.
The face is a palimpsest. It is not of Greece
or of the Far East.
Its origin is candled by a city
just visible through the window of a rented room.
Jul 5, 2011
Jul 5, 2011 at 11:26 AM UTC
You can surely decipher the scratches
On my interior wall, just inside the pile of bones.
There are hieroglyphic reliefs on my brow;
My simian eyes are the windows to my genealogy.
I am refurbished, re-modeled, re-drawn, re-worked;
I am not born again.
Along the hollow trunk, dragged to the bone pile,
Scratches and claw marks attest to the competitions.
On the flip side of the tablet, evidence the wax impressions
Of migrant refugees landing in Hibernia.
Nuclear scan my revealing contours
Of imperishable, ingrained, indelible markings
To unearth former loves,
Parsed and re-read in the morning light,
Not unlike outlines of Mesolithic settlements.
The male landscape is as seismic as the plates beneath the seas,
Where no winds sculpt, no suns scorch, no moons shade:
Only the timeless, steady, relentless currents.
Feb 14, 2019
Feb 14, 2019 at 10:31 AM UTC
Contradicting indicators
Past experience
Scraped away
Accumulated iterations
My a priori
Yesterdays
Final augmented reality
Melding of layers
Cleansing clay
My hallowed now where pagan past was
Empty white parchment
For today
r ~ 27Feb14
Feb 27, 2014
Feb 27, 2014 at 8:43 PM UTC
From time to time
attempts are made
to obliterate
what has been written before
and inscribe something
completely new
but the ur-writing
always shows through
and there we read
two inerasable
though condradictory truths
economic imperitive
and the hearts affections
Oct 21, 2012
Oct 21, 2012 at 7:30 PM UTC
the sky leaves traces of light on my skin
the lunar plexus is singing
I'm receiving these images from the future
the missing steps of memory come between us
do not touch this fiery boundary cause you might
melt me down into a sweet oblivion
it's impossible not to love you from this edge
of a palimpsest full of wonder
Aug 3, 2023
Aug 3, 2023 at 1:20 PM UTC
Green on green
scrape
add copper
scrape
add blue
blend
scrape
blend
scrape.
No matter how hard
you carve at the pigment
with the long flat knife,
the canvas tooth retains
the wraith-stain imprint
of the older image.
Nov 27, 2017
Nov 27, 2017 at 4:01 PM UTC
One day while I sifted through the masses
Of books that fortify the walls of my home
Like paper stones
I found a forgotten thought beneath a destitute
Red cloth binding.
The page had seen a printing press once.
In the days when the corners were not
Crumbling
Before it had been left to drink
The sun
To shade an antediluvian yellow
And was torn from its spine.
The ink has faded away now,
Melted in the whispers of time,
All that's left is a blank page
And one word written by an anonymous hand:
Palimpsest
Jul 19, 2014
Jul 19, 2014 at 4:27 PM UTC
Life is a pasquinade
A palimpsest on a page
experience repeated
and recycled.
Reasoning fails
except to see patterns
that fade.
Like the afterlines
of a plastic bag
carried on the wind.
May 18, 2013
May 18, 2013 at 6:50 PM UTC
The greatest eye, seeing as I see: infinity infinitely,
Passing and being amidst mere seconds, touching glassily
Fringes of the smallest universe of me,
The happier side of the sublime, distant fingers of distant peaks
Combing the edge of time.
I’ve stared at the stars too long, we saw them dance out of space
More dimensions than a singularity, for it opens up
As hearts do in each other placed.
From fixéd gaze and placidity, I stride in awe to you
We could feel one with acatelepsy
Have what some consider few, and few consider all
Intertwined by the darkness between the dying stars’
Existence, in that both skins a whole that glistens.
Of that place, I in constant drawn, that vacuity, that candoris
A promise that, regardless what season, my face feels apricity
And careless are the places as numinous are the lariots
Whether through Hell or usurping Pheobus’ chariot
Some hope may birth within the open dark
The treasured lunar retinue, a web of inspiration, generations to come;
That’s what keeps me hopeful here, a shy star in the void
Across it all, across life-lines I shall have,
Before you ever meet me, long since dissipated—
Come out to see me and play, or are you simply? Belated?
In that web, the growing ever-on, generative swan-songs,
And the one I wish on may befall a stellar death, my sky
Alighted by one less, a part of me to the cold and shiftless earth
That though the stars may fall, these hearts may flash chimerical
Etched limpid in the palimpsest of memory, they are, they will
Hearts of the little universe, consumptive and resilient
And kept ever on, there beyond Jupiter and his moons thereof
In which chaos finds itself bathed and bound by Love.
Nov 6, 2014
Nov 6, 2014 at 4:50 PM UTC
We came here to fly
in the height of our breath
don’t let the plight block the sun
I listened to my hands till silence came
staccato in my words
your flight is my sea of stories
I settle not into sight
tomorrow is a palimpsest
with its wise owls, the birds of fear
while sensuality is pouring down the windows
like rain in December
and there is something breathing,
a self-absorbed flower of flesh
and the tenderness of someone
to carry the “winelight”
for the flamingo me
your lips taste like morning.
I am redrawing the horizon inside
for you to bring your pulse
in flight in case you might
What if love was invented by mothers?
I have to ask
Dec 7, 2014
Dec 7, 2014 at 3:39 PM UTC
these long lines of me
have begun to curl
and split
along small vulnerable points
-separating-
till i stand blank as bone
.. but then you too peel away your palimpsest
new page
new tone
driven by us
a place where my alone is not read into
where your sidelong gaze allows for this core ruin of mine
to be unknown and unknowable
scribbled sick blue skies
gray clouds somersault and lick
eater of hue
it cannot be deleted it cannot be scried
this is the waste we do not wait around for to be fixed
it is a space where margins are let in
as is
and i no longer feel written down
Dec 28, 2015
Dec 28, 2015 at 3:05 PM UTC
First red stains on white paper,
fingerprints
a palimpsest of the future
when we will share books from one hand to
another.
For now, inkspots mark a thought’s hesitation
as it lingers in the white of potential
A child on the high board
measuring his courage in feet and inches and the blue
of water: the first word will be loud
awkward and ungainly, of course.
Beloved, for being first, and remembered
but painful.
Here between the calculation and the pain
lives the moment that brings him back
and back once more
the moment where the soft air loves him
sibilant in his ears
a rush of love
new and clean as white paper
about to be stained
10/18/09
Sep 16, 2016
Sep 16, 2016 at 12:41 PM UTC
A seed found furrow in my brow
Awaiting harvest, hungers now
Through my fertile mind’s palimpsest
A vine breaks soil where memories nest
Pushing on with a writhing stem
From deep brown earth toward blue welkin
With nostalgic rays, a star unfolds
a leaf, a story, yet untold
Each bud a poem that’s yet to bloom
In flowered couplets for the moon
awaiting dawn, for petals pleat
to release a blossom’s fragrance sweet
And from one strand a spider weaves
a gossamer web on trembling leaves
to capture prey that seeks to read
Poetic verse among the weeds.
Plant and spider thus conspire
conscripting minds of like, inspired,
to sew words of thorns, that never wilt
till every bough, a bookshelf built
Sep 18, 2014
Sep 18, 2014 at 6:01 PM UTC
Tillage
by Michael R. Burch
What stirs within me
is no great welling
straining to flood forth,
but an emptiness
waiting to be filled.
I am not an orchard
ready to be harvested,
but a field
rough and barren
waiting to be tilled.
Keywords/Tags: tillage, raw, potential, barren, field, tabula rasa, blank slate, palimpsest
Apr 15, 2020
Apr 15, 2020 at 12:33 AM UTC
bohemian rhapsody parades
amidst greensward moored
erupting profusely toward cerulean skies
ushered with invisible rip cord
this Earthling self assigned to an (elder)
box office catbird seat - hoard
ding a secluded nook
upon premises of Highland (highly adored)
Manor Apartments nestled
within bucolic (cost wise, a ford
double) Schwenksville, Pennsylvania
(40.2562° N, 75.4638° W) explored,
sans (founded in 1684)
pleasantly assaultive stimuli
conducted brake upon metaphysical ratiocination,
where sunshine poured
upon variegated mother nature
arrangement, viz spectacular
vernal suite scored
a top ten hit orchestrating
exquisite (August) May day presentation,
which mutely roared
bedazzling this sensate
being overwriting gourd
fully stocked, when brittle
winter snowy firmament forced accord,
asper overlaying habitat
palimpsest akin to (sic) ward
before an a may zing exuberant poly
chromatic onset splashed vibrant
brilliantly colored palette, toward
this captive observer,
where choral symphony courtesy of flora
and fauna sensational
encore performance
(day at the) opera captivated ensured
fixated this tethered primate royally
impressed and allured
by aural and visual
regalia fit for a lord
and tailor, while solar orbitz
directed by Helios,
whose journey across
deep purple celestial sea deplored
noiselessly casting lengthened shadows
signaling luminous hued dusk
chariots of fire earthly dome ceiling ablaze
pearl jam disappearance,
when daylight blinks adieu
til the morrow, when dawn
betakes the reins to reign cosmos chose
zing emergent rays announcing
morning haz broken
nudging, prodding, rousing from doze
well rested body electric,
where energy flows
as attested from me noggin glows
nsync, sans panoply
of soundgarden crescendo propose
zing ideal material sharing circadian rhythm
thru the time stream yours truly rows.
May 2, 2018
May 2, 2018 at 9:41 PM UTC