"recursive" poems
How many
More creative
Ways can I say
I wanna die.
I hear they're
Gonna
Go to
Mars.
While I moulder
In my filth,
Ferment in
My forgetfulness.
And God
Says,
Put in more
Work
Slave.
And,
I do.
But I've gone
Past redemption
Got stuck
In retribution.
And all of this
Torment
Would end.
If I could only
Just disappear
Into
The epilogue
Of an
Obituary.
Sep 7, 2025
Sep 7, 2025 at 3:08 PM UTC
Heartstone is a reflection in music on a ‘lost’ poem. The poem described in its two short verses a summer’s day, a landscape, a fossil found and placed in the palm of a child’s hand. The poem inspired a seven-movement work for wind, brass and percussion with solo piano. Here is its poetic programme note.
Chert
The piano draws an arc of rhythm
rising then falling.
Above
two choirs of wind and brass
exclaim, fanfare, mark out
shorter, determined
gestures of sound.
The procession, almost a march,
becomes a dance.
Alone
Two choirs of wind and brass
become four couples
whose music weaves
from complexity a simplicity:
Chromatic to Pentatonic
twelve becoming five.
Prase
Four stopped horns,
five extended tonalities.
Together they wander
a maze of Pentatonic paths;
alone, and in pairs, as a quartet
they discover within
a measured harmonic rhythm.
Tension: resolution
. . . and surrounding
their every move
the piano
insists an obligato,
a continuum of phrases,
absorbing into itself
the warp and weft of horn tone.
Sard
Oscillating
in perpetual motion
the full ensemble
occupies a frame
of time and space.
Flutes, reeds,
double-reeds
brass, piano,
percussion
mirror-fold on mirror-fold
layer upon layer
overlapping.
Yarns of threaded sound.
Tuff
Without a break
the mirrored oscillations
patter pentatonics
on tuned percussion
of marimba and vibraphone
whilst
a batterie of drums
lays down
shards of beaten rhythm
against this onward
folding of tonality change.
In the background
a choir of winds
flutes and single reeds
waymark this recursive journey
gathering together
cadential moments and the
necessary pause for breath.
Marl
Relentlessly, the motion is sustained,
piano-driven,
a syncopated continuo,
rhythm-sectioned
amidst layers of percussion.
Adding edge,
a choir of brass and double reeds
amplify the piano’s jagged rhythms
providing impetus for
phrases to become longer and longer,
ratching up the tension,
ever-denying closure
until the batterie
delivers
a conclusive flourish.
Paramoudra
Pulse-figures of winds.
Motific cells of brass.
Both
negotiate a stream of
fractal-shaped tonality
expanding: contracting.
A blossom of fanfares
folding into
pulsating layers
of tuned percussion,
flutes and reeds.
A dance-like episode
absorbs a chorale.
Four horns in close harmony
against the continuing dance.
A duet of differences
flows into a cascade of chords
in closed and open forms.
The piano supports
brass-flourishing figures
before a final stillness.
Heartstone
In gentle reflection
the solitary piano –
a figure in a landscape
of collapsed harmonic forms -
presents in slow procession
the essence of previous music.
Jan 27, 2013
Jan 27, 2013 at 12:41 PM UTC
Twice the fool is the runaway
Who hides his trail, as he hides his ache
All bottle and pills, temporary sleep
Insomniac daze and cheap dinner meals
Static lies on a stationary screen
Radio chatter can’t feed the famine in me
The world is aflame
With no one awake
Sunrise slumber
I fall unconscious to the restless on midnight pavement
Breaking bones or breaking bottles
Selling skin or dealing dust to lost souls
Hearts tucked and folded from the cold
Future oblique
I dare you, predict my dreams
Late riser / never bloomer
Packs a bag, a change of clothes
To deadbeat joints, and dead end posts
Been as many years gone as daily cigarettes smoked
Bloodshot symmetry eyes
I see in every passerby
Like the whole city gone up and left their troubles behind,
You and I
We’re cerebral projections
Locked into motor whirs, recursive disintegration
Status acknowledged, clean cut
Black and white since day one
Mould breaker, you’re told you’re out of line
Gutter graves or veins, stay your place or fall behind
The only constant is the throne
You sit upon or come to view as your body’s own
The red light stare, blue flicker flares
Blare on your skin, like prisms, colour wear
Better to fade to grey than know yourself
For what you truly are, just a shade of catch and tell
Dire straits
No deviation
Full advance
Or desolation
Empty eyes
Golden restraints
I don’t want wealth
I just want change
Sep 25, 2013
Sep 25, 2013 at 8:51 PM UTC
See you our server farm that hums
And serves HTTP?
It's spun its disks and done its sums
Ever since Berners-Lee.
See you our mainframe spewing out
The Towers of Hanoi?
It's moved recursive discs about
Since Babbage was a boy.
See you our ZX81
That prints the ABCs?
That very program used to run
With Lovelace at the keys.
Magnetic floppy disks and hard,
And tape with patience torn,
And eighty columns on a card,
And so was England born!
She is not any common thing,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Turing's Isle of Programming,
Where you and I will fare.
Dec 16, 2010
Dec 16, 2010 at 7:23 AM UTC
"Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords,
resigned to **** and to die." – Jorge Louis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
stoic labyrinthine sparrow-bone;
there is a slalom down your gullet,
bayonet curled around your neck,
you have a beak, you are lusty-smooth,
have rubble for skin, an emaciated infinity:
everything is fractal so eat your words
they are you are your rusty toenails
every footstep is a holocaust there’s
genocide under your neurons,
watch them flex and shiver.
you have soft plastic lips,
there is a vacuum in your gullet,
a box cutter carving
through your adam’s apple:
epileptics are just indecisive,
when they seize hold their tongues
they are their words you are a god
are oppenheimer and shiva,
pick favorites it doesn’t matter
it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter
flex and shimmer we are just neurons
flatlines are not ghoulish nooses,
paraplegics are just cowards,
move with conviction each step
is a genocide, you have wooden
teeth and woolen wings,
thrashes are a velveteen sunset
an edible fog, your stomach
is a stomach do not eat the fog
just know that someday it will **** you
softly and swiftly.
it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter:
infinity is not recursive
alive is not our default state
once is the only route
blood makes the blade holy
if you cut me i will bleed,
i won't blame you just know
you were only ever
that very moment.
May 2, 2013
May 2, 2013 at 1:17 AM UTC
Southern Icarus
by Michael R. Burch
Windborne, lover of heights,
unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching embrace
you climb, skittish kite ...
What do you know of the world’s despair,
gliding in vast solitariness there
so that all that remains is to
fall?
Only a little longer the wind invests its sighs;
you stall
spread-eagled as the canvas snaps
and ***** its white rebellious wings,
and all
the houses watch with baffled eyes.
Originally published by Poetry Porch. Keywords/Tags: Icarus, flight, flying, hang-gliding, kite, glider, wind, canvas, South, southern, truck, unspooled
Note: The following poem unites Icarus with Tom O'Bedlam in a final, magical quest ...
Finally to Burn
(the Fall and Resurrection of Icarus)
by Michael R. Burch
I.
Athena takes me
sometimes by the hand
and we go levitating
through strange Dreamlands
where Apollo sleeps
in his dark forgetting
and Passion seems
like a wise bloodletting
and all I remember
—upon awaking—
is: to Love sometimes
is like forsaking
one’s Being—to glide
heroically beyond thought,
forsaking the here
for the There and the Not.
II.
O, finally to Burn,
gravity beyond escaping!
To plummet is Bliss
when the blisters breaking
rain down red scabs
on the earth’s mudpuddle...
Feathers and wax
and the watchers huddle...
Flocculent sheep,
O, and innocent lambs!
I will rock me to sleep
on the waves’ iambs.
III.
To Sleep, that is Bliss
in Love’s recursive Dream,
for the Night has Wings
pallid as moonbeams—
they will flit me to Life,
like a huge-eyed Phoenix
fluttering off
to quarry the Sphinx.
IV.
Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,
Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.
Quixotic, I seek Love
amid the tarnished
rusted-out steel
when to live is varnish.
To Dream—that’s the thing!
Aye, that Genie I’ll rub,
soak by the candle,
aflame in the tub.
V.
Riddlemethis,
riddlemethat,
Rynosseross,
throw out the Welcome Mat.
Somewhither, somewhither
aglitter and strange,
we must moult off all knowledge
or perish caged.
VI.
I am reconciled to Life
somewhere beyond thought—
I’ll Live in the There,
I’ll Dream of the Naught.
Methinks it no journey;
to tarry’s a waste,
so fatten the oxen;
make a nice baste.
I’m coming, Fool Tom,
we have Somewhere to Go,
though we injure noone,
ourselves wildaglow.
Apr 14, 2020
Apr 14, 2020 at 3:57 AM UTC
and she walks the heart’s road
one more time
the known letter becomes unknown
last time the first time
she allows vapors of thrill shape
as much as wisdom approves time
Know your place she says
don’t fly up too high
that’s uncivilized far
See I am standing calm inside
hear me?
on the ground
body feet well aligned
agreed ?
yes and no agreed
you anyway cannot disagree
It's only my politeness that asks
She walks like the wind blowing pure joy
a gifted natural balance of posture
being one with the time
of man and of woman and of child
whatever she becomes
at once the crowd
Their laughter makes summer
like a hypolimnetic volume in the temperate
reflects to universe as a place to perch
amongst stars (when you sometimes pass)
while they seemingly cross traffic lights
led by a black dog
and a red cat (hiding in a mysterious plant)
as if she knows us
from somewhere
or I her
as if this has no consequence
as if
she says
and the sound defines
Feb 8, 2015
Feb 8, 2015 at 6:42 AM UTC
That dancing
Lover
Is empty
Caress
Faded
Photography
All encased
In memory space
By ageless
Glass
Over ancient
Death
Waded hands
Over welts
Over
Skin
The tightness
An heirloom
To your
Troubled
Breath
A rasping cry
In perpetual
Iterate
Recursive
The motion
Of ending eyes
When all lights flutter
And die
May 1, 2013
May 1, 2013 at 6:29 AM UTC
Conscious creature
You opened your eyes
And saw into infinity
Beyond a vast divide
You walked with agitation
Under a circadian sphere
But in slumber lapped upon
A recursive lie turned fear
So you gnawed and you nibbled
You scratched and you split
Without a pause in your malice
Until reality thinned
Until the atmosphere bled
All life, light, and breath
And you were left with closed eyes
And vast emptiness
Aug 2, 2013
Aug 2, 2013 at 10:09 AM UTC
I worry about everything, baby
I'm a
writer - a poet
passion begets anxiety
it's my job hell
I even worry about
my worrying
my stress is recursive
mere moments only can I
break the loop
forget to worry
and smile
usually it's when I'm
with you
Jun 6, 2015
Jun 6, 2015 at 9:24 PM UTC
*"Oh my, I don't feel
that I can go on much longer.
These old man's heels
have in the past been stronger. "*
And then,
down a black Hole
to seek the last truth;
defeating blunders of mind,
but too long in the tooth.
And then,
back out, returning to the open.
Auburn leaves beneath lie still.
Wind stirs, orange spirals woven.
"It's a universal fractal spill."
And then,
*"Recursive, it's recursive;
my whole existence has thrived.
One end is subversive,
the other end is contrived."*
And then,
the black Hole opens wide,
******* grabbing, attracting--
uncontrived, unaware of requite.
One old soul the Hole is extracting.
And then,
...
Oct 3, 2012
Oct 3, 2012 at 11:59 AM UTC
Staying in tune with the balance
Courageously looking into the mind's eye
into all eyes
what is swirling in my limitless expanse?
Recursive Recursive
Tell me your dreams
share in thought
find the silence holding the world's sound
Peace is a pebble in the blinding storm, Pick it up
Fantasy touch Reality
Drive along watch
Find the tower over looking the expanse
climb the mountain high
stare around the expanse until your vision meets the endless horizons
its all out there
globular circle, perpetual motion machine
spinning, flying, tumbling round & round
hurtling at 7 decatillion light years
through time space and beyond
we, these seeming ants along for the ride of our life
space time travelers placidly in our world of chaos adapting,
adaptive shoulder shruggers on a planetary scale
This planetary potential genius to awake in us all
Does the last man come?
What will the over man make of paradise?
Sleepy progenitors, laugh
shake your curly hairy heads
cover yourself with rags if you must,
or Don't!
Are you comfortable in skin?
Do you fathom what is beyond your sensual limits?
***** woman do you know?
Have you found it in your fleshy delights,
the secret invitation for discovery is in every niche, every hole, every fold, every kiss, every caress, every stare, every touch, every smooth slide, fingertips tracing lines of hips, lips, backs, calves, feet, jaw, ear, cheek.
A young lover may know it there, or especially an old, a bucktramp
or the loveliest ***** lady
Label the divine and holy if you must
its all out there waiting and engaging
its here now with you, with us
linking along
the water moves but is constantly there, co arising,
what wave is where
Its all here
chant OM, can you feel it?
Hold that vibration, pulsate with your mouth closed and hum and shout melodically
emitting the vibe
Be the Vibeman.
Jan 5, 2014
Jan 5, 2014 at 8:05 PM UTC
a pale neurology
within
pale iron gates
painted in pallid shades
of steel, gold and myrrh.
locked within recursive delusions of grandeur
like granite, horizontal and brittle
snapping within their multiplicities
lost within blindness' entangled waves.
drowning at the cusps of its own banality:
vacant plasticity
homeomorphic sludge
betraying nothing
of the mystified real
but an idempotent of
projected projections,
of a recursively flickering reel,
an echo-chamber,
of pale
gated communities.
aether.
flesh.
bronze.
iron.
silver.
gold.
gold.
ink.
(tape)
flesh.
silicon.
pale.
pale.
ether,
aether
(void)
Jun 24, 2014
Jun 24, 2014 at 7:57 AM UTC
light magenta vertical;
gaurdian of the margin.
light blue horizontal;
conveyer of the ledger.
the space
between -
white teeth gleam,
refracting
lunarlit scribbles
across one loose leaf,
fell by some god
awful idiot,
all for
you
to space
out
on.
i will be
written
down
yesteday
in elegant
recursive
flicks
of the
wrist -
a has-been
fate.
so, i am not supposed to be here.
not anymore, anyway.
i know that.
i am three-hole
punch drunker.
awkwarder.
but those potential
whatif's glyph bright
behind closed eyelids,
and
it
makes
me wonder
just a little longer.
indigo
cursor
blink.
blink. blink.
blink.
May 28, 2016
May 28, 2016 at 12:35 AM UTC
1.
The light that agitates the equator
bounds across your southern frontier,
and being higher in the wage scale
enables trips there to be easier
than the odysseys of those passing
away in the opposite direction.
Where once bandaged soles went
now many machines tie the stitches
between the divides where once again
bandaged souls will traverse.
2.
Our footprint will be larger than life
and beat the earth to an abstract plain.
Where once many names were needed,
our editorial, read as obituary, will need few.
It’s a recursive gesture to prune in order to grow
but who’s hand truly closes the symphony?
Here I find legumes, tubers, a display of sage
and a cold comfort in my palm.
The perfect chicane of the fern’s stem,
tributaries unfurled, reflects in the plastic bucket.
Feb 29, 2016
Feb 29, 2016 at 4:37 PM UTC
The pattern keeps repeating most attractively,
but its the patterns in the pattern that shape our destiny.
I find comfort in forgetting that everything is nothing,
and all this beauty makes me happy just to say I am something.
Cloud my eyes, i’ll be alright.
Cloud my eyes, and i’ll be fine.
Why is everything that i’m feeling nothing of who i am?
Now all the love I'm needing is going up in smoke.
Is there nothing for this daily dying that's lived inside of me?
Can't you tell the only thing I’m feeling is "na na na-na-na"?
The pattern keeps repeating as far as i can see,
and there are patterns in the pattern quite recursively.
But, i find comfort in forgetting everything is nothing,
and all this beauty makes me happy just to say I am something.
Welcome to the world of the depressed,
where the lights and motion take interest.
Welcome to the hour of decay,
where the lights and motion take you away.
I don’t want to wake up from this dream.
Run away from reality.
Dying inside of my memory.
Story of a living casualty.
I think i might just sleep this off...
I think you should just write me off...
May 12, 2012
May 12, 2012 at 9:29 AM UTC
Crouched by the lakeside I grasp
a small stone, same as all its neighbours:
no jagged cliff-shorn shard of concussive weather
to be sent pounding across the surface,
but a smooth, round pebble, who traces a single arc
then vanishes from sight –
and the growing ring of ripples
the only testament to its passing.
As I wander on,
the waves of my lone effort are fading.
Yet, as each passing stranger
adds their own voice,
every wave harmonizes,
compounds upon its predecessors,
and once still waters accelerate
towards a resonating crescendo.
And my pebble rests below the surface,
unaware of the exultation above,
until wandering currents sweep it up,
back onto the lakeside once more.
I arise from my idle contemplation,
and pour myself in.
Apr 18, 2014
Apr 18, 2014 at 12:15 PM UTC
I am a ******** artist
I ******** my way through ******** conversations
And I ******** all of my ******** poetry
I ******** my daily life
Spewing ******** to people around
Who themselves are really full of ******** as well
I do this to hide the fact that I am really full of ********
You see it is a recursive cycle of ********
Me bullshitting them, them me, and everyone full of ********
And don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to feed you negative ********
I even believe my own ********
And their ********
I guess you could say it is some Buddhist ********
Or some ******** like that
But really we are all so full of ******** that it’s coming out our eyes
Even this poem right here is ********
I don’t even buy this ********
ah ******** is there any sifting through you?
any escape from ********
It just seems like the more you try to sift through the ********
The more you get your hands covered in ********
So you see how I fall deeper and deeper into ********
It really is appropriate
Jun 18, 2014
Jun 18, 2014 at 4:28 PM UTC
You bound my wrists
With tithe and tides and barbed wire
Draped your braided halo around my throat
Told me you’d never leave
Till you did and fogged my glasses
With recursive memories.
We are strangers now
Or always were
Because I could never
Love a person who’d do that
To someone. Maybe it
Was just the way you
Made me feel like home,
Like the ******* sun,
Like I understood why
I wanted to exist,
Why every other pop song
Is about this corny ********
That really is the only reason
To keep trudging in circles
Trying to replicate
A beginning point
We will never again find.
Because love is something
I only really understood
After you left, when I
Felt my blood harden
And my senses regurgitate
Memoryaftermemoryaftermemory
Until every pulse was a trigger,
When I saw how wretched
You were, felt the sidewalk
Shear my skull clean off,
Even then, and even now,
When you well up inside my head
I feel the skin on my back
Disappear and I am warm
Because you never stop loving a home,
Even when it is no longer yours.
I don’t intend to ever see you again,
I don’t want to know who you’ve become,
All I know is the girl I loved is gone,
But I hope she’s happy,
I hope she’s happy and I hope she’s loved,
Because I will never forget
What it’s like not to be.
Apr 15, 2013
Apr 15, 2013 at 9:12 PM UTC
again they said
against the wall
of hope in life
to face this all
recursive action so
pay on you know
the game to grow
so shame so go
so pain lay low
so rain can flow
for May a home
to make and stow
so vain to grow
so watch the show
Dec 4, 2013
Dec 4, 2013 at 12:39 AM UTC
you morn me
in retrospect
and hurt me
in the present tense
Jun 10, 2014
Jun 10, 2014 at 9:48 PM UTC
We live our single lives
whether with friend, girl, boy
husband, wife or family.
We live our single life.
That is the American Way,
and certainly not
the United Way.
We're taught to lift
ourselves up, bootstrapping.
So I keep sampling
my heart with replacements,
hoping against the odds
that mean means something,
and normal distribution doesn't
give Gaussian grouse.
Or could it be
I'm strapping myself
to the wrong boot
and all my recursive
iterations are yielding
a false curve
to my zero coupon life?
Mar 2, 2013
Mar 2, 2013 at 2:47 PM UTC
inauspicious you
crawl through my dreamscapes
dragging your silver heels
through my recursive grays.
scraping the grime from my
amorphous solitude,
i follow you into the clarity
of our bittersweet meanderings.
you'll find me in the lull
between comfort and composure.
i awaken in the hum of your absence,
clinging to your static repose.
and in the lingering shame
of my throbbing, wanting
a more immutable calm,
i am feeble-minded and floating
through the day
like a fleeting fever.
Apr 15, 2013
Apr 15, 2013 at 1:39 AM UTC
there were some hints of hidden plots
but I'm unable to reveal
I found some separated spots
still unable to tell which link is real
and so I try to analyze
what rather should and must be framed
since all I see creates disguise
that's much too complex to be ever named
of course it has been clear to me
that I can never understand
trapped in the wrongest strategy
but this slight insight it could never end
living within recursive strains
and sensing that there is a sense
more valid than just causal chains
but only describable as weird chance
so all foretelling must stay vague
and loosely caught in blurring lines
just guessing back allows to make
out what still must resist to be combined
seems context can produce a part
that hides some future in degrees
of freedom interpreting art
seems the mystic whole is stored in a piece
but there's no way to find out how
to find what is the fitting view
since perspectives change truth right now
and every looking back is always new
breaking habits means crossing lines
to unveil the contexted mess
just writing what my brain combines
still so far beyond my most daring guess
but this is where I cannot get
by words bound to logical thoughts
I treat them in new ways instead
where all I is weakly felt metaphors
and all I see is kept in mind
and stretching out with every verse
but well, of course no one can find
what only contextually occurs
a strange result is feeding doubts
since all is trapped self-reference
that can be clearly talked about
asking how to comprehend any sense
outside the very performed act
but what got written down at last
is a shadowed trace that reflects
translating what cannot be tracked unmasked
with or kept by well defined terms
but ambiguous metaphors
leaving space for views to confirm
spotted patterns that could reflect my course
but each changed context brings the chance
to find new ways of reading how
the world was caught within found sense
constructed just against backgrounds of now
Mar 3, 2014
Mar 3, 2014 at 7:40 AM UTC