Dear Poet Friends, this poem was composed as a tribute and praise
to the Creator of heaven and earth way back in the year 2008, & was posted on ‘Poemhunter.com’. The Creator’s handiwork has inspired Poets, Artists, and Humans alike since the dawn of our
civilisation, and shall continue to do so for our future generations! Hope you like this poetic composition. I will be grateful if you comment only after having read the entire poem.  Thanks, - Raj

VISIONS OF THE VAST BLUE EMPYREAN
                * BY RAJ NANDY*

       '’The heavens declare the glory of the Lord,
        The sky proclaim His divine handiwork!’’
                                                   - Psalm of David.

(I)
The SKY is a multidimensional manifestation of God's
creation,
A translucent blue canopy above all and one.
The sky has inspired humans for centuries to aspire
and dream, -
To seek His blessings and guidance from above;
And shall continue to do so for centuries to come!
The sky beckons and lures with its mystical spell;
Making humans with leaping aspirations to try out
and reach, -
Those frontiers where the sky is the unlimited limit of
all our hopes, aspirations and dreams!
The sky, lush, luring, luminous, and sweet, -
Invites, entice, and fills us with a sense of wonder!
How God-like in appearance, and almost human in
its expressions!
The sky has remained as a silent witness to the birth
of our planet,
Since God created the firmament and the heavens,
before creating the Earth.
The sky, a silent spectator since eons past,
Shall continue to see the fading away of old stars;
And formation of baby galaxies in a cosmic drama of
His creation,
Lying beyond the comprehension of Mankind!
While we try to delve His secrets with our space probes,
Which we can neither fully comprehend nor unravel;
And shall only continue to wonder and marvel!

(II)
The blue sky continues to inspire and even melts,
While its blue translucence silently seep into the
Poet's heart,
As he sits to reflect and shape his thoughts,
And the vast expanse of the ethereal sky,
Stretching his mind with future dreams and
visions!
While the azure blue begins to flow through his
veins, and gets transmitted through his pen, -
To convey his exalted thoughts and deepest feelings,
in poetic lines and verse, -
Which becomes the Poet's sole mission.
And at night when the Poet meditates, he catches a
falling star,
And writes a poem on it and keeps it in his pocket, -
Saving it for a rainy day!
And during the silence of the night, when the hours
grow dark and deep,
And the sky gently droops and drips;
The poet wakes up to write, and writes to sleep!

(III)
The sky flows on to the canvas of the Painter,
As he tries to depict its varied complexions and moods,
With his limited colours, shades and hues,
Flashing and spilling his canvas with touches of tints
and tones,
To captivate the capricious, transient and fanciful moods,
which the sky adorns!
The deep blue empyrean is at times blissful and sublime,
Changing from a radiant, opulent, and iridescent, -
To threatening, cruel, and violent;
Both devastating and destructive as the sweeping
tornado or a hurricane!
Yet when God decides to paint the Aurora Borealis those
magical Northern Lights, -
Those glowing diaphanous curtains of waving, swirling
streamers of lights,
With its red, green, blue, violet, and luminescent spell-
binding shades;
How can any artist foolishly dare to compete or replicate
His celestial art?
For the Auroras are a reflection of His live real time
handiwork, -
Which shall never diminish or fade!

(IV)
The crystal blue arch of heaven, a glorious canopy
cover over our head,
Blesses us with the much needed shade;
From the tormenting and scorching rays of the
relentless Summer's sun.
With its varying layers of passing clouds, -
As the sun completes its diurnal rounds!
Those high cheerful cirrus and cirro-stratus clouds
of the Winter sky,
The meditating alto-cumulus and alto-stratus clouds
of medium heights;
And those upward swelling, ambitious clouds of
cumulonimbus, -
Carrying the thunder bolts and lightning of the great
Zeus do confound us!
And finally those low sheets of stratus clouds of the
rumbling monsoon sky;
Bringing incessant rain and lightning darts, -
Flashing like a whip lash across the sky and the earth!
With the speed of sound always lagging behind that
of light, -
Thus thunder bolts always follow those blinding flashing
darts of dazzling blue lights!
While the good Earth absorbs it all like some suffering
soul,
And forever regenerates itself to transcend its
tormenting plight!

(V)
The clouds floating like fluffy wool of cotton and
the downs of white goose feathers,
Adds dimensions, visual depth, definition and a sense
of perception;
For the human mind to behold and meditate, -
Those vast measureless depths of the infinite space!
The clouds with its varying forms and shapes,
At times like the ice cream cones with vanilla
tops and wisps of cream;
Keep floating across the cerulean blue, forming
and melting, -
From one nothingness into another,  below the
arched vault of the heavens!
And at times the clouds coalesce to dissipate as
gentle rain,
With rhythmic beats, or follow some wild musical note,
Lashing against the earth like a dancer in trance!
While it brings down the cool aqua, the very elixir of
life to earth.

(VI)
The sky is held captive by its own void of eternal
silence.
As nature's mirror, it reflects and also shows us a
glimpse of the infinite!
While the night sky by itself exhibits a wondrous
sight,
With the sentinel stars shining like a living hymn
written in light!
And the ebony treasure vault of heavens hold the
sparkling and glittering countless gems;
Of pearls of lily white, rubies with red sheen,
And galaxies shimmering like hyacinth of purple
light!
The sky envelopes the earth all around in an elusive
embrace of unconsummated love!
But each night, in hope and expectations the Sky
adorns itself, -
With diamond necklace and pearls of milky white,
Woven round its dark black flowing stresses;
Casting longing looks towards the beloved Earth,
To whom she is attracted from her very birth!

(VII)
The sky despite its wide range of colourful
spectrum and moods,
Forever retains its pristine colour of azure blue,
behind its gray and somber clouds.
Each morning the sky presents us with a clean
blue slate,
Where nothing ever remains written or etched!
Inspiring humans to make a new beginning,
Before time runs out and it becomes too late!
Yet the sky never forgets to reflect the arched
rainbow over its brow,
Once the thunder clouds and storms dissipate!
Keeping our hopes and aspirations forever alive;
And impelling us to strive in all our endeavours
and to excel!

(VIII)
The sky remains as a revelation of God's immaculate
handiwork.
The blue welkin, God's treasure trove, with its
capricious moods,
Sometimes furious, sometimes iridescent, but by nature
divinely sublime!
The sky a recurrence of happenings, with its speckled dance, -
Of colours, cadence, and of light and shade,
Giving us a taste, smell and feel of eternity, -
Which appears as real, though illusory and ephemeral!
Transcending all our scientific formulas, speculations
and intricate *******-up logic;
Since many mystical and unknown energy forms exist in
our sky and space,
Beyond the realms of Quantum Physics , String Theory,
the Higgs Field and Relativity!  * ( see Notes below)
And forces can even be made to emanate from the human
mind and soul and to transcend, -
To blend with those vibrations in the celestial spheres of
the Divine!

(IX)
The sky shall forever remain a source of exhilaration
and exhortation for mankind, -
And as an exaltation of God's divine and lofty thoughts!
The sky also remains as our ultimate frontier, -
Stretching the dimensions of human consciousness,
Till our consciousness learns to merge with the Divine;
To become one and to blend, under the blue vault of
our blissful Empyrean!
                                                       -  by RAJ NANDY, NEW DELHI

(*NOTES: The five different versions of the String Theories know as the 'The M- Theory' of Quantum Physics, which tries to explain the origin of all things through the vibrations of nano strings. The latest discovery of the Higgs Field, which is said to add mass to subatomic particles; are our humble and insufficient efforts to understand God’s mysterious creation of the universe and space!)
      (ALL COPY RIGHT ARE WITH THE AUTHOR ONLY)

This little man that I know with money in his sockets and routine in his pockets has self proclaimed that he is a tight ***. When I envision a *** such as this, I imagine a bundle -- of securely aggregated, perfectly sharpened number two pencils. The businessman just shy of adulthood and too tired to remember –even the beginning of his of disclosure, denied his struggle to acclimate a multifarious lifestyle, appropriately suggested in the form of a triangle, and a circle, both of which embody polar opposing adaptations of humanistic routine.

The two shapes: The circle, denies the break in motion by imposing a constant cycle of diligent compression, there is no room for pause only steady flow and relentless drive. This influence of life impression slows down the heart, body, and soul while speeding up time. This particular commitment accommodates the dry colorless beings that embrace and accept boxed imprisonment.

Traditionally, the triangle denotes rhythmic patterns that elevate and drop to a point in which imposes a healthy reflective pause: progression, reflection, balance. As stated, as a provincial approach, a regular triangle flat on its base, peaking at the top represents a healthy, solid life routine. In contrast, the triangle can be flipped upside-down introducing an entirely new dynamic, composed of flat-lined monotony, tapered off to a regressed realm of destruction, regret and disorder. Despite the uniqueness of the standard triangle model to the man in question, it is important to compare the negative reflection, for it applies to the entirety of this investigation.

We used to be lovers, he and I. We shared my giant pillow-top that I bought on the black market for a meager two-hundred fifty. -- A mere steal at that rate.


We occasionally exchanged ideas, mainly about ethical concerns related to globalization and the environment.

I attempted to give him a cooking lesson once, but that failed, indefinitely. The bust was not my doing, but simply, a great disinterest on his part; or better yet an inability of not being better than me at something.

Everything has gotten so crowded.

take me to PuNe  baby
or I'll take you
in the back of my self-induced
naked hallucinations
as words *****
themselves from my gut
too impertinent to do
drugs
solely high off of your jargon
you don't know how
bold
I am
stardust
sugar and spice and everything nice
covered in salt
dripping tar black salt
just like you
hedonistic
all humans hedonistic
but this is my joie de vivre
pUnE baby
race me to the finish line
pisces and scorpio
bleeding atmospheres
between them
maybe my skin is
too salty black tar
for sweet tongues
but you forget
I am relentless
relentless
and will not allow
a consignation to oblivion
I'll be in PuNe
relentless

the world is too bright.
i am blinded by false smiles and laughs strained to reach that falsetto note.
that preconceived notion that paradise of the land brings paradise of the mind.
sand is still sand, and water is still water,
less we quantify their quality by purity and color.
sand is still sand and water is still water,
and i am still me.

the world is too bright,
so i filter it into sepia tones gentler to the mind's eye and swim to where the water meets the clouds.
i am drowning,
but not from the ocean's relentless caresses,
but from the world's relentless stresses:
beauty that is measured and calculated,
saturated with standards that burn like the sun and are as intangible as its rays,
a paradise built on sand as quick as it is to judge.    

so i swim to where the water meets the clouds.
where the water is still water,
and i am still me.

Fear.
I wish I never came to know.
Fear.
We try so hard to never let it show.
Fear.
A relentless force.
Fear.
It always finds its way into everyone's course.
Fear.
Go away!
Fear.
Show me a brighter day.

“I cannot but remember such things were,
  And were most dear to me.”
  ‘Macbeth’

  [”That were most precious to me.”
  ‘Macbeth’, act iv, sc. 3.]


When slow Disease, with all her host of Pains,
Chills the warm tide, which flows along the veins;
When Health, affrighted, spreads her rosy wing,
And flies with every changing gale of spring;
Not to the aching frame alone confin’d,
Unyielding pangs assail the drooping mind:
What grisly forms, the spectre-train of woe,
Bid shuddering Nature shrink beneath the blow,
With Resignation wage relentless strife,
While Hope retires appall’d, and clings to life.
Yet less the pang when, through the tedious hour,
Remembrance sheds around her genial power,
Calls back the vanish’d days to rapture given,
When Love was bliss, and Beauty form’d our heaven;
Or, dear to youth, pourtrays each childish scene,
Those fairy bowers, where all in turn have been.
As when, through clouds that pour the summer storm,
The orb of day unveils his distant form,
Gilds with faint beams the crystal dews of rain
And dimly twinkles o’er the watery plain;
Thus, while the future dark and cheerless gleams,
The Sun of Memory, glowing through my dreams,
Though sunk the radiance of his former blaze,
To scenes far distant points his paler rays,
Still rules my senses with unbounded sway,
The past confounding with the present day.

Oft does my heart indulge the rising thought,
Which still recurs, unlook’d for and unsought;
My soul to Fancy’s fond suggestion yields,
And roams romantic o’er her airy fields.
Scenes of my youth, develop’d, crowd to view,
To which I long have bade a last adieu!
Seats of delight, inspiring youthful themes;
Friends lost to me, for aye, except in dreams;
Some, who in marble prematurely sleep,
Whose forms I now remember, but to weep;
Some, who yet urge the same scholastic course
Of early science, future fame the source;
Who, still contending in the studious race,
In quick rotation, fill the senior place!
These, with a thousand visions, now unite,
To dazzle, though they please, my aching sight.

IDA! blest spot, where Science holds her reign,
How joyous, once, I join’d thy youthful train!
Bright, in idea, gleams thy lofty spire,
Again, I mingle with thy playful quire;
Our tricks of mischief, every childish game,
Unchang’d by time or distance, seem the same;
Through winding paths, along the glade I trace
The social smile of every welcome face;
My wonted haunts, my scenes of joy or woe,
Each early boyish friend, or youthful foe,
Our feuds dissolv’d, but not my friendship past,—
I bless the former, and forgive the last.
Hours of my youth! when, nurtur’d in my breast,
To Love a stranger, Friendship made me blest,—
Friendship, the dear peculiar bond of youth,
When every artless ***** throbs with truth;
Untaught by worldly wisdom how to feign,
And check each impulse with prudential rein;
When, all we feel, our honest souls disclose,
In love to friends, in open hate to foes;
No varnish’d tales the lips of youth repeat,
No dear-bought knowledge purchased by deceit;
Hypocrisy, the gift of lengthen’d years,
Matured by age, the garb of Prudence wears:
When, now, the Boy is ripen’d into Man,
His careful Sire chalks forth some wary plan;
Instructs his Son from Candour’s path to shrink,
Smoothly to speak, and cautiously to think;
Still to assent, and never to deny—
A patron’s praise can well reward the lie:
And who, when Fortune’s warning voice is heard,
Would lose his opening prospects for a word?
Although, against that word, his heart rebel,
And Truth, indignant, all his ***** swell.

  Away with themes like this! not mine the task,
From flattering friends to tear the hateful mask;
Let keener bards delight in Satire’s sting,
My Fancy soars not on Detraction’s wing:
Once, and but once, she aim’d a deadly blow,
To hurl Defiance on a secret Foe;
But when that foe, from feeling or from shame,
The cause unknown, yet still to me the same,
Warn’d by some friendly hint, perchance, retir’d,
With this submission all her rage expired.
From dreaded pangs that feeble Foe to save,
She hush’d her young resentment, and forgave.
Or, if my Muse a Pedant’s portrait drew,
POMPOSUS’ virtues are but known to few:
I never fear’d the young usurper’s nod,
And he who wields must, sometimes, feel the rod.
If since on Granta’s failings, known to all
Who share the converse of a college hall,
She sometimes trifled in a lighter strain,
’Tis past, and thus she will not sin again:
Soon must her early song for ever cease,
And, all may rail, when I shall rest in peace.

  Here, first remember’d be the joyous band,
Who hail’d me chief, obedient to command;
Who join’d with me, in every boyish sport,
Their first adviser, and their last resort;
Nor shrunk beneath the upstart pedant’s frown,
Or all the sable glories of his gown;
Who, thus, transplanted from his father’s school,
Unfit to govern, ignorant of rule—
Succeeded him, whom all unite to praise,
The dear preceptor of my early days,
PROBUS, the pride of science, and the boast—
To IDA now, alas! for ever lost!
With him, for years, we search’d the classic page,
And fear’d the Master, though we lov’d the Sage:
Retir’d at last, his small yet peaceful seat
From learning’s labour is the blest retreat.
POMPOSUS fills his magisterial chair;
POMPOSUS governs,—but, my Muse, forbear:
Contempt, in silence, be the pedant’s lot,
His name and precepts be alike forgot;
No more his mention shall my verse degrade,—
To him my tribute is already paid.

  High, through those elms with hoary branches crown’d
Fair IDA’S bower adorns the landscape round;
There Science, from her favour’d seat, surveys
The vale where rural Nature claims her praise;
To her awhile resigns her youthful train,
Who move in joy, and dance along the plain;
In scatter’d groups, each favour’d haunt pursue,
Repeat old pastimes, and discover new;
Flush’d with his rays, beneath the noontide Sun,
In rival bands, between the wickets run,
Drive o’er the sward the ball with active force,
Or chase with nimble feet its rapid course.
But these with slower steps direct their way,
Where Brent’s cool waves in limpid currents stray,
While yonder few search out some green retreat,
And arbours shade them from the summer heat:
Others, again, a pert and lively crew,
Some rough and thoughtless stranger plac’d in view,
With frolic quaint their antic jests expose,
And tease the grumbling rustic as he goes;
Nor rest with this, but many a passing fray
Tradition treasures for a future day:
“’Twas here the gather’d swains for vengeance fought,
And here we earn’d the conquest dearly bought:
Here have we fled before superior might,
And here renew’d the wild tumultuous fight.”
While thus our souls with early passions swell,
In lingering tones resounds the distant bell;
Th’ allotted hour of daily sport is o’er,
And Learning beckons from her temple’s door.
No splendid tablets grace her simple hall,
But ruder records fill the dusky wall:
There, deeply carv’d, behold! each Tyro’s name
Secures its owner’s academic fame;
Here mingling view the names of Sire and Son,
The one long grav’d, the other just begun:
These shall survive alike when Son and Sire,
Beneath one common stroke of fate expire;
Perhaps, their last memorial these alone,
Denied, in death, a monumental stone,
Whilst to the gale in mournful cadence wave
The sighing weeds, that hide their nameless grave.
And, here, my name, and many an early friend’s,
Along the wall in lengthen’d line extends.
Though, still, our deeds amuse the youthful race,
Who tread our steps, and fill our former place,
Who young obeyed their lords in silent awe,
Whose nod commanded, and whose voice was law;
And now, in turn, possess the reins of power,
To rule, the little Tyrants of an hour;
Though sometimes, with the Tales of ancient day,
They pass the dreary Winter’s eve away;
“And, thus, our former rulers stemm’d the tide,
And, thus, they dealt the combat, side by side;
Just in this place, the mouldering walls they scaled,
Nor bolts, nor bars, against their strength avail’d;
Here PROBUS came, the rising fray to quell,
And, here, he falter’d forth his last farewell;
And, here, one night abroad they dared to roam,
While bold POMPOSUS bravely staid at home;”
While thus they speak, the hour must soon arrive,
When names of these, like ours, alone survive:
Yet a few years, one general wreck will whelm
The faint remembrance of our fairy realm.

  Dear honest race! though now we meet no more,
One last long look on what we were before—
Our first kind greetings, and our last adieu—
Drew tears from eyes unus’d to weep with you.
Through splendid circles, Fashion’s gaudy world,
Where Folly’s glaring standard waves unfurl’d,
I plung’d to drown in noise my fond regret,
And all I sought or hop’d was to forget:
Vain wish! if, chance, some well-remember’d face,
Some old companion of my early race,
Advanc’d to claim his friend with honest joy,
My eyes, my heart, proclaim’d me still a boy;
The glittering scene, the fluttering groups around,
Were quite forgotten when my friend was found;
The smiles of Beauty, (for, alas! I’ve known
What ’tis to bend before Love’s mighty throne;)
The smiles of Beauty, though those smiles were dear,
Could hardly charm me, when that friend was near:
My thoughts bewilder’d in the fond surprise,
The woods of IDA danc’d before my eyes;
I saw the sprightly wand’rers pour along,
I saw, and join’d again the joyous throng;
Panting, again I trac’d her lofty grove,
And Friendship’s feelings triumph’d over Love.

  Yet, why should I alone with such delight
Retrace the circuit of my former flight?
Is there no cause beyond the common claim,
Endear’d to all in childhood’s very name?
Ah! sure some stronger impulse vibrates here,
Which whispers friendship will be doubly dear
To one, who thus for kindred hearts must roam,
And seek abroad, the love denied at home.
Those hearts, dear IDA, have I found in thee,
A home, a world, a paradise to me.
Stern Death forbade my orphan youth to share
The tender guidance of a Father’s care;
Can Rank, or e’en a Guardian’s name supply
The love, which glistens in a Father’s eye?
For this, can Wealth, or Title’s sound atone,
Made, by a Parent’s early loss, my own?
What Brother springs a Brother’s love to seek?
What Sister’s gentle kiss has prest my cheek?
For me, how dull the vacant moments rise,
To no fond ***** link’d by kindred ties!
Oft, in the progress of some fleeting dream,
Fraternal smiles, collected round me seem;
While still the visions to my heart are prest,
The voice of Love will murmur in my rest:
I hear—I wake—and in the sound rejoice!
I hear again,—but, ah! no Brother’s voice.
A Hermit, ’midst of crowds, I fain must stray
Alone, though thousand pilgrims fill the way;
While these a thousand kindred wreaths entwine,
I cannot call one single blossom mine:
What then remains? in solitude to groan,
To mix in friendship, or to sigh alone?
Thus, must I cling to some endearing hand,
And none more dear, than IDA’S social band.

  Alonzo! best and dearest of my friends,
Thy name ennobles him, who thus commends:
From this fond tribute thou canst gain no praise;
The praise is his, who now that tribute pays.
Oh! in the promise of thy early youth,
If Hope anticipate the words of Truth!
Some loftier bard shall sing thy glorious name,
To build his own, upon thy deathless fame:
Friend of my heart, and foremost of the list
Of those with whom I lived supremely blest;
Oft have we drain’d the font of ancient lore,
Though drinking deeply, thirsting still the more;
Yet, when Confinement’s lingering hour was done,
Our sports, our studies, and our souls were one:
Together we impell’d the flying ball,
Together waited in our tutor’s hall;
Together join’d in cricket’s manly toil,
Or shar’d the produce of the river’s spoil;
Or plunging from the green declining shore,
Our pliant limbs the buoyant billows bore:
In every element, unchang’d, the same,
All, all that brothers should be, but the name.

  Nor, yet, are you forgot, my jocund Boy!
DAVUS, the harbinger of childish joy;
For ever foremost in the ranks of fun,
The laughing herald of the harmless pun;
Yet, with a breast of such materials made,
Anxious to please, of pleasing half afraid;
Candid and liberal, with a heart of steel
In Danger’s path, though not untaught to feel.
Still, I remember, in the factious strife,
The rustic’s musket aim’d against my life:
High pois’d in air the massy weapon hung,
A cry of horror burst from every tongue:
Whilst I, in combat with another foe,
Fought on, unconscious of th’ impending blow;
Your arm, brave Boy, arrested his career—
Forward you sprung, insensible to fear;
Disarm’d, and baffled by your conquering hand,
The grovelling Savage roll’d upon the sand:
An act like this, can simple thanks repay?
Or all the labours of a grateful lay?
Oh no! whene’er my breast forgets the deed,
That instant, DAVUS, it deserves to bleed.

  LYCUS! on me thy claims are justly great:
Thy milder virtues could my Muse relate,
To thee, alone, unrivall’d, would belong
The feeble efforts of my lengthen’d song.
Well canst thou boast, to lead in senates fit,
A Spartan firmness, with Athenian wit:
Though yet, in embryo, these perfections shine,
LYCUS! thy father’s fame will soon be thine.
Where Learning nurtures the superior mind,
What may we hope, from genius thus refin’d;
When Time, at length, matures thy growing years,
How wilt thou tower, above thy fellow peers!
Prudence and sense, a spirit bold and free,
With Honour’s soul, united beam in thee.

Shall fair EURYALUS, pass by unsung?
From ancient lineage, not unworthy, sprung:
What, though one sad dissension bade us part,
That name is yet embalm’d within my heart,
Yet, at the mention, does that heart rebound,
And palpitate, responsive to the sound;
Envy dissolved our ties, and not our will:
We once were friends,—I’ll think, we are so still.
A form unmatch’d in Nature’s partial mould,
A heart untainted, we, in thee, behold:
Yet, not the Senate’s thunder thou shall wield,
Nor seek for glory, in the tented field:
To minds of ruder texture, these be given—
Thy soul shall nearer soar its native heaven.
Haply, in polish’d courts might be thy seat,
But, that thy tongue could never forge deceit:
The courtier’s supple bow, and sneering smile,
The flow of compliment, the slippery wile,
Would make that breast, with indignation, burn,
And, all the glittering snares, to tempt thee, spurn.
Domestic happiness will stamp thy fate;
Sacred to love, unclouded e’er by hate;
The world admire thee, and thy friends adore;—
Ambition’s slave, alone, would toil for more.

  Now last, but nearest, of the social band,
See honest, open, generous CLEON stand;
With scarce one speck, to cloud the pleasing scene,
No vice degrades that purest soul serene.
On the same day, our studious race begun,
On the same day, our studious race was run;
Thus, side by side, we pass’d our first career,
Thus, side by side, we strove for many a year:
At last, concluded our scholastic life,
We neither conquer’d in the classic strife:
As Speakers, each supports an equal name,
And crowds allow to both a partial fame:
To soothe a youthful Rival’s early pride,
Though Cleon’s candour would the palm divide,
Yet Candour’s self compels me now to own,
Justice awards it to my Friend alone.

  Oh! Friends regretted, Scenes for ever dear,
Remembrance hails you with her warmest tear!
Drooping, she bends o’er pensive Fancy’s urn,
To trace the hours, which never can return;
Yet, with the retrospection loves to dwell,
And soothe the sorrows of her last farewell!
Yet greets the triumph of my boyish mind,
As infant laurels round my head were twin’d;
When PROBUS’ praise repaid my lyric song,
Or plac’d me higher in the studious throng;
Or when my first harangue receiv’d applause,
His sage instruction the primeval cause,
What gratitude, to him, my soul possest,
While hope of dawning honours fill’d my breast!
For all my humble fame, to him alone,
The praise is due, who made that fame my own.
Oh! could I soar above these feeble lays,
These young effusions of my early days,
To him my Muse her noblest strain would give,
The song might perish, but the theme might live.
Yet, why for him the needless verse essay?
His honour’d name requires no vain display:
By every son of grateful IDA blest,
It finds an ech

Touch as the fervent feeling seek to know the ambiguity of it,
Feel as the ****** of a sparrow wing crept upon my dreams,
Fathom as the grief of rocks shrieked on deserted mountains,

And the Sky was blue
Touched by a Crescent Moon
Unraveling the hidden truth
How life was promised to me and you

Awe as landscapes vanished from distant perplexing shores,
Sigh as Long ships sailed on white ashes coasting inherently,
Fright as the voluptuous sights, faking wonders in my night,

And the Sky was blue
mellifluously My Heart as to see
a magnificent feeling to be free
the beauty relentless, endlessly weave

Pray as the growing wind whisper, a phrase to forever keep,
Kneel as crowds offered Him, a gratitude of rejoicing praise,
Trust as dandelions glides, the strength of His binding faith,

And the Sky was blue
for God is forever faithful & true
to broken lives, he one's renew
Keeping his promise to come again soon

Awake as the daybreak reveal, memories of our love revisit,
Sing as angels on white veil’s, bring you to heaven's place,
Gone is the world I once knew, eyes closing as my soul flew,

Amen...

The blush of the dawn is so relentless
driving into me it numbs all my senses,
Oh beauty of the heavens far above
You fill my heart with so much love,
Thus I turn my gaze up to this glorious sky
Watching all of these fluffy clouds passing by
Until finally the sun rises..

~ Umi

Grains of sand fall through the cracks.
Gritty & hot between your toes.
Squishy & mushy in the salty water.
Waves crash forward one after another.
During the winter & the summer.
The rocks near the shore have seagulls.
They are waiting for the fish.
Their silent daily wish.

At the beach it was just us two.
I couldn't are anyone else there I knew.
The color of the water was green & blue.

The ghost voice speaks, but can it see?
La Jolla Cliffs is haunted.
On video tape in 2008 I recorded it's voice that taunted.
Then it said ' Ha ha, I found you".
Spooky right? It wasn't like Casper saying "boo".

It said " Ariel come closer".
It's like it chose her.

Seashells wash up on the shore.
Like little presents from the sea floor.
The relentless sun bakes your flesh.
Sunblock or sunscreen works the best.
Feeling thirsty to drink some ice water.
Under the shade from the trees just me & my daughter.

PROLOGUE

Umpteen billion years
Big Bang, supernova, gas
Brief eclipse of time

Gases swirling, fall
Sun and planets, water, goo
Brief eclipse of time

Another billion
life, amoeba, fishes swim
Brief eclipse of time

Movement, change and flux
slither, crawl, climb, walk and talk
Brief eclipse of time

Ra, Sol, Helios,
Mithra and the Mighty Eye
Brief eclipse of time

Life begins and ends
birth, joy, laugh, cry, death, and dust
Brief eclipse of time

Waves cleave seas, shores, skies
forever folding, pulsing
Brief eclipse of time


            CHRONICLE

The Mighty Eye begins to slip and slowly sink,
(unfocused, stained, diffuse)
while frizzled waves imbibe her searing tears,
with salted languid lips.

The Mighty Eye, now weary, thin,
is gazing through the frozen cracks,
as sundry straying clouds,
bloated,
sidle feebly by
and wax their billowed tracks
upon the heated sky,
and cool the rush of rolling waves
beneath the blotted sky.

The waves
(impaled on time and space inside me),
gently tumbling aging pebbles
and lifeless shells across the shifting sands,
seem unaware
as they once again arise
to greet the Mighty Eye,
to close the Mighty Eye,
to ***** the Mighty Eye.

But then again,
perhaps the waves are well aware indeed,
yet simply unconcerned
and feel no need to care.

For, as the frazzled froth is rushing forward
madly towards the sandy shores beyond,
before retreating slowly,
then careening brashly forth ahead again,
eternally,
it matters little if the Mighty Eye will cast
her blazing glance from high above,
or else retire for the night,
kissed sweetly by the liquid lips
of distant faithless waves
in a brief eclipse of time.

The trees, they hang in time and space around me –
trees, which in time before had swayed,
so gently tugged by ocean breezes,
trees, which in time before were lightly lit
with emerald tinted leaves,
trees, which in time before had reached to space above
with twisted tangled fingers,
grasping fingers,
fingers drenched with golden tears
shed by the Mighty Eye.

The trees, they hang in space and time,
benumbed and frozen motionless around me
chilled with rooted premonitions of the void,
their branches clutching darkness  
and their leaves foreboding doom.

The muted winds begin to whisper tales
of many frightened things,
which, with mournful apprehension
have hunkered down behind the haze
and ceased their joyful play.

And all the while dank shadows gaily dance
a dismal dance,
for their time is soon to come.

The fitful shore lies suddenly still.

Unfeeling stones and hollow shells,
are paused a little,
stalled,
and dropped haphazardly,
midst their mindless random journey,
now abandoned by the sea,

for fickle waves have slipped away
to greet a falling prey.

And as the Mighty Eye droops lower,
laminated molten lips
are pursed and pucker higher,
******* in the sky.

Within a trice the Mighty Eye
submits and squints, distended red,
perhaps tormented by fantastic thoughts
of imminent demise,
or else of being lashed beneath a lid
of distant faithless waves.

And as her dying flash dissolves,
two lurid lips arise,
three ***** lips -
a thousand parted limpid lips
which asudden,
though with little haste,
consume the Mighty Eye.

                   EPILOGUE**

The trees are now but lurking shades
amongst the murky shadows.

Relentless fog slips slowly by -
her floating tongues drip silence
as they slink like snakes in stealth nearby.

The lacerated faithless lips have once again returned
to kiss the vacant vapid shores
in a brief eclipse of time.

In a peculiar, far off, world, time and place,
The trivial past would be irrelevant, chased away then erased.
Contrary to the reality of distorted lies in front of my face,
These eyes cannot mask fraudulence or disgrace.
Chasing them down with a trace of a defaced case of toxic waste,
I pace as my thoughts race of the time that’s left until I dissipate.
Looking into the murky vase with dying flowers desperate to be replaced,
Misplaced to the one who’d obliterate the beauty I once embraced.

Within my sorrow I woke, shattered love replaced with a heart no longer broke.
Soaked with what I could never cope, I felt passion and choked on my once false hope.
This vision evoked a note; a call of duty for you, my eternity to devote.
Instinctively I knew, the words stuck in my throat, but blindly every incline eventually has a *****.
Surrounded by mirrors shielded with smoke,
As we stared we shared yet nothing we spoke.
Your presence was felt but disguised with a cloak,
Confined in your skin, comfortably lost afloat, for your soul I searched to perpetually stroke.

With blurred vision I envisioned, stood silent, anxious of your condition,
Division of indecision was nothing less than your frightened inquisition.
A hallucination on a mission of who was out to hurt you with consistence,
I understood as you tried to piece together the suspicion of our composition.
Guarded and in position to react upon intuition then the smoke disappeared and you saw our reflection.
No longer was my presence an imposition now in recognition you accepted the ignition of a united evolution.
Successful revision disposed internal superstition,
Our collision created a premonition for our future decisions of precision.

The past’s paths we chose were restricted to our addiction and careless indifference,
The assistance of negative influence stripped us of our innocence.
Blood shot eyes, negligence of appearance, abstracted resistance only creating distance.
Ambiguous and inexperienced, taking shots and hits in an instance,
Distorted images, lacking clarity, the abuse of substance left an absence of existence.
Building tolerance whilst sabotaging resilience, guilty and unable to admit repentance,
Without a witness, secret and safe, no justice to serve and no one to listen.
A mission incomplete and persistent,
We continue to envelope in our disappearance.

In the seam of my sickness I submerge within these contaminated nerves,
Fearing the silence with thirst not to be disturbed,
But absurdly I yearned your unhealthy and perplexed words to be heard,
My tender nature reserved an exclusive place to keep you conserved,
Unstable but concerned I’d preserve you like an herb,
I slurred for forgiveness but observed perhaps this was my turn,
But with your freedom you turned away and flew away like a bird.
Now relentless and pure I burn the surface of my figure, no intent to return.

Yet once we were young, wild and free,
Conducting our train with no fear of where we’d soon be,
The sweet breeze guaranteed the destination with ease,
Imagination without knowledge, amid glee and degree,  
We’d dive and rise above the salty sea,
Later meet beneath that tree with belief the starry sky we’d seize,
Through the debris you still held in your hand the key,
And we’d conquer our dreams, what we sought and believed.

But as I’ve grown within my questioning dome,
My home of stones has nothing to be shown,
Prone to disown my weakened skin and bones,
Candidly I pacify the clone I’ve never known.
In hopes to be flown far ahead of this zone,
I’d hover above in a whispering tone, draining my disease as it’s blown.
My soul will glisten and roam, looking down at my new golden throne,
As I’ve postponed to recognize the beauty of the Earth & my own – No longer shall I be alone.

I'm tired of beauty
incessantly meddling in my affairs

luring me to venture outside myself
revealing hidden radiance within

disguising life's dismal undercurrent
reducing it to a superficial veneer

randomly appearing by surprise
stubbornly eliciting a smile

performing alchemy on the mundane
dousing my awareness in the elixir of life

beauty...
the pulchritude of spirit...that's all it is...

Constant, consistent, consuming
Devoid of all control
Relentless, redundant, ruining
I must never reveal my soul

For only I know
How far I will go
Can't let it show
I've never felt so low

if only emotional abuse scarred my skin the way physical abuse did, because maybe then you'd see that your words and your demeanor are the reason why you say i have issues with channeling my anger
maybe if your screams bludgeoned my skin the way a punch would destroy the filaments under my tender flesh, you'd notice how much you're hurting me
and it scares me that you can't even see what you're doing
it scares me that one day i'll be one scream away from erratically fainting to my demise, falling effortlessly to the floor, heart still beating in my chest and brain activity picking up faster than ever before
it scares me that you're not scared
your words are like knives carving my organs with cynical words
"worthless" is inscribed through the hemispheres of my brain
"damaged" is engraved into my lungs
i can't breathe
and im beginning
to not feel anything
anymore

But some good Triton-god had ruth, and bare
The boy’s drowned body back to Grecian land,
And mermaids combed his dank and dripping hair
And smoothed his brow, and loosed his clenching hand;
Some brought sweet spices from far Araby,
And others bade the halcyon sing her softest lullaby.

And when he neared his old Athenian home,
A mighty billow rose up suddenly
Upon whose oily back the clotted foam
Lay diapered in some strange fantasy,
And clasping him unto its glassy breast
Swept landward, like a white-maned steed upon a venturous quest!

Now where Colonos leans unto the sea
There lies a long and level stretch of lawn;
The rabbit knows it, and the mountain bee
For it deserts Hymettus, and the Faun
Is not afraid, for never through the day
Comes a cry ruder than the shout of shepherd lads at play.

But often from the thorny labyrinth
And tangled branches of the circling wood
The stealthy hunter sees young Hyacinth
Hurling the polished disk, and draws his hood
Over his guilty gaze, and creeps away,
Nor dares to wind his horn, or—else at the first break of day

The Dryads come and throw the leathern ball
Along the reedy shore, and circumvent
Some goat-eared Pan to be their seneschal
For fear of bold Poseidon’s ravishment,
And loose their girdles, with shy timorous eyes,
Lest from the surf his azure arms and purple beard should rise.

On this side and on that a rocky cave,
Hung with the yellow-belled laburnum, stands
Smooth is the beach, save where some ebbing wave
Leaves its faint outline etched upon the sands,
As though it feared to be too soon forgot
By the green rush, its playfellow,—and yet, it is a spot

So small, that the inconstant butterfly
Could steal the hoarded money from each flower
Ere it was noon, and still not satisfy
Its over-greedy love,—within an hour
A sailor boy, were he but rude enow
To land and pluck a garland for his galley’s painted prow,

Would almost leave the little meadow bare,
For it knows nothing of great pageantry,
Only a few narcissi here and there
Stand separate in sweet austerity,
Dotting the unmown grass with silver stars,
And here and there a daffodil waves tiny scimitars.

Hither the billow brought him, and was glad
Of such dear servitude, and where the land
Was ****** of all waters laid the lad
Upon the golden margent of the strand,
And like a lingering lover oft returned
To kiss those pallid limbs which once with intense fire burned,

Ere the wet seas had quenched that holocaust,
That self-fed flame, that passionate lustihead,
Ere grisly death with chill and nipping frost
Had withered up those lilies white and red
Which, while the boy would through the forest range,
Answered each other in a sweet antiphonal counter-change.

And when at dawn the wood-nymphs, hand-in-hand,
Threaded the bosky dell, their satyr spied
The boy’s pale body stretched upon the sand,
And feared Poseidon’s treachery, and cried,
And like bright sunbeams flitting through a glade
Each startled Dryad sought some safe and leafy ambuscade.

Save one white girl, who deemed it would not be
So dread a thing to feel a sea-god’s arms
Crushing her ******* in amorous tyranny,
And longed to listen to those subtle charms
Insidious lovers weave when they would win
Some fenced fortress, and stole back again, nor thought it sin

To yield her treasure unto one so fair,
And lay beside him, thirsty with love’s drouth,
Called him soft names, played with his tangled hair,
And with hot lips made havoc of his mouth
Afraid he might not wake, and then afraid
Lest he might wake too soon, fled back, and then, fond renegade,

Returned to fresh assault, and all day long
Sat at his side, and laughed at her new toy,
And held his hand, and sang her sweetest song,
Then frowned to see how froward was the boy
Who would not with her maidenhood entwine,
Nor knew that three days since his eyes had looked on Proserpine;

Nor knew what sacrilege his lips had done,
But said, ‘He will awake, I know him well,
He will awake at evening when the sun
Hangs his red shield on Corinth’s citadel;
This sleep is but a cruel treachery
To make me love him more, and in some cavern of the sea

Deeper than ever falls the fisher’s line
Already a huge Triton blows his horn,
And weaves a garland from the crystalline
And drifting ocean-tendrils to adorn
The emerald pillars of our bridal bed,
For sphered in foaming silver, and with coral crowned head,

We two will sit upon a throne of pearl,
And a blue wave will be our canopy,
And at our feet the water-snakes will curl
In all their amethystine panoply
Of diamonded mail, and we will mark
The mullets swimming by the mast of some storm-foundered bark,

Vermilion-finned with eyes of bossy gold
Like flakes of crimson light, and the great deep
His glassy-portaled chamber will unfold,
And we will see the painted dolphins sleep
Cradled by murmuring halcyons on the rocks
Where Proteus in quaint suit of green pastures his monstrous
flocks.

And tremulous opal-hued anemones
Will wave their purple fringes where we tread
Upon the mirrored floor, and argosies
Of fishes flecked with tawny scales will thread
The drifting cordage of the shattered wreck,
And honey-coloured amber beads our twining limbs will deck.’

But when that baffled Lord of War the Sun
With gaudy pennon flying passed away
Into his brazen House, and one by one
The little yellow stars began to stray
Across the field of heaven, ah! then indeed
She feared his lips upon her lips would never care to feed,

And cried, ‘Awake, already the pale moon
Washes the trees with silver, and the wave
Creeps grey and chilly up this sandy dune,
The croaking frogs are out, and from the cave
The nightjar shrieks, the fluttering bats repass,
And the brown stoat with hollow flanks creeps through the dusky
grass.

Nay, though thou art a god, be not so coy,
For in yon stream there is a little reed
That often whispers how a lovely boy
Lay with her once upon a grassy mead,
Who when his cruel pleasure he had done
Spread wings of rustling gold and soared aloft into the sun.

Be not so coy, the laurel trembles still
With great Apollo’s kisses, and the fir
Whose clustering sisters fringe the seaward hill
Hath many a tale of that bold ravisher
Whom men call Boreas, and I have seen
The mocking eyes of Hermes through the poplar’s silvery sheen.

Even the jealous Naiads call me fair,
And every morn a young and ruddy swain
Woos me with apples and with locks of hair,
And seeks to soothe my virginal disdain
By all the gifts the gentle wood-nymphs love;
But yesterday he brought to me an iris-plumaged dove

With little crimson feet, which with its store
Of seven spotted eggs the cruel lad
Had stolen from the lofty sycamore
At daybreak, when her amorous comrade had
Flown off in search of berried juniper
Which most they love; the fretful wasp, that earliest vintager

Of the blue grapes, hath not persistency
So constant as this simple shepherd-boy
For my poor lips, his joyous purity
And laughing sunny eyes might well decoy
A Dryad from her oath to Artemis;
For very beautiful is he, his mouth was made to kiss;

His argent forehead, like a rising moon
Over the dusky hills of meeting brows,
Is crescent shaped, the hot and Tyrian noon
Leads from the myrtle-grove no goodlier spouse
For Cytheraea, the first silky down
Fringes his blushing cheeks, and his young limbs are strong and
brown;

And he is rich, and fat and fleecy herds
Of bleating sheep upon his meadows lie,
And many an earthen bowl of yellow curds
Is in his homestead for the thievish fly
To swim and drown in, the pink clover mead
Keeps its sweet store for him, and he can pipe on oaten reed.

And yet I love him not; it was for thee
I kept my love; I knew that thou would’st come
To rid me of this pallid chastity,
Thou fairest flower of the flowerless foam
Of all the wide AEgean, brightest star
Of ocean’s azure heavens where the mirrored planets are!

I knew that thou would’st come, for when at first
The dry wood burgeoned, and the sap of spring
Swelled in my green and tender bark or burst
To myriad multitudinous blossoming
Which mocked the midnight with its mimic moons
That did not dread the dawn, and first the thrushes’ rapturous
tunes

Startled the squirrel from its granary,
And cuckoo flowers fringed the narrow lane,
Through my young leaves a sensuous ecstasy
Crept like new wine, and every mossy vein
Throbbed with the fitful pulse of amorous blood,
And the wild winds of passion shook my slim stem’s maidenhood.

The trooping fawns at evening came and laid
Their cool black noses on my lowest boughs,
And on my topmost branch the blackbird made
A little nest of grasses for his spouse,
And now and then a twittering wren would light
On a thin twig which hardly bare the weight of such delight.

I was the Attic shepherd’s trysting place,
Beneath my shadow Amaryllis lay,
And round my trunk would laughing Daphnis chase
The timorous girl, till tired out with play
She felt his hot breath stir her tangled hair,
And turned, and looked, and fled no more from such delightful
snare.

Then come away unto my ambuscade
Where clustering woodbine weaves a canopy
For amorous pleasaunce, and the rustling shade
Of Paphian myrtles seems to sanctify
The dearest rites of love; there in the cool
And green recesses of its farthest depth there is pool,

The ouzel’s haunt, the wild bee’s pasturage,
For round its rim great creamy lilies float
Through their flat leaves in verdant anchorage,
Each cup a white-sailed golden-laden boat
Steered by a dragon-fly,—be not afraid
To leave this wan and wave-kissed shore, surely the place was made

For lovers such as we; the Cyprian Queen,
One arm around her boyish paramour,
Strays often there at eve, and I have seen
The moon strip off her misty vestiture
For young Endymion’s eyes; be not afraid,
The panther feet of Dian never tread that secret glade.

Nay if thou will’st, back to the beating brine,
Back to the boisterous billow let us go,
And walk all day beneath the hyaline
Huge vault of Neptune’s watery portico,
And watch the purple monsters of the deep
Sport in ungainly play, and from his lair keen Xiphias leap.

For if my mistress find me lying here
She will not ruth or gentle pity show,
But lay her boar-spear down, and with austere
Relentless fingers string the cornel bow,
And draw the feathered notch against her breast,
And loose the arched cord; aye, even now upon the quest

I hear her hurrying feet,—awake, awake,
Thou laggard in love’s battle! once at least
Let me drink deep of passion’s wine, and slake
My parched being with the nectarous feast
Which even gods affect!  O come, Love, come,
Still we have time to reach the cavern of thine azure home.’

Scarce had she spoken when the shuddering trees
Shook, and the leaves divided, and the air
Grew conscious of a god, and the grey seas
Crawled backward, and a long and dismal blare
Blew from some tasselled horn, a sleuth-hound bayed,
And like a flame a barbed reed flew whizzing down the glade.

And where the little flowers of her breast
Just brake into their milky blossoming,
This murderous paramour, this unbidden guest,
Pierced and struck deep in horrid chambering,
And ploughed a ****** furrow with its dart,
And dug a long red road, and cleft with winged death her heart.

Sobbing her life out with a bitter cry
On the boy’s body fell the Dryad maid,
Sobbing for incomplete virginity,
And raptures unenjoyed, and pleasures dead,
And all the pain of things unsatisfied,
And the bright drops of crimson youth crept down her throbbing
side.

Ah! pitiful it was to hear her moan,
And very pitiful to see her die
Ere she had yielded up her sweets, or known
The joy of passion, that dread mystery
Which not to know is not to live at all,
And yet to know is to be held in death’s most deadly thrall.

But as it hapt the Queen of Cythere,
Who with Adonis all night long had lain
Within some shepherd’s hut in Arcady,
On team of silver doves and gilded wain
Was journeying Paphos-ward, high up afar
From mortal ken between the mountains and the morning star,

And when low down she spied the hapless pair,
And heard the Oread’s faint despairing cry,
Whose cadence seemed to play upon the air
As though it were a viol, hastily
She bade her pigeons fold each straining plume,
And dropt to earth, and reached the strand, and saw their dolorous
doom.

For as a gardener turning back his head
To catch the last notes of the linnet, mows
With careless scythe too near some flower bed,
And cuts the thorny pillar of the rose,
And with the flower’s loosened loneliness
Strews the brown mould; or as some shepherd lad in wantonness

Driving his little flock along the mead
Treads down two daffodils, which side by aide
Have lured the lady-bird with yellow brede
And made the gaudy moth forget its pride,
Treads down their brimming golden chalices
Under light feet which were not made for such rude ravages;

Or as a schoolboy tired of his book
Flings himself down upon the reedy grass
And plucks two water-lilies from the brook,
And for a time forgets the hour glass,
Then wearies of their sweets, and goes his way,
And lets the hot sun **** them, even go these lovers lay.

And Venus cried, ‘It is dread Artemis
Whose bitter hand hath wrought this cruelty,
Or else that mightier maid whose care it is
To guard her strong and stainless majesty
Upon the hill Athenian,—alas!
That they who loved so well unloved into Death’s house should
pass.’

So with soft hands she laid the boy and girl
In the great golden waggon tenderly
(Her white throat whiter than a moony pearl
Just threaded with a blue vein’s tapestry
Had not yet ceased to throb, and still her breast
Swayed like a wind-stirred lily in ambiguous unrest)

And then each pigeon spread its milky van,
The bright car soared into the dawning sky,
And like a cloud the aerial caravan
Passed over the AEgean silently,
Till the faint air was troubled with the song
From the wan mouths that call on bleeding Thammuz all night long.

But when the doves had reached their wonted goal
Where the wide stair of orbed marble dips
Its snows into the sea, her fluttering soul
Just shook the trembling petals of her lips
And passed into the void, and Venus knew
That one fair maid the less would walk amid her retinue,

And bade her servants carve a cedar chest
With all the wonder of this history,
Within whose scented womb their limbs should rest
Where olive-trees make tender the blue sky
On the low hills of Paphos, and the Faun
Pipes in the noonday, and the nightingale sings on till dawn.

Nor failed they to obey her hest, and ere
The morning bee had stung the daffodil
With tiny fretful spear, or from its lair
The waking stag had leapt across the rill
And roused the ouzel, or the lizard crept
Athwart the sunny rock, beneath the grass their bodies slept.

And when day brake, within that silver shrine
Fed by the flames of cressets tremulous,
Queen Venus knelt and prayed to Proserpine
That she whose beauty made Death amorous
Should beg a guerdon from her pallid Lord,
And let Desire pass across dread Charon’s icy ford.

Floating above the rifts of apperception I glaze over the gaudy faucets of imagined vector thrusts in hibernation by the lucubration of space-time materialized crystal in the somber beats of fetched farrago of choice slices in delicate hums of hemmed balance rantipole only in ethereal importance but otherwise supersolid above the sprauncy vagrancy of dilettantism. We shout a clarion virtuosity so that the conclamation of neovitalism conjures upon a spell of lapse and regress a motive for further crystallization of epidemiology into harmony with syndicated admonition sleek in design and parceled into renown by feats of completion rather than slugabed gregarious fountains of wasted ingenuity bleeding from the vacuum of an empty hearth in a hospitable dwelling otherwise cleared of imperfection. Right now, I levitate with transcendence with an approximated eidetic memory that is the surgical vibrancy of renewal rather than the chameleons of hidden talents buried by the walls of Jericho sounding tocsins of alarm that the anointed favor of choice destruction is only an encircled rapture of rhapsodies of confluence found in axiomatic truths ribbed with the futtocks of seaworthy but cauponate recidivism into the donnybrooks of apocryphal revelation preceding the whimsical fall of cascading permanence just as gravity so ordained it. We breathe the life of the ethereal numinous spirit of isangelous repute because we navigate the exquisite cobweb of reconciliation to surpass all understanding in peace what would be a miscegenated carcass of war otherwise apart from the incidental apartheid of the drones of causality ignoring the antecedent reality too much to register fathomed streaks of preventive endeavor because of the scars of a scrappy schlep of the rampicks of ecbolic servitude to moth-eaten star-crossed lovers of the mean menagerie of gutless succor renowned only in tepid rejections of harbingers bequeathed in succession but ignored because of the procession of “Billie Jean” politics.

   The citadel aflame with controversy buttresses carnality by witless contaminants of hidebound scaldabancos of ineffable destitution so craven in eisoptrophobia for their hypostasized indolent fatuousness of capitulation that they are but a minor punctuation in the largesse of centuries to favor audacity in candor over the prevarications of catastrophe to dented human pride against humane dictates of theodicy in fatalism that predestination experimented with its own vaulted verve to find permanent solutions engraved in the agrapha of time to solidify the redintegrated truth of God’s divine stewardship above the quisquilous deism of former regnant centuries of blench and blandishment. We revolt at the specter of rot only when the effluvia of disgust elevates the visceral reality above the utilitarianism of recycled prim nuisances of noisome lineage that yet balk because they are bereft of attention but not a vacant talent and therefore should the subsidies of man surpass the ignorance of appearances he will shrug of the demur of the scrimshank and sharpen his scrivello in the service of redemption found through cultivated prowess of gardens beneath where rivers flow above a cubic centurion of embattled visages of the heavens becoming the rampart for the vestigial clarity of Secret Masters to foresee the bypass that heals decadence and rebukes the formalism of puritan endeavor to sweat with exhaustive patience over the gossamer intertesselations of a ripe reality rather than a groveled fragmentary world shattered too much by exigent metanoia to mount the crenellated catchpole of vigilant enmity towards the stew of listlessness found in epigone and farce more than in organic fortunes. We flip the upheaval of society to squander our proportionate degrees of wealth on the necessity created by dire quandary which enamors by interrogations of pulchritude the verisimilitude of participle ivory dalliance of etched canvasses of simultagnosia for the librations of the liberated rings of betrothed liberation despite profound lurches of the mistetches of ignorance presiding dismally over the hulked disdain of glamborge rather than resselenque.

     The winter is a poor porcine glut of ciconine swelters because the prickly obtuse recoil of the delopes of caution find their permeable balance with a sort of photographic photosynthesis that braves the dearth of reprieve for the reprisal of nostalgic deeds found in the docimasy of riveted reflections because the preordination of God is the superlative champion of the witeless grandeval protectorate of infinite concepts guarded from the parvanimity even of the most strident minds squabbling over the braseros and battues of history as though those funereal stains of lachrymose regret outweigh the traditions of vaunted human progress because they are finicky about importunate pleas of subsidiary injustice rather than fulminations of the modern rebuttal to the disclaimers of an uneven history that shepherds the doubts of nihilism into ripe fruition at the expense of very expensive moral rot for the codlings of urbacity and mendaciloquence used to foment that tribalism of totemic justice. We see in Penuel the wrestling match of specters and heroic giants documented on the ageless pages and we notice the ironic twinges of struggle that kneaded the propriety of gentilian privilege that ultimately fostered an insurrection against chosen bravado among those that sear with zeal beyond the yordim afflictions of yobbery because the Jewish heart is stronger than any calamity even if it departs from the reverence of the colporteurs of the integrated syncretism of the attempted monolith that beseeches polyphiloprogenitive growth in mindset rather than in testy abeyance of forbearance because of known scrutinies into the tropology of wilted facts remanded by curious historicity that crumples without disdain when we memorialize the erasure of scepsis by modern standards of thaumaturgy.

    The minauderies of growth are a repositioned tacit allegiance to the untold fanfare and hearsay immunized against the broach of facetious levity to buoy discordant hearts above fumatoriums of relentless ignorance because coherent masterwork can be cobbled without such lapidary toil and toll on sincere affectations of wizened brevity. The seismic precautions for the forefathers of incidental convergences between expectancy and crystallized history are an ironic intortion of priorities because the heralds and tribunes matched the peerless foresight with the gerrymandered figments of apartheid between the imaginary and the real so that the delicate synchrony of events could unfurl a riveting carapace from the shells of protection even in amiable squalor for its impenitent attrition on the volleys of sensible rumor becoming fashioned in covert bedazzled errors in judgment leading to the triumph of the eventual civilization over the futtocks of the burial of the former trekleador of zenkidu belonging to provincial cadasters found so tucked in the hedges that discernment of frikmag would be an indelible scourge on the biognosy of the diagnosed endeavors that elapsed into remediated circumstances that brave the depths of deontological violation for the breadth of apportioned loaves and two swanky fish earning a place among the miracles of transcendent liberation from articles of decree imperious by sardonic disdain becoming nullified by the histrionics of a delicately staged orchestra that cements human achievement.

       We relish the frescades of a ruffled autumnal reminder of flourish above pothers of the screed of admonition swamped by nostalgic backtracks in the séance with ultimatum of design and the impregnated and carnal lusts of a world pitched in darkness with guarded lambent lights fomenting a perjury against tact for the deliverance of freedom in tacit agreement with owleries that every bonanza be tithed in their favor regardless of hibernation of spoilsports or their subsidiary remarks on indelible quills of invented manufactured realities we crave with desperation rather than cower from in requited nescience urging us to depart from affairs and stagnate the loyalty of fealty above the limber of utility mobilized above levities for solemn remarks and rejoinders. Promulgated above the robotic rubble of staffage haywire in wiredrawn contemplative resonance of tremulous subterfuge vestigial but immediate to the yardsticks of reprehensible malarkey, is the barnstorm for erratic dimples sauntered by the saunas of shelter above the chaos of ruined ginnels for the gimcracks of auxiliary duty to service, is the glorification of the sultry intimations of legions of remonstrance in guarded decorum about sunken atrocities lapsed in memorial to the incumbent brunt of sockdolagers of justice returning revenants from the bridewell of historical internment. The symphily of orchestras to cineaste symposiasts of surquedry in impudence beyond the brays of betrayal is the aborning mythos of regimented perceptions of a world that when magnified by minutiae appears starkly contrast to the gapped gubbertushed reality of the average patron of the arts to such an extreme gulf of receptive understanding that the qualia are dovetailed only in the swink of careful kisswonks to certify certitude itself when all the fragments coalesce into subjoined harmony to the substructures of inherent conscientiousness. The miracles at work that are vesicles and vessels for the swage of imprint above the loyalty of the imprinted tribunes of the fluminous is how hidden protrusions can emerge so victorious over popularized glazes on the pastures of a farmed culture itching for timmynoggies of innovation but only finding the etched remarks of pristine imagos of heroism dwindling in motivation to surpass the imaginative leaps accustomed to a newfangled laziness that bedazzles the guzzle of crowds but not the discrimination of the crowded morass of incompletion found in mosaics missing enigmatic philters of intoxicated love for the profound. So to be intermediary as a custodian for artistry we must cozen the wheedled imaginations not of the relic but the archaeologist that discovered the embedded prisms of attentive scrutiny for glinting sunshine inherent in troves of surpassed excellence beyond parochial sympatric blandishment of donnism rather than a resselenque that floats above demeanor to usher the cosseted age of treasure above the glib brocards and florews of past success.

      Immanent to the provisions of God as decreed from a syncretic reconnaissance of the pitiable gulfs that separate boundless divine love from the clavigerous potential for scrappy sympatric affiliation to **** through the barnstorms of internal comestions of conflated priorities we are ourselves prismatic in the indulgence of a tasty life sprinkled with zest rather than tempered with the vengeance of retorted animosity that we knead the pottery of ironclad resistance to a metallic conduit of pruned fulminations of unguided intuition so that the natural accord supersedes the goad of materialism for the sustenance of antiquity beyond its heyday for vital gains against the tauricide of panic and frenzy. The linchpin of all realistic attempts at the sympatric symphily of civilization is a guided remorse through the torment of affliction that sizzles without anteric barbs as it measures through engrenage how to pilot the vehicles of prosperity through the minefields of contingency that invisibly bequeath new hurdles and inestimable obstacles that collude surreptitiously to fulminate measured controversy against the backbites of restrained equipoise created by polities of the macadamized fabric of a welded smithy of a universe that with ubiquity proclaims above the senseless the harvest of conjugal repartee in sensible pride against militant bastions of incidental prejudice for a careen against the flyndresques of danger and the flyndrigs of glaikery alike for a humane spurt of enlightenment to tower peerlessly in supervision of entelechy created by esemplastic unity in apolaustic purpose. We cannot be puritans engaged in a pilgrimage to a palimpsest of priggishness because the daring elements of adventurism are necessary ingredients to catalyze the supply-chain of the innate gluttony of ego-seeking endless balance with a natural sustained biognosy that prizes biocentric harmony above bibliognost scepsis so that the enthused can flock with liberty divorced from libertinism. The ultimatum is a war between hedonism wed with donnism against eumoirety and self-restraint and this battle will be waged on the indolence of a future of cordslave tethers to interrogation of privy conceptualism hamshackled by the gradgrinds into the neat nexility of precise conformity that blacklists the samizdat because the genizah profoundly twists the already jumbled jengadangle and provides a junediggle of procession and ceremony rather than pomp without substantial grit embedded in the showmanship of a reality in need of a fourth-wall.

        It is ironic how we bewrayed our stewardship of the planet as a plenipotentiary sentience waged against the vesicles of instinct but more fundamental to this tattered but pregnant psalm is that the stronghold of our future is the tenacity of filial duty to enthrone the household with husbandry and restraint as an emolument to divine justice that sparkles opalescent in its own redacted notions of gravity imperfect in the taradiddles of science but refined by the eclat of the combustible syncopation of a reiterative trope of realism combined with surrealist caprice to henpeck affectionate violation above inviolable screeds of blood sport rather than conjugal affections afforded to the brood and the feast of the flocks that rein supreme over all things but exert inclement justice over the cattle and chattel of civilization itself. The minkumpf against the sacrilege of a prioritized kosher is to abhor the suffering rather than embrace the penitence of perceived but specious sacrifice which is an ornery thorn on the stained conscience of the yobbery of both the apikoros and the obedient because to attenuate all suffering even of instinctual beings we anneal our hearts to a glorified compassion that supersedes the relegated relics of pushful genuflection by succedaneum of sacrifice waged against the docile whangams of otiose theodicy. The filibusters against the regnant complexity of regalia that is a sprauncy poivrade with terpsichorean flairs to transmute the intimations of hibernated perfidy into finicky transmissions for the riometers that accord orbific merit in a lackluster time enchant the rollicking audience of this auditorium of the prevenance of the conquered universe bracing for the camorra of the insipid entreaty of defalcated casuistry—the prominent exchequer in hoodwinked political agitprop that forges ironclad allegiances to flimsy facades of the verisimilitude of dignity with recalcitrant but incondite bruits of venom militant against secular apostasy—that the fitful arrivistes that swim in dire dearth will be welcomed into the reconciliation of all time with a tempered lurid glint of revelation bounded by sunken albatross of hype unbounded with a peace insurmountable in prestige rewarded only with the highest reservations.


    On 3-1-2020 when I penned my philosophy—even at a slowpoke margin of crafty precision above rapid empirical faucets of folly—I was entirely selfsame with the autotelic engravings of the smoldering aboriginal talents within that many can swing through by tenacity for enormous plaudit but a flagrant majority will apprehend with flippant scollardical tenets of rebuke and remain honest in their appraisal only in meek resignation of parvanimity.
Consider the postulates of rarefaction whittled into a vehement zeal against the prostitution of our species to the anteric cycles of residual molds of dingy spectacle mired by the tyrannical towers of supercilious squirms of revamped novelty rather than enhanced by the freebooters of dirigisme that borrow from time the behest of philandered flairs divorced from the cadges of secular instinct and enthroned by the qualms of engineered virtuosity that is stark, barren but peerless in its outstretched clamor for luxuriant sprees against the silentium of grandeval asylum incurred by the flippant filigrees of recalcitrant modernism endangered by the irredentism of the future upon the whimsy of the present-minded momentary glare of rapture.  This impending architecture of nimble but subservient endeavor is a pinprick rejoinder against the wernaggles of prepossessed fountains of configured animosity against the stapled heed of a modality of trayned invictive invectives against the plodding course of fustilugianation that swerves in apathy of autopilot junediggle to emanate the surrender of epigone to the raktendure of the synaesthesis of the attuned perception of all superimposed minutiae delegated by calculated design into a synclastic focus on veiled caprice that is vaulted above the choppy and sketchy verdure of remiss perception to stellar continuities rather than mundane knickpoints of stodged blurs that magnify syncretic qualia into baseline congruity rather than staid torpefied resignation of the visage of thunder without the pangs of the widely vituperated lightning that bequeaths all certain notions but flouts the tortious saboteurs of the prim trucage of brittle fundamentalism.

     As the flawed paragon of a picaresque youth punctuated by vibrant plumage of self-wrought tropophilous usucaption of remote groomed frontiers of desolate luxury but buoyant morale into the ballasts of a nimble usufruct that hikkles yet still against still-framed thilloire--fatuous in endearment only to the polity of the waterdrip of craven but gravid disingenuous flickers of lambent cloaks of perfidy—that earned its birthright by meditative fruition rather than prodigal tallespin of indolent frapplanks of a vicarious personage rather than an autotelic haecceity showcases the folly of heterodyne inclinations meeting an impasse of accidental dislodgement. The interregnum between the spurts and sprees of luxuriance is a staid pause between continuities of afforded parlance becoming stapled demographic solidarity affixed to a strident gallop of effortful pushes against the tenacity of the slumberous wicked hibernation of vetust magpiety without hieratical internment because youthful industry beats hackneyed bludgeons of wiseacres of a stilted manufacture of steamy nostalgia for lickerish moments that dignify but undermine moral virtues but splash anointed and sometimes disjointed favor upon the congeners to a rabid escapade of a heedless love frowning on the girdles of the prim balderdash of heralded jolts dim on levity and puffed with elusive contextualized control of libidinous serrated defilement because the crotaline **** outmantles the sweedled limber of exploitable folly. The cosseted reality of wheedled gourmands of continuous perception rather than the Gaussian blur of the protean invention of stitches in time that obscure rather than magnify the supernal levity inherent to most artistry is a linchpin of lenient gravitas that levies the lavaderos of ripe perception into annealment.
Excuse the bravado of the gait of winnowed forks in a bronteum for heralds of megaloscopy fastened to the macroscian reality of indelible filigrees of countermanded controversy becoming its best behest in the sempiternal flowering of burgeoned demonstration rather than illustrious overhang of drab slabs of manufacture rather than organism that should be interposed between the constellated concepts of both apperception and the aggrieved counselors to obtuse obsessions that are an improper tutelary for a designated reprisal of the once profane now immediately gratified by ramshackle tenets of a guarded sublimation of the tenets of post-modernism into a sustained force of the internalized tabernacle of haecceity shepherded into exuberance by the manumission of spirit from the ******* of purblind scalds of defamation that incurs the penalty of flippant privation. The refuge the Lord provides is not contingent upon the vagaries of deliberation nor the calculus of oversight but the remontant amaranthine glower of a listed deed becoming an eternal reminder that a dismantled and disjointed world fathoming only remorse rather than the trudge of gentility against the headwinds of brunt asperity will always flout the successor rather than atone for the failure of the imponent condition that constellates around rudimentary drivel grubbing the momentary out of avarice for allotted merchandise rather than glommed magnets to amoeba sentiments for the kisswonk of ulterior motive beyond dungeons of desperation that lurk ghoulishly with spectral frights at the disfigurement of morale created by errors askew rather than a contagion of righteous valor.

   Ask the heedful servant if the captaincy of reneged commitment owes homage to dutiful instruction or whether it is a balking corpse of necrosis accorded to the omphalism of brutish carnal repose in times of sedentary silt siphoned in spelunked rijuice for preordination is a predominant specter for a world scared scurrilous and skittish in a diatribe against the very notion of tribal screeds embedded in the sedimentary heft of traditionalism above the pother of vacillation commended to the apikoros but counterfeit fiat system of a ruddy governance without a supreme magistrate. Now lets venture into the territory of visagists as we envision the swanky subversion of impoverished and nebbich visions of oligochrome that fixates on belabored but dead notions of rigid propriety and levitate above those concerns with a querulous transcendence that never wernaggles about the profaned irrelevance of burlesque tropes of sidereal friction but instead memorializes the thermolysis of permeable endeavor above staid countenances of imposture that lurk in the shadowy penumbra of the connivance of persona above the archetype of the tutelary guardian spirit that through windlass and sometimes deliberation affixes nobility to even the pedestrian in order to assize its proper proportions to granular ironies expounded into megalography transformative by the very rivets of its supersensible existence and cohabitation with histrinkage among human taboos.

   The handiwork of a permeable race prone to exacerbated proclamations of prerogatives bulldozed by the rapid percolation of insoluble quandaries to the gripes of the feast of foofaraw sometimes shelters our otherwise regnant concern about the plenipotentiary God that observes all latent affairs without the paramours that conflate vivid carnality with appeased luxury and superimposes a crafty system of seismic shifts in rantipole dances with numinous flux rather than dissipated militant suppression of the fracklings of dissolute pollution which swirk in their dastardly desperado endeavors to corral the entire monoliths that guard each province into a winnowed rumble of rubble by tarnish of Tyre rather than by the upstart rejoinders of Canaan. Every creature which has the capacity to perceive language is afforded benedictions by the overhailing force of the hypaethral heights of superlative ingenuity founded in the bolted speculation of the endearment of all to tropological seesaws embattled against the hearsay of nyejays that contaminates the telmatology of the ecosystem of revivalism rather than buries the leaden debts of the disjointed revenants of past prominence into recycled irrelevance for posterity rather than for anything but a machination of a clockwork apple rigged for a rotten worm to swindle the sweet delicate tempests of unforeseen disaster to perjuries against financial solidarity.

The spinsters of sardonic drollery underscore the imminence of an incondite cutthroat collapse blackguarded by the hucksters of incontinence grubbing every fetched noisome notion and congealing a bonnyclabber of desiccated mildew that proves vestigial when the victors of time earn their joyous serenade to the pinnacle of the totem of jaundice slits in wavy endeavors for the participles of sejungible syntax of the ephorized furor to outlast the draksteng of droned dereliction manned by half-baked spies of ulterior recitals for imprinted vicissitude in supremacy in synquest for frizzlounges rather than the pedestrian circulatory system of careworn polity. We vaporize the petty hatred of sympatric regelation that neuters the virulence of motivated impediments to the draconian surge of asperity that sinks temporal haplessness as a regaled blasphemy that crowns only the ringed betrothal to spumid serrated halts in slick superstition that is a buggery to the idea of insectivores devouring the erratic chantage of germane germs that pauperize rather than even blind the deafened to be a crutch to vehicular homicide. Melismatic sennet is a dirigible of immense herculean sinew without the traces of vestibulary retches of kisswonked grisly tepid intimidations of eccedentesiasts by the radioglare of wizened corrugations in thanatism that exhort the avatars of narquiddity over the natural departure of revenant souls back to their temporary hostility to crass lifeless decarnate immediacy that slinks with foibles magnified by vertiginous heights of scollardical reputes rigged by the rijuice of the plackiques of meaningless spoils for swashbuckler bonanza borrowed from serrated vengeance exacted in prominence to provide false avenues of extenuation to malefaction that is confidant to the panopticon of exemplary dimples meager in the largesse of the composite realism of a sizable imprint on megalography that outlasts impertinent excuses for dangerous trout swimming against the mobilized selachostomous frizz of sharks gathering to avenge disclosure with insolence and gravid atrocity of incisive surgical evisceration of attempted depositions that falter by innumerable facets of countenance that belie ultimate realism and the perdurable construction of a sturdy hive of bibliognost revelry.

     Even with the blaring sennet of majesty inundating my piecemeal perception with the marstions of flarium that is an efficacy in a flaccid world of otiose pretenses limpid only in folly but contraplex in ironic skewbald skerries of grubbed destination that is the terminus of karezza despite the maledictions of vehement guarded betrayals that conjure up lurid noisome virility against the gamines and gallywows that populate interstellar fictions of virtu rather than mundane pragmatica that astound with the resselenque of contaminated skeumorphs of latent fracture belonging to a skeletonized ossified reification of farce above historicity in seemly seamless countenance with overwrought princely stature deserving integrity to ripples through sparkling opalescence. The vapid insularity of the self-contained mythos of appeased groundlings is based on the rhizic and rhizogenic fracklings destitute in predicative flares to swelter above stratospheres of the illimitable into the dwelling of the highest serenity inherent to the pacification of truth to neglect its egregious errors of mistetches of a ripened pachyderm of bravery in times of austerity and now a reclaimed notion of sempiternal charades swimming above the punitive draksteng of dranger that is enlarged by acclimated attempts at foiled raltention hikkling against its own superior forces of galvanized preterition to elide over screwball insanity of derangement in this virtual paradise of inhabited souls belonging to former times congregating on the pasture of the evanescence of now for all eternity having the optative condition of incarnation above the ferules of the stagnant brevity of oversight in heavenly realms by postulate but not confirmed by regal logic.

     The troponder of the flickered lambent niceties of polity is a countenance that piggybacks on simpered jostles of negligent engrenage to appease sworn enmities among beatific havens for certitude swarmed by the fisticuffs of darbied bridewells of desiccated drainage traversing the distant disdain for the gravel of cemented slits of stilted pragmatica that is a gavel of atrocious estoppel mediated by heroic heresiarchs against pitiable betrayal for forceful remedies in acclimated servitude to the groans and groaks of a life of remorse and dearth rather than the glut of luxuriance in forbearance to its own intorted mirrored ironies that etch infinity with every scrawled rejoinder to austere ploys of checkered rumbles of threat and exigency posed by the clairvoyant hypocrites who benefit greatly by the design of the omphalism above the frays and brays of corporate dogmatism slowly outmoded by vibrant plumages of heteronormative originality beyond petty chantage. A hesitation overcomes the bluster of bravado as the restive earnest concerns of tribulation beset the minauderies of divine affection to reaffirm the teachings of the Gospel so that future generations genuflect beneath the altar of the ultimate stroke of sociogenesis and the blood ransom of suffering that promoted the human latitude and liberty against incarcerated throngs of virtue over caesaraproprism accorded to genuflection beneath denarii rather than absolution by tether to the eternal vine of sensation of the supersensible entelechy of all valiant insurrections against defective polities and renewed policies.

     We thus seek a transdimensional bridge between the morphean virtu of rudimentary alchemy of propitiation divulged by leverage and the teeming rambunctiousness of fiduciary tribes to the ultimate duty of man to consummate the future of eternity even in slowpoke mannerisms that sidle through rigors of entelechy and assize the masterwork of tutelage above the circumforaneous entrenchment of glut above the mastery of the subtle subaudition that beleaguers an adept conflagration of harnessed human ignorance staid in the incarceration of exotic virtues of freewheeling sapience never vulnerary to hospitable concerns that entrenches the verisimilitude of a refracted justice to reign over the stultification of a primitivism inherent to man and not man alone.

Etymologically,
          paradise
is inherited from the Latin
          paradisus
and the Greek
          paradeisos
and ultimately an ancient Iranian root --
          pairi daêza.

In theory, paradise is a religious term. By that definition, paradise is a place in which existence is positive, harmonious and timeless. It is conceptually a counter-image of the miseries of human civilization; in paradise, there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness.
It’s absurd, though, how we provide ourselves with such a convenient idea, a carrot for all mankind to share in our relentless drive towards death. It’s absurd that we must rely on such nonsensical ideals to inspire us to adhere to literal, arbitrarily-dictated morals. “Thou shalt not do things we say you probably shouldn’t.
Except sometimes.”
“Actually, whenever, as long as you feel bad about it and spend a moment kneeling quietly and thinking something along the lines of ‘So, like, sorry -- my bad. It won’t happen again, unless it does.’”
The fundamental mistake here is attempting to delineate the existence of Man with an old book and relentless propaganda and childhood indoctrination and threats of post-mortem punishment, but more on topic -- why can’t one just live the right way without this kind of artificial motivation? It’s a juvenile concept that we’ve taken much too far. It marginalizes the human race -- “listen, Man, if you eat all your broccoli, then you can have dessert.” But what happens in this situation, when the dessert isn’t real?
What I mean to say is that maybe you should eat your broccoli because it’s healthy, and because, besides what society has attempted to instill in you, it might actually be tasty if you give it a chance.
Live for now. Care about people now. Because you don’t get anything afterwards; however cynical it may be, dessert is just a cold grave or a flame designed for whole incineration of your being. Paradise is now.

No more of talk where God or Angel guest
With Man, as with his friend, familiar us’d,
To sit indulgent, and with him partake
Rural repast; permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblam’d. I now must change
Those notes to tragick; foul distrust, and breach
Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt,
And disobedience: on the part of Heaven
Now alienated, distance and distaste,
Anger and just rebuke, and judgement given,
That brought into this world a world of woe,
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery
Death’s harbinger: Sad talk!yet argument
Not less but more heroick than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d;
Or Neptune’s ire, or Juno’s, that so long
Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea’s son:                        

If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial patroness, who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplor’d,
And dictates to me slumbering; or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse:
Since first this subject for heroick song
Pleas’d me long choosing, and beginning late;
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroick deem’d chief mastery to dissect
With long and tedious havock fabled knights
In battles feign’d; the better fortitude
Of patience and heroick martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe races and games,
Or tilting furniture, imblazon’d shields,
Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights
At joust and tournament; then marshall’d feast
Serv’d up in hall with sewers and seneshals;
The skill of artifice or office mean,
Not that which justly gives heroick name
To person, or to poem.  Me, of these
Nor skill’d nor studious, higher argument
Remains; sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing
Depress’d; and much they may, if all be mine,
Not hers, who brings it nightly to my ear.
The sun was sunk, and after him the star
Of Hesperus, whose office is to bring
Twilight upon the earth, short arbiter
“twixt day and night, and now from end to end
Night’s hemisphere had veil’d the horizon round:
When satan, who late fled before the threats
Of Gabriel out of Eden, now improv’d
In meditated fraud and malice, bent
On Man’s destruction, maugre what might hap
Of heavier on himself, fearless returned
From compassing the earth; cautious of day,
Since Uriel, regent of the sun, descried
His entrance, and foreworned the Cherubim
That kept their watch; thence full of anguish driven,
The space of seven continued nights he rode
With darkness; thrice the equinoctial line
He circled; four times crossed the car of night
From pole to pole, traversing each colure;
On the eighth returned; and, on the coast averse
From entrance or Cherubick watch, by stealth
Found unsuspected way.  There was a place,
Now not, though sin, not time, first wrought the change,
Where Tigris, at the foot of Paradise,
Into a gulf shot under ground, till part
Rose up a fountain by the tree of life:
In with the river sunk, and with it rose
Satan, involved in rising mist; then sought
Where to lie hid; sea he had searched, and land,
From Eden over Pontus and the pool
Maeotis, up beyond the river Ob;
Downward as far antarctick; and in length,
West from Orontes to the ocean barred
At Darien ; thence to the land where flows
Ganges and Indus: Thus the orb he roamed
With narrow search; and with inspection deep
Considered every creature, which of all
Most opportune might serve his wiles; and found
The Serpent subtlest beast of all the field.
Him after long debate, irresolute
Of thoughts revolved, his final sentence chose
Fit vessel, fittest imp of fraud, in whom
To enter, and his dark suggestions hide
From sharpest sight: for, in the wily snake
Whatever sleights, none would suspicious mark,
As from his wit and native subtlety
Proceeding; which, in other beasts observed,
Doubt might beget of diabolick power
Active within, beyond the sense of brute.
Thus he resolved, but first from inward grief
His bursting passion into plaints thus poured.
More justly, seat worthier of Gods, as built
With second thoughts, reforming what was old!
O Earth, how like to Heaven, if not preferred
For what God, after better, worse would build?
Terrestrial Heaven, danced round by other Heavens
That shine, yet bear their bright officious lamps,
Light above light, for thee alone, as seems,
In thee concentring all their precious beams
Of sacred influence!  As God in Heaven
Is center, yet extends to all; so thou,
Centring, receivest from all those orbs: in thee,
Not in themselves, all their known virtue appears
Productive in herb, plant, and nobler birth
Of creatures animate with gradual life
Of growth, sense, reason, all summed up in Man.
With what delight could I have walked thee round,
If I could joy in aught, sweet interchange
Of hill, and valley, rivers, woods, and plains,
Now land, now sea and shores with forest crowned,
Rocks, dens, and caves!  But I in none of these
Find place or refuge; and the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries: all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heaven much worse would be my state.
But neither here seek I, no nor in Heaven
To dwell, unless by mastering Heaven’s Supreme;
Nor hope to be myself less miserable
By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound:
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts; and, him destroyed,
Or won to what may work his utter loss,
For whom all this was made, all this will soon
Follow, as to him linked in weal or woe;
In woe then; that destruction wide may range:
To me shall be the glory sole among
The infernal Powers, in one day to have marred
What he, Almighty styled, six nights and days
Continued making; and who knows how long
Before had been contriving? though perhaps
Not longer than since I, in one night, freed
From servitude inglorious well nigh half
The angelick name, and thinner left the throng
Of his adorers: He, to be avenged,
And to repair his numbers thus impaired,
Whether such virtue spent of old now failed
More Angels to create, if they at least
Are his created, or, to spite us more,
Determined to advance into our room
A creature formed of earth, and him endow,
Exalted from so base original,
With heavenly spoils, our spoils: What he decreed,
He effected; Man he made, and for him built
Magnificent this world, and earth his seat,
Him lord pronounced; and, O indignity!
Subjected to his service angel-wings,
And flaming ministers to watch and tend
Their earthly charge: Of these the vigilance
I dread; and, to elude, thus wrapt in mist
Of midnight vapour glide obscure, and pry
In every bush and brake, where hap may find
The serpent sleeping; in whose mazy folds
To hide me, and the dark intent I bring.
O foul descent! that I, who erst contended
With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrained
Into a beast; and, mixed with ******* slime,
This essence to incarnate and imbrute,
That to the highth of Deity aspired!
But what will not ambition and revenge
Descend to?  Who aspires, must down as low
As high he soared; obnoxious, first or last,
To basest things.  Revenge, at first though sweet,
Bitter ere long, back on itself recoils:
Let it; I reck not, so it light well aimed,
Since higher I fall short, on him who next
Provokes my envy, this new favourite
Of Heaven, this man of clay, son of despite,
Whom, us the more to spite, his Maker raised
From dust: Spite then with spite is best repaid.
So saying, through each thicket dank or dry,
Like a black mist low-creeping, he held on
His midnight-search, where soonest he might find
The serpent; him fast-sleeping soon he found
In labyrinth of many a round self-rolled,
His head the midst, well stored with subtile wiles:
Not yet in horrid shade or dismal den,
Nor nocent yet; but, on the grassy herb,
Fearless unfeared he slept: in at his mouth
The Devil entered; and his brutal sense,
In heart or head, possessing, soon inspired
With act intelligential; but his sleep
Disturbed not, waiting close the approach of morn.
Now, when as sacred light began to dawn
In Eden on the humid flowers, that breathed
Their morning incense, when all things, that breathe,
From the Earth’s great altar send up silent praise
To the Creator, and his nostrils fill
With grateful smell, forth came the human pair,
And joined their vocal worship to the quire
Of creatures wanting voice; that done, partake
The season prime for sweetest scents and airs:
Then commune, how that day they best may ply
Their growing work: for much their work out-grew
The hands’ dispatch of two gardening so wide,
And Eve first to her husband thus began.
Adam, well may we labour still to dress
This garden, still to tend plant, herb, and flower,
Our pleasant task enjoined; but, till more hands
Aid us, the work under our labour grows,
Luxurious by restraint; what we by day
Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,
One night or two with wanton growth derides
Tending to wild.  Thou therefore now advise,
Or bear what to my mind first thoughts present:
Let us divide our labours; thou, where choice
Leads thee, or where most needs, whether to wind
The woodbine round this arbour, or direct
The clasping ivy where to climb; while I,
In yonder spring of roses intermixed
With myrtle, find what to redress till noon:
For, while so near each other thus all day
Our task we choose, what wonder if so near
Looks intervene and smiles, or object new
Casual discourse draw on; which intermits
Our day’s work, brought to little, though begun
Early, and the hour of supper comes unearned?
To whom mild answer Adam thus returned.
Sole Eve, associate sole, to me beyond
Compare above all living creatures dear!
Well hast thou motioned, well thy thoughts employed,
How we might best fulfil the work which here
God hath assigned us; nor of me shalt pass
Unpraised: for nothing lovelier can be found
In woman, than to study houshold good,
And good works in her husband to promote.
Yet not so strictly hath our Lord imposed
Labour, as to debar us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet *******
Of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow,
To brute denied, and are of love the food;
Love, not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksome toil, but to delight,
He made us, and delight to reason joined.
These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands
Will keep from wilderness with ease, as wide
As we need walk, till younger hands ere long
Assist us; But, if much converse perhaps
Thee satiate, to short absence I could yield:
For solitude sometimes is best society,
And short retirement urges sweet return.
But other doubt possesses me, lest harm
Befall thee severed from me; for thou knowest
What hath been warned us, what malicious foe
Envying our happiness, and of his own
Despairing, seeks to work us woe and shame
By sly assault; and somewhere nigh at hand
Watches, no doubt, with greedy hope to find
His wish and best advantage, us asunder;
Hopeless to circumvent us joined, where each
To other speedy aid might lend at need:
Whether his first design be to withdraw
Our fealty from God, or to disturb
Conjugal love, than which perhaps no bliss
Enjoyed by us excites his envy more;
Or this, or worse, leave not the faithful side
That gave thee being, still shades thee, and protects.
The wife, where danger or dishonour lurks,
Safest and seemliest by her husband stays,
Who guards her, or with her the worst endures.
To whom the ****** majesty of Eve,
As one who loves, and some unkindness meets,
With sweet austere composure thus replied.
Offspring of Heaven and Earth, and all Earth’s Lord!
That such an enemy we have, who seeks
Our ruin, both by thee informed I learn,
And from the parting Angel over-heard,
As in a shady nook I stood behind,
Just then returned at shut of evening flowers.
But, that thou shouldst my firmness therefore doubt
To God or thee, because we have a foe
May tempt it, I expected not to hear.
His violence thou fearest not, being such
As we, not capable of death or pain,
Can either not receive, or can repel.
His fraud is then thy fear; which plain infers
Thy equal fear, that my firm faith and love
Can by his fraud be shaken or seduced;
Thoughts, which how found they harbour in thy breast,
Adam, mis-thought of her to thee so dear?
To whom with healing words Adam replied.
Daughter of God and Man, immortal Eve!
For such thou art; from sin and blame entire:
Not diffident of thee do I dissuade
Thy absence from my sight, but to avoid
The attempt itself, intended by our foe.
For he who tempts, though in vain, at least asperses
The tempted with dishonour foul; supposed
Not incorruptible of faith, not proof
Against temptation: Thou thyself with scorn
And anger wouldst resent the offered wrong,
Though ineffectual found: misdeem not then,
If such affront I labour to avert
From thee alone, which on us both at once
The enemy, though bold, will hardly dare;
Or daring, first on me the assault shall light.
Nor thou his malice and false guile contemn;
Subtle he needs must be, who could ******
Angels; nor think superfluous other’s aid.
I, from the influence of thy looks, receive
Access in every virtue; in thy sight
More wise, more watchful, stronger, if need were
Of outward strength; while shame, thou looking on,
Shame to be overcome or over-reached,
Would utmost vigour raise, and raised unite.
Why shouldst not thou like sense within thee feel
When I am present, and thy trial choose
With me, best witness of thy virtue tried?
So spake domestick Adam in his care
And matrimonial love; but Eve, who thought
Less attributed to her faith sincere,
Thus her reply with accent sweet renewed.
If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit straitened by a foe,
Subtle or violent, we not endued
Single with like defence, wherever met;
How are we happy, still in fear of harm?
But harm precedes not sin: only our foe,
Tempting, affronts us with his foul esteem
Of our integrity: his foul esteem
Sticks no dishonour on our front, but turns
Foul on himself; then wherefore shunned or feared
By us? who rather double honour gain
From his surmise proved false; find peace within,
Favour from Heaven, our witness, from the event.
And what is faith, love, virtue, unassayed
Alone, without exteriour help sustained?
Let us not then suspect our happy state
Left so imperfect by the Maker wise,
As not secure to single or combined.
Frail is our happiness, if this be so,
And Eden were no Eden, thus exposed.
To whom thus Adam fervently replied.
O Woman, best are all things as the will
Of God ordained them: His creating hand
Nothing imperfect or deficient left
Of all that he created, much less Man,
Or aught that might his happy state secure,
Secure from outward force; within himself
The danger lies, yet lies within his power:
Against his will he can receive no harm.
But God left free the will; for what obeys
Reason, is free; and Reason he made right,
But bid her well be ware, and still *****;
Lest, by some fair-appearing good surprised,
She dictate false; and mis-inform the will
To do what God expressly hath forbid.
Not then mistrust, but tender love, enjoins,
That I should mind thee oft; and mind thou me.
Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve;
Since Reason not impossibly may meet
Some specious object by the foe suborned,
And fall into deception unaware,
Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warned.
Seek not temptation then, which to avoid
Were better, and most likely if from me
Thou sever not: Trial will come unsought.
Wouldst thou approve thy constancy, approve
First thy obedience; the other who can know,
Not seeing thee attempted, who attest?
But, if thou think, trial unsought may find
Us both securer than thus warned thou seemest,
Go; for thy stay, not fre

covered by thorns and hidden by vines
but you’re still attracted to the light
that reflects from my broken sides
you want to swim alone tonight
but I know you’d let me hold you down
Velvet rose petals and shattered glass don't mix but still you’ll love me anyway
despite the scars I've left on you
you’d lay with me
on dead grass
and let me point out your fading colors
you’ll excuse my relentless attempts
to bury you under ground.
“you're destructive
and reflective,
I see myself in you”
As my ridges rip you to shreds you stay with me,
a ****** mess and a lonely swimmer,
another garden destroyed
with wasted raindrop tears

Outside my window I see a kite,
red as a cherry right before its prime,
flying against a grey sky.
It's struggling to escape, relentless like a dog on a leash,
tugging and stretching until its tongue hangs out.
A boy with clumsy sneakers and a curious smile,
with skinny legs like knobby branches,
and a freckled, sun-burned, smiling face,
feels its tugging and stretching,
but decides with great determination,
to never let it get away.

On a wall through the dark of the night,
thrills sent down by countless of legs creeping up and down in their dance
Daddy, is that you ? I asked a spider with long legs
Indeed a daddy longlegs spider haunted for prey
It hopped onto me, trying to guide me out, of this nightmare,
In fact a quite gentle grip of this venomless beast, a sweet embrace of this two eyed arachnid
It whispered to me " Umi, keep going, before they find you "
A shadow of the long past, forgotten in the loitering abyss of time
Serene and clear, my friend kept his dance on my head, resting was no option
A ****** devotion of the creeping darkness,
Ah, phantoms ! Spiders, gather in a dark night,
One tarantula crosses my way, with no intention to bite
The shadow I was running from was no where near, but my knights summoned around me, tapping on the ground with their eight legs in their dance
Realisation floods my mind, relentless, numbing all my senses
The black widow of hatred cast on a pure fury, with lilies of murderous intend, was me,
Running from myself was what I did all these years but not anymore
It is best to dance on these fantastic grounds with me,
Because I am the eternity of this realm of fantasy
After all, we have infinite time in our dreams

~ Umi

This is a relentless dance

Lipstick prints lead from empty, cracked pedestals

She jumped, but not high enough.

Looks for his eyes and gets turned to stone

Now she can roll through it all

As smiles break, seasons churn, and he drifts out to lose

Treading years in his invisible exhaled wake

Everyone wants to trade

She is alive

A painful commodity, too thick to shake

The wind blows hard as the world spins down in her warped eyes

Why can’t she feel it?

Standing alone and untouched

Nothing moves her

Screams out with a silence so hard

Stolen voices, borrowed words

The floor is paved with wax

Fire won’t survive here

Waves flow through as she wades through his memory

Breathes in the stale air

Curses the clear horizon

Remembers the current

Claws at the scars and squints till it rains

Storms light up the halls

Strike her again.

It’s true. There are things I always rethink over.
I want to talk about this life, and the numbered corners
We back into, as each one before becomes a blur
I need to find those escaped outlawed words
Those thoughts that are dreams that are life I never said
Or ever read
In the newspapers full of despair & odes to the dead

Here I am, again. Scratching my head..
Solitary confinement in the tip of my pen
I hope I can hear the rain on a tin roof again.
I want to rescue each petal of this tired rose
Been told they hate getting wet, maybe they should close
Perhaps that’s a tangent better left to the prose..

I want to discuss the melody the earth plays as it spins
One day the clocks will melt, and time then will win
I want to pick these roses, struck by a thorn or two
I’ll rescue the weakest and give them all to you

I want to speak for every part of me.
Pronouncing the syllables of my arms through my neck
Feeling that same stutter I can’t ever forget
Or enunciating the words of America
It sounds like the inflection of grief
She’ll lead you to where hearts now lay limp
As all of her feels the pain in her feet
Composed of beings accepting defeat

But I can tell you about my motherland, or the hardness of her hands
As she struggles at the top, or the bottom of the can
Can do little more without much help to survive
First world problems? How about just keeping this life.

It’s ok if you’re lost. Go ahead, misunderstand.
Don’t tell us to work harder, poverty wasn’t planned

America, my other parent, imposed many countries
But Nicaragua is in tune with my heartbeat.
Now, how many secret wars are we fighting?
Like you’re ******* Genesis, the beginning of country
Well this is not why God himself sent me.

The great immigrations to one, emigrate with frustration
Looking for a better life, not just land; a nation.
We’ve graduated, far past the burning of witches
Although love may have been present, it was absent in ditches
Dug for the masses all over the world
Tell me the numbers don’t make your toes curl.

Like the owned. the bedraggled one in the line
Each of us in some way forever confined
To the cuffs of dark pigment or hair
The accent that these tongues flick out in the air,

I wanted to talk about the sky at jet-packed speeds
The broken men and that mystery
The wonder hiding on the other side of the reef
Or how certain dogs are not dogs, but a four legged beast
We put our ideas on those who can’t even speak
Judging and pointing deflecting our peak
Of feeling internally smaller and weak.

I want to talk about the man who hit on me last week
And the secrets that I have no real reason to keep
Perhaps tally up the hours and days without sleep
Or the relative meanings of victory or defeat.

I want to talk about the boy who was shot next to me
And the eyes on the girl who got away this past week
And now these heart valves have sprung a leak

There’s a reason I passed that spelling test in 4th grade
It’s a pact that me and some other nerd made
This test for some homework was the almost real trade
But then I studied anyways, suddenly was afraid
To be a real cheater at such a young age
So I waited until I was tired and baked
To cheat off of Tee Kay in the 8th grade.

I wanted to talk about the wonders of our skies
We see breathtaking birds and flutterbys take flight
Or how about the negative connotation with night
Instead of endless wonder, it’s dark, dead and trite.
Only letting the positive notions be awarded to light.

I want to talk about the things we all know
Like when someone asks you “what did he say?” at the same time as you
Following the first line in the show

Or

Wait, I forgot what I came into this room for.
I am now in my phonebook, what now?
--Swinging door.
Falling and yelling about what was left on the floor
Forgot that fearless child with instinct to explore.

And of course what about Fidel, the betrayal, conclusion
All in all, that epic Cuban Revolution
Or how we are scared to research the real scale of pollution
Settling for ignorance, unwritten, accepted solution
(I’m not a tree hugger, I’m a writer arranging each word just to lose them.)

How about what lies from sea to shining sea
And the immigrating souls giving testimony
To those who do, and will never know me
Each sea runs through the other
Like the veins in your body
And we all sadly add to our planet earth rotting

I wanted to talk about the first moment a hand brushed my cheek
My muscles finally gave in, tense to shameless defeat
The ridiculousness of the odd days in a week
Or how every sound in my almost mute world goes to the same beat
And the hook is brought to you by the bird’s tactful beak
And the beautiful colors the sunset uses to light up the streets

I want to spill each morsel of knowledge I’ve stolen, and the little that was free
And that I’ve learned from those before the ones that came before me
Being all of natures beautiful things.
Yes, did a bell mentally ring?
If you are alive, then you are one and more of all these
Even more beautiful with those scrapes on your knees
Standing with blood down your leg forgetting the dirt and disease
Carried away with the breeze through the trees

I can tell you those unspoken unwritten words from lost poetry
But that would be like asking you in the theater to scream
At that alien’s awkwardly shiny green screen moon beam

But maybe you should go out and growatree
Johnny the Appleseed Infantry
Or something to remember the free.

Discovery: Victory is only for the relentless
Walk up to a great oak, give thanks; we are rootless
Master ignoring those who labeled you useless
You decide what you are, and there’s no need to prove this

The heart that is mine beats with the rest that are beating
Trying to prevent a few scars and stitches from bleeding
Past error and self is no new acquaintance we’re meeting
Enjoy this life on a stage, I promise good seating

Fighting to clench onto every painful recollection
Every past hopeless pothole of the moments of rejection
Letting go is the key; allow me to mention
Freedom was, is never any man’s invention.
I’ll talk about the concept of our intentions
Hopefully you have good mental retention
There is one truth, and for some no redemption

I’ll give you one more line of ADHD poetry
I can put it short, and maybe even soerty
Some say  farfetched, or insurrectionary
Holding life’s weight at times sans what was necessary
Wide eyes at my inner strength, each arm is tearing
Felt each torn ligament swollen and flaring

Yesterday someone used the word evolutionary

I always write 'I am' before 'revolutionary.'

Pained like windows,
Widows hang on walls.
Eight-legged nightmares,
Trying not to fall.

Knitting webs,
Made of lies,
Trying to be clever,
Trying to hide.

A tangled mess
Of silken strings
Homes filled with knickknacks
And mismatched things

Always rebuilding
What was new yesterday
Relentless pest,
Find a new place to stay.

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.

In October 1838 the Cherokees began to walk the "Trail of Tears." Most of them made the thousand mile journey west to Oklahoma on foot. An estimated 4,000 people, or a quarter of the tribe, died en route. The soldiers "escorting" the Cherokees at bayonet point refused permission for the dead to be buried, threatening to shoot anyone who disobeyed. So the living were forced to carry the corpses of the dead until camp was made for the night. Years after the Cherokees had been rounded up and driven down the Trail of Tears, John G. Burnett reflected on what he and his fellow soldiers had done, saying, "Schoolchildren of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point, to satisfy the white man's greed... ****** is ****** and somebody must answer, somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country... Somebody must explain the four thousand silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile." Keywords/Tags: Cherokee, Native American, Trail of Tears, Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, ******, Evil, Death, March, Death March, Infanticide, Matricide, Racism, Racist, Discrimination, Violence, Fascism, White Supremacists, Horror, Terror, Terrorism, Greed, Gluttony, Avarice, Lust, ****, mrbpig, mrbpigs



Cherokee Prayer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

As I walk life's trails
imperiled by the raging wind and rain,
grant, O Great Spirit,
that yet I may always
walk like a man.

This prayer makes me think of Native Americans walking the Trail of Tears with far more courage and dignity than their “civilized” abusers.



Native American Prayer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Help us learn the lessons you have left us
in every leaf and rock.



Native American Travelers' Blessing
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Let us walk together here
among earth's creatures great and small,
remembering, our footsteps light,
that one wise God created all.



Sioux Vision Quest
by Crazy Horse, Oglala Lakota Sioux, circa 1840-1877
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A man must pursue his Vision
as the eagle explores
the sky's deepest blues.



Cherokee Travelers' Blessing I
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I will extract the thorns from your feet.
For yet a little while, we will walk life's sunlit paths together.
I will love you like my own brother, my own blood.
When you are disconsolate, I will wipe the tears from your eyes.
And when you are too sad to live, I will put your aching heart to rest.

Published by Better Than Starbucks and Cherokee Native Americans



Cherokee Travelers' Blessing II
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Happily may you walk
in the paths of the Rainbow.
                  Oh,
and may it always be beautiful before you,
beautiful behind you,
beautiful below you,
beautiful above you,
and beautiful all around you
where in Perfection beauty is finished.

Published by Better Than Starbucks



Cherokee Travelers' Blessing III
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

May Heaven’s warming winds blow gently there,
where you reside,
and may the Great Spirit bless all those you love,
this side of the farthest tide.
And wherever you go,
whether the journey is fast or slow,
may your moccasins leave many cunning footprints in the snow.
And when you look over your shoulder, may you always find the Rainbow.

Published by Better Than Starbucks



What is life?
The flash of a firefly.
The breath of the winter buffalo.
The shadow scooting across the grass that vanishes with sunset.
―Blackfoot saying, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Warrior's Confession
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Oh my love, how fair you are—
far brighter than the fairest star!



Cherokee Proverb
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Before you judge
a man for his sins
be sure to trudge
many moons in his moccasins.



Cherokee Prayer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

As I walk life's trails
imperiled by the raging wind and rain,
grant, O Great Spirit,
that yet I may always
walk like a man.

When I think of this prayer, I think of Native Americans walking the Trail of Tears.



The Receiving of the Flower
excerpt from a Mayan love poem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Let us sing overflowing with joy
as we observe the Receiving of the Flower.
The lovely maidens beam;
their hearts leap in their *******.

Why?

Because they will soon yield their virginity to the men they love!



The Deflowering
excerpt from a Mayan love poem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Remove your clothes;
let down your hair;
become as naked as the day you were born—

virgins!



Prelude to *******
excerpt from a Mayan love poem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Lay out your most beautiful clothes,
maidens!
The day of happiness has arrived!

Grab your combs, detangle your hair,
adorn your earlobes with gaudy pendants.
Dress in white as becomes maidens ...

Then go, give your lovers the happiness of your laughter!
And all the village will rejoice with you,
for the day of happiness has arrived!



The Flower-Strewn Pool
excerpt from a Mayan love poem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You have arrived at last in the woods
where no one can see what you do
at the flower-strewn pool ...
Remove your clothes,
unbraid your hair,
become as you were
when you first arrived here
naked and shameless,
virgins, maidens!



Native American Proverbs

The soul would see no Rainbows if not for the eyes’ tears.
—loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A woman’s highest calling is to help her man unite with the Source.
A man’s highest calling is to help his woman walk the earth unharmed.
—loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.
Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.
—White Elk, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

What is life?
The flash of a firefly.
The breath of a winter buffalo.
The shadow scooting across the grass that vanishes with sunset.
—Blackfoot saying, translation by Michael R. Burch

Speak less thunder, wield more lightning. — Apache proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

The more we wonder, the more we understand. — Arapaho proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

Adults talk, children whine. — Blackfoot proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

Don’t be afraid to cry: it will lessen your sorrow. — Hopi proverb

One foot in the boat, one foot in the canoe, and you end up in the river. — Tuscarora proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

Our enemy's weakness increases our strength. — Cherokee proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

We will be remembered tomorrow by the tracks we leave today. — Dakota proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

No sound's as eloquent as a rattlesnake's tail. — Navajo saying, translation by Michael R. Burch

The heart is our first teacher. — Cheyenne proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

Dreams beget success. — Maricopa proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

Knowledge interprets the past, wisdom foresees the future. — Lumbee proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch

The troublemaker's way is thorny. — Umpqua proverb, translation by Michael R. Burch



Earthbound
an original poem by Michael R. Burch

Tashunka Witko, better known as Crazy Horse, had a vision of a red-tailed hawk at Sylvan Lake, South Dakota. In his vision he saw himself riding a spirit horse, flying through a storm, as the hawk flew above him, shrieking. When he awoke, a red-tailed hawk was perched near his horse.

Earthbound,
and yet I now fly
through the clouds that are aimlessly drifting ...
so high
that no sound
echoing by
below where the mountains are lifting
the sky
can be heard.

Like a bird,
but not meek,
like a hawk from a distance regarding its prey,
I will shriek,
not a word,
but a screech,
and my terrible clamor will turn them to clay—
the sheep,
the earthbound.



Years after the Cherokees had been rounded up and driven down the Trail of Tears, John G. Burnett reflected on what he and his fellow soldiers had done, saying, "Schoolchildren of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point, to satisfy the white man's greed ... ****** is ****** and somebody must answer, somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country ... Somebody must explain the four thousand silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile."

In the same year, 1830, that Stonewall Jackson consigned Native Americans to the ash-heap of history, Georgia Governor George Gilmer said, "Treaties are expedients by which ignorant, intractable, and savage people are induced ... to yield up what civilized people have the right to possess." By "civilized" he apparently meant people willing to brutally dispossess and **** women and children in order to derive economic benefits for themselves.

These nights bring dreams of Cherokee shamans
whose names are bright verbs and impacted dark nouns,
whose memories are indictments of my pallid flesh . . .
and I hear, as from a great distance,
the cries tortured from their guileless lips, proclaiming
the nature of my mutation.
―Michael R. Burch, from "Mongrel Dreams" (my family is part Cherokee, English and Scottish)

After Jackson was re-elected with an overwhelming majority in 1832, he strenuously pursued his policy of removing Native Americans, even refusing to accept a Supreme Court ruling which invalidated Georgia's planned annexation of Cherokee land. But in the double-dealing logic of the white supremacists, they had to make the illegal resettlement of the Indians appear to be "legal," so a small group of Cherokees were persuaded to sign the "Treaty of New Echota," which swapped Cherokee land for land in the Oklahoma territory. The Cherokee ringleaders of this infamous plot were later assassinated as traitors. (****** was similarly obsessed with the "legalities" of the **** Holocaust; isn't it strange how mass murderers of women and children can seek to justify their crimes?)

Native Americans understood the "circle of life" better than their white oppressors ...

When we sit in the Circle of the People,
we must be responsible because all Creation is related
and the suffering of one is the suffering of all
and the joy of one is the joy of all
and whatever we do affects everything in the universe.
—"Lakota Instructions for Living" by White Buffalo Calf Woman, translated by Michael R. Burch



Veiled
by Michael R. Burch

She has belief
without comprehension
and in her crutchwork shack
she is
much like us . . .

tamping the bread
into edible forms,
regarding her children
at play
with something akin to relief . . .

ignoring the towers ablaze
in the distance
because they are not revelations
but things of glass,
easily shattered . . .

and if you were to ask her,
she might say:
sometimes God visits his wrath
upon an impious nation
for its leaders’ sins,

and we might agree:
seeing her mutilations.

Published by Poetry Super Highway and Modern War Poems.



Ali’s Song
by Michael R. Burch

They say that gold don’t tarnish. It ain’t so.
They say it has a wild, unearthly glow.
A man can be more beautiful, more wild.
I flung their medal to the river, child.
I flung their medal to the river, child.

They hung their coin around my neck; they made
my name a bridle, “called a ***** a *****.”
They say their gold is pure. I say defiled.
I flung their slave’s name to the river, child.
I flung their slave’s name to the river, child.

Ain’t got no quarrel with no Viet Cong
that never called me ******, did me wrong.
A man can’t be lukewarm, ’cause God hates mild.
I flung their notice to the river, child.
I flung their notice to the river, child.

They said, “Now here’s your bullet and your gun,
and there’s your cell: we’re waiting, you choose one.”
At first I groaned aloud, but then I smiled.
I gave their “future” to the river, child.
I gave their “future” to the river, child.

My face reflected up, dark bronze like gold,
a coin God stamped in His own image―BOLD.
My blood boiled like that river―strange and wild.
I died to hate in that dark river, child,
Come, be reborn in this bright river, child.

Originally published by Black Medina

Note: Cassius Clay, who converted to Islam and changed his “slave name” to Muhammad Ali, said that he threw his Olympic boxing gold medal into the Ohio River. Confirming his account, the medal was recovered by Robert Bradbury and his wife Pattie in 2014 during the Annual Ohio River Sweep, and the Ali family paid them $200,000 to regain possession of the medal. When drafted during the Vietnamese War, Ali refused to serve, reputedly saying: “I ain't got no quarrel with those Viet Cong; no Vietnamese ever called me a ******.” The notice mentioned in my poem is Ali's draft notice, which metaphorically gets tossed into the river along with his slave name. I was told through the grapevine that this poem appeared in Farsi in an Iranian publication called Bashgah. ―Michael R. Burch



evol-u-shun
by Michael R. Burch

does GOD adore the Tyger
while it’s ripping ur lamb apart?

does GOD applaud the Plague
while it’s eating u à la carte?

does GOD admire ur intelligence
while u pray that IT has a heart?

does GOD endorse the Bible
you blue-lighted at k-mart?



Enheduanna, the daughter of the famous King Sargon the Great of Akkad, is the first ancient writer whose name remains known today. She appears to be the first named poet in human history and the first known author of prayers and hymns. Enheduanna, who lived circa 2285-2250 BCE, is also one of the first women we know by name.

Lament to the Spirit of War
by Enheduanna
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

You hack down everything you see, War God!

Rising on fearsome wings
you rush to destroy the land,
descending like a raging storm,
howling like a hurricane,
screaming like a tempest,
thundering, raging, ranting, drumming,
whiplashing whirlwinds!

Men falter at your approaching footsteps.

Tortured dirges scream
on your lyre of despair.

Like a fiery Salamander you poison the land:
growling over the earth like thunder,
vegetation collapsing before you,
blood gushing down a mountainside.

Spirit of hatred, greed and vengeance!

******* of heaven and earth!

Your ferocious fire consumes our land.

Whipping your stallion
with furious commands,
you decide our fate.

You triumph over all human rites and prayers.

Who can explain your tirade,
why you go on so?



Temple Hymn 15
to the Gishbanda Temple of Ningishzida
by Enheduanna
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Most ancient and terrible shrine,
set deep in the mountain,
dark like a mother's womb...

Dark shrine,
like a mother's wounded breast,
blood-red and terrifying...

Though approaching through a safe-seeming field,
our hair stands on end as we near you!

Gishbanda,
like a neck-stock,
like a fine-eyed fish net,
like a foot-shackled prisoner's manacles...
your ramparts are massive,
like a trap!

But once we’re inside,
as the sun rises,
you yield widespread abundance!

Your prince
is the pure-handed priest of Inanna, heaven's Holy One,
Lord Ningishzida!

Oh, see how his thick, lustrous hair
cascades down his back!

Oh Gishbanda,
he has built this beautiful temple to house your radiance!
He has placed his throne upon your dais!



The Exaltation of Inanna: Opening Lines and Excerpts
by Enheduanna, the daughter of Sargon I of Akkad and the high priestess of the Goddess Inanna
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Lady of all divine powers!
Lady of the resplendent light!
Righteous Lady adorned in heavenly radiance!

Beloved Lady of An and Uraš!
Hierodule of An, sun-adorned and bejeweled!
Heaven’s Mistress with the holy diadem,
Who loves the beautiful headdress befitting the office of her own high priestess!

Powerful Mistress, seizer of the seven divine powers!
My Heavenly Lady, guardian of the seven divine powers!
You have seized the seven divine powers!
You hold the divine powers in your hand!
You have gathered together the seven divine powers!
You have clasped the divine powers to your breast!

You have flooded the valleys with venom, like a viper;
all vegetation vanishes when you thunder like Iškur!
You have caused the mountains to flood the valleys!
When you roar like that, nothing on earth can withstand you!

Like a flood descending on floodplains, O Powerful One, you will teach foreigners to fear Inanna!

You have given wings to the storm, O Beloved of Enlil!
The storms do your bidding, blasting the unbelievers!

Foreign cities cower at the chaos You cause!
Entire countries cower in dread of Your deadly South Wind!
Men cower before you in their anguished implications,
raising their pitiful outcries,
weeping and wailing, beseeching Your benevolence with many wild lamentations!

But in the van of battle, everything falls before You, O Mighty Queen!

My Queen,
You are all-conquering, all-devouring!
You continue Your attacks like relentless storms!
You howl louder than the howling storms!
You thunder louder than Iškur!
You moan louder than the mournful winds!
Your feet never tire from trampling Your enemies!
You produce much wailing on the lyres of lamentations!

My Queen,
all the Anunna, the mightiest Gods,
fled before Your approach like fluttering bats!
They could not stand in Your awesome Presence
nor behold Your awesome Visage!

Who can soothe Your infuriated heart?
Your baleful heart is beyond being soothed!

Uncontrollable Wild Cow, elder daughter of Sin,
O Majestic Queen, greater than An,
who has ever paid You enough homage?

O Life-Giving Goddess, possessor of all powers,
Inanna the Exalted!

Merciful, Live-Giving Mother!
Inanna, the Radiant of Heart!
I have exalted You in accordance with Your power!
I have bowed before You in my holy garb,
I the En, I Enheduanna!

Carrying my masab-basket, I once entered and uttered my joyous chants ...

But now I no longer dwell in Your sanctuary.
The sun rose and scorched me.
Night fell and the South Wind overwhelmed me.
My laughter was stilled and my honey-sweet voice grew strident.
My joy became dust.

O Sin, King of Heaven, how bitter my fate!

To An, I declared: An will deliver me!
I declared it to An: He will deliver me!

But now the kingship of heaven has been seized by Inanna,
at Whose feet the floodplains lie.

Inanna the Exalted,
who has made me tremble together with all Ur!

Stay Her anger, or let Her heart be soothed by my supplications!
I, Enheduanna will offer my supplications to Inanna,
my tears flowing like sweet intoxicants!
Yes, I will proffer my tears and my prayers to the Holy Inanna,
I will greet Her in peace ...

O My Queen, I have exalted You,
Who alone are worthy to be exalted!
O My Queen, Beloved of An,
I have laid out Your daises,
set fire to the coals,
conducted the rites,
prepared Your nuptial chamber.
Now may Your heart embrace me!

These are my innovations,
O Mighty Queen, that I made for You!
What I composed for You by the dark of night,
The cantor will chant by day.

Now Inanna’s heart has been restored,
and the day became favorable to Her.
Clothed in beauty, radiant with joy,
she carried herself like the elegant moonlight.

Now to the Noble Hierodule,
to the Wrecker of foreign lands
presented by An with the seven divine powers,
and to my Queen garbed in the radiance of heaven ...

O Inanna, praise!



The Exaltation of Inanna: Opening Lines, an Excerpt
Nin-me-šara by Enheduanna
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Lady of all divine powers,
Lady of the all-resplendent light,
Righteous Lady clothed in heavenly radiance,
Beloved Lady of An and Uraš,
Mistress of heaven with the holy diadem,
Who loves the beautiful headdress befitting the office of her high priestess,
Powerful Mistress who has seized all seven divine powers,
My lady, you are the guardian of the seven divine powers!
You have seized the divine powers,
You hold the divine powers in your hand,
You have gathered up the divine powers,
You have clasped the divine powers to your breast!
Like a dragon you have spewed venom on foreign lands that know you not!
When you roar like Iškur at the earth, nothing can withstand you!
Like a flood descending on alien lands, O Powerful One of heaven and earth, you will teach them to fear Inanna!



Temple Hymn 7: an Excerpt
to the Kesh Temple of Ninhursag
by Enheduanna
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

O, high-situated Kesh,
form-shifting summit,
inspiring fear like a venomous viper!

O, Lady of the Mountains,
Ninhursag’s house was constructed on a terrifying site!

O, Kesh, like holy Aratta: your womb dark and deep,
your walls high-towering and imposing!

O, great lion of the wildlands stalking the high plains!...



Temple Hymn 17: an Excerpt
to the Badtibira Temple of Dumuzi
by Enheduanna
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

O, house of jeweled lapis illuminating the radiant bed
in the peace-inducing palace of our Lady of the Steppe!



Temple Hymn 22: an Excerpt
to the Sirara Temple of Nanshe
by Enheduanna
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

O, house, you wild cow!
Made to conjure signs of the Divine!
You arise, beautiful to behold,
bedecked for your Mistress!



Temple Hymn 26: an Excerpt
to the Zabalam Temple of Inanna
by Enheduanna
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

O house illuminated by beams of bright light,
dressed in shimmering stone jewels,
awakening the world to awe!



Temple Hymn 42: an Excerpt
to the Eresh Temple of Nisaba
by Enheduanna
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

O, house of brilliant stars
bright with lapis stones,
you illuminate all lands!

...

The person who put this tablet together
is Enheduanna.
My king: something never created before,
did she not give birth to it?



Update of "A Litany in Time of Plague"
by Michael R. Burch

THE PLAGUE has come again
To darken lives of men
and women, girls and boys;
Death proves their bodies toys
Too frail to even cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Tycoons, what use is wealth?
You cannot buy good health!
Physicians cannot heal
Themselves, to Death must kneel.
Nuns’ prayers mount to the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty’s brightest flower?
Devoured in an hour.
Kings, Queens and Presidents
Are fearful residents
Of manors boarded high.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

We have no means to save
Our children from the grave.
Though cure-alls line our shelves,
We cannot save ourselves.
"Come, come!" the sad bells cry.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

NOTE: This poem is meant to capture the understandable fear and dismay the Plague caused in the Middle Ages, and which the coronavirus has caused in the 21st century. We are better equipped to deal with this modern plague, thanks to advances in science, medicine and sanitation. We do not have to succumb to fear, but it would be wise to have a healthy respect for the nasty bug and heed the advice of medical experts.--MRB



Regret
by Michael R. Burch

Regret,
a bitter
ache to bear . . .

once starlight
languished
in your hair . . .

a shining there
as brief
as rare.

Regret . . .
a pain
I chose to bear . . .

unleash
the torrent
of your hair . . .

and show me
once again―
how rare.

Published by The HyperTexts and The Chained Muse



The Stake
by Michael R. Burch

Love, the heart bets,
if not without regrets,
will still prove, in the end,
worth the light we expend
mining the dark
for an exquisite heart.

Originally published by The Lyric



If
by Michael R. Burch

If I regret
fire in the sunset
exploding on the horizon,
then let me regret loving you.

If I forget
even for a moment
that you are the only one,
then let me forget that the sky is blue.

If I should yearn
in a season of discontentment
for the vagabond light of a companionless moon,
let dawn remind me that you are my sun.

If I should burn―one moment less brightly,
one instant less true―
then with wild scorching kisses,
inflame me, inflame me, inflame me anew.

Originally published by The HyperTexts



The Effects of Memory
by Michael R. Burch

A black ringlet
curls to lie
at the nape of her neck,
glistening with sweat
in the evaporate moonlight ...
This is what I remember

now that I cannot forget.

And tonight,
if I have forgotten her name,
I remember:
rigid wire and white lace
half-impressed in her flesh ...

our soft cries, like regret,

... the enameled white clips
of her bra strap
still inscribe dimpled marks
that my kisses erase ...

now that I have forgotten her face.



Villanelle: Because Her Heart Is Tender
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

She scrawled soft words in soap: "Never Forget,"
Dove-white on her car's window, and the wren,
because her heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her. As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.

She wrote in sidewalk chalk: "Never Forget,"
and kept her heart's own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.

Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers' glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on,
she stitches in wet linen: "NEVER FORGET,"
and listens to her heart's emphatic song.

The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond ...
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.

She writes in adamant: "NEVER FORGET"
because her heart is tender with regret.



To the boy Elis
by Georg Trakl
translation by Michael R. Burch

Elis, when the blackbird cries from the black forest,
it announces your downfall.
Your lips sip the rock-spring's blue coolness.

Your brow sweats blood
recalling ancient myths
and dark interpretations of birds' flight.

Yet you enter the night with soft footfalls;
the ripe purple grapes hang suspended
as you wave your arms more beautifully in the blueness.

A thornbush crackles;
where now are your moonlike eyes?
How long, oh Elis, have you been dead?

A monk dips waxed fingers
into your body's hyacinth;
Our silence is a black abyss

from which sometimes a docile animal emerges
slowly lowering its heavy lids.
A black dew drips from your temples:

the lost gold of vanished stars.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: I believe that in the second stanza the blood on Elis's forehead may be a reference to the apprehensive ****** sweat of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. If my interpretation is correct, Elis hears the blackbird's cries, anticipates the danger represented by a harbinger of death, but elects to continue rather than turn back. From what I have been able to gather, the color blue had a special significance for Georg Trakl: it symbolized longing and perhaps a longing for death. The colors blue, purple and black may represent a progression toward death in the poem.



Turkish Poetry Translations

Attilâ İlhan (1925-2005) was a Turkish poet, translator, novelist, screenwriter, editor, journalist, essayist, reviewer, socialist and intellectual.

Ben Sana Mecburum: “You are indispensable”
by Attila Ilhan
translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

You are indispensable; how can you not know
that you’re like nails riveting my brain?
I see your eyes as ever-expanding dimensions.
You are indispensable; how can you not know
that I burn within, at the thought of you?

Trees prepare themselves for autumn;
can this city be our lost Istanbul?
Now clouds disintegrate in the darkness
as the street lights flicker
and the streets reek with rain.
You are indispensable, and yet you are absent ...

Love sometimes seems akin to terror:
a man tires suddenly at nightfall,
of living enslaved to the razor at his neck.
Sometimes he wrings his hands,
expunging other lives from his existence.
Sometimes whichever door he knocks
echoes back only heartache.

A screechy phonograph is playing in Fatih ...
a song about some Friday long ago.
I stop to listen from a vacant corner,
longing to bring you an untouched sky,
but time disintegrates in my hands.
Whatever I do, wherever I go,
you are indispensable, and yet you are absent ...

Are you the blue child of June?
Ah, no one knows you―no one knows!
Your deserted eyes are like distant freighters ...

Perhaps you are boarding in Yesilköy?
Are you drenched there, shivering with the rain
that leaves you blind, beset, broken,
with wind-disheveled hair?

Whenever I think of life
seated at the wolves’ table,
shameless, yet without soiling our hands ...
Yes, whenever I think of life,
I begin with your name, defying the silence,
and your secret tides surge within me
making this voyage inevitable.
You are indispensable; how can you not know?



Fragments
by Attila Ilhan
loose English translations/interpretations by Michael R. Burch

The night is a cloudy-feathered owl,
its quills like fine-spun glass.

It gazes out the window,
perched on my right shoulder,
its wings outspread and huge.

If the encroaching darkness seems devastating at first glance,
the sovereign of everything,
its reach infinite ...

Still somewhere within a kernel of light glows secretly
creating an enlightened forest of dialectics.

In September’s waning days one thinks wanly of the arrival of fall
like a ship appearing on the horizon with untrimmed, tattered sails;
for some unfathomable reason fall is the time to consider one’s own demise―
the body smothered by yellowed leaves like a corpse rotting in a ghoulish photograph ...

Bitter words
crack like whips
snapping across prison yards ...

Then there are words like pomegranate trees in bloom,
words like the sun igniting the sea beyond mountainous horizons,
flashing like mysterious knives ...

Such words are the burning roses of an infinite imagination;
they are born and they die with the flutterings of butterflies;
we carry those words in our hearts like pregnant shotguns until the day we expire,
martyred for the words we were prepared to die for ...

What I wrote and what you understood? Curious and curiouser!



Mehmet Akif Ersoy: Modern English Translations of Turkish Poems

Mehmet Âkif Ersoy (1873-1936) was a Turkish poet, author, writer, academic, member of parliament, and the composer of the Turkish National Anthem.



Snapshot
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Earth’s least trace of life cannot be erased;
even when you lie underground, it encompasses you.
So, those of you who anticipate the shadows,
how long will the darkness remember you?



Zulmü Alkislayamam
"I Can’t Applaud Tyranny"
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I can't condone cruelty; I will never applaud the oppressor;
Yet I can't renounce the past for the sake of deluded newcomers.
When someone curses my ancestors, I want to strangle them,
Even if you don’t.
But while I harbor my elders,
I refuse to praise their injustices.
Above all, I will never glorify evil, by calling injustice “justice.”
From the day of my birth, I've loved freedom;
The golden tulip never deceived me.
If I am nonviolent, does that make me a docile sheep?
The blade may slice, but my neck resists!
When I see someone else's wound, I suffer a great hardship;
To end it, I'll be whipped, I'll be beaten.
I can't say, “Never mind, just forget it!” I'll mind,
I'll crush, I'll be crushed, I'll uphold justice.
I'm the foe of the oppressor, the friend of the oppressed.
What the hell do you mean, with your backwardness?



Çanakkale Sehitlerine
"For the Çanakkale Martyrs"
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Was there ever anything like the Bosphorus war?―
The earth’s mightiest armies pressing Marmara,
Forcing entry between her mountain passes
To a triangle of land besieged by countless vessels.
Oh, what dishonorable assemblages!
Who are these Europeans, come as rapists?
Who, these braying hyenas, released from their reeking cages?
Why do the Old World, the New World, and all the nations of men
now storm her beaches? Is it Armageddon? Truly, the whole world rages!
Seven nations marching in unison!
Australia goose-stepping with Canada!
Different faces, languages, skin tones!
Everything so different, but the mindless bludgeons!
Some warriors Hindu, some African, some nameless, unknown!
This disgraceful invasion, baser than the Black Death!
Ah, the 20th century, so noble in its own estimation,
But all its favored ones nothing but a parade of worthless wretches!
For months now Turkish soldiers have been vomited up
Like stomachs’ retched contents regarded with shame.
If the masks had not been torn away, the faces would still be admired,
But the ***** called civilization is far from blameless.
Now the ****** demand the destruction of the doomed
And thus bring destruction down on their own heads.
Lightning severs horizons!
Earthquakes regurgitate the bodies of the dead!
Bombs’ thunderbolts explode brains,
rupture the ******* of brave soldiers.
Underground tunnels writhe like hell
Full of the bodies of burn victims.
The sky rains down death, the earth swallows the living.
A terrible blizzard heaves men violently into the air.
Heads, eyes, torsos, legs, arms, chins, fingers, hands, feet ...
Body parts rain down everywhere.
Coward hands encased in armor callously scatter
Floods of thunderbolts, torrents of fire.
Men’s chests gape open,
Beneath the high, circling vulture-like packs of the air.
Cannonballs fly as frequently as bullets
Yet the heroic army laughs at the hail.
Who needs steel fortresses? Who fears the enemy?
How can the shield of faith not prevail?
What power can make religious men bow down to their oppressors
When their stronghold is established by God?
The mountains and the rocks are the bodies of martyrs! ...
For the sake of a crescent, oh God, many suns set, undone!
Dear soldier, who fell for the sake of this land,
How great you are, your blood saves the Muslims!
Only the lions of Bedr rival your glory!
Who then can dig the grave wide enough to hold you. and your story?
If we try to consign you to history, you will not fit!
No book can contain the eras you shook!
Only eternities can encompass you! ...
Oh martyr, son of the martyr, do not ask me about the grave:
The prophet awaits you now, his arms flung wide open, to save!



Sessiz Gemi (“Silent Ship”)

by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

for the refugees

The time to weigh anchor has come;
a ship departing harbor slips quietly out into the unknown,
cruising noiselessly, its occupants already ghosts.
No flourished handkerchiefs acknowledge their departure;
the landlocked mourners stand nurturing their grief,
scanning the bleak horizon, their eyes blurring ...
Poor souls! Desperate hearts! But this is hardly the last ship departing!
There is always more pain to unload in this sorrowful life!
The hesitations of lovers and their belovèds are futile,
for they cannot know where the vanished are bound.
Many hopes must be quenched by the distant waves,
since years must pass, and no one returns from this journey.



Full Moon
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation by Nurgül Yayman and Michael R. Burch

You are so lovely
the full moon just might
delight
in your rising,
as curious
and bright,
to vanquish night.

But what can a mortal man do,
dear,
but hope?
I’ll ponder your mysteries
and (hmmmm) try to
cope.

We both know
you have every right to say no.



The Music of the Snow
by Yahya Kemal Beyatli
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This melody of a night lasting longer than a thousand years!
This music of the snow supposed to last for thousand years!

Sorrowful as the prayers of a secluded monastery,
It rises from a choir of a hundred voices!

As the *****’s harmonies resound profoundly,
I share the sufferings of Slavic grief.

My mind drifts far from this city, this era,
To the old records of Tanburi Cemil Bey.

Now I’m suddenly overjoyed as once again I hear,
With the ears of my heart, the purest sounds of Istanbul!

Thoughts of the snow and darkness depart me;
I keep them at bay all night with my dreams!

Translator’s notes: “Slavic grief” because Beyatli wrote this poem while in Warsaw, serving as Turkey’s ambassador to Poland, in 1927. Tanburi Cemil Bey was a Turkish composer.



Thinking of you
by Nazim Hikmet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Thinking of you is beautiful, hopeful―
like listening to the most beautiful songs
sung by the earth's most beautiful voices.
But hope is insufficient for me now;
I don't want to listen to songs.
I want to sing love into birth.



I love you
by Nazim Hikmet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love you―
like dipping bread into salt and eating;
like waking at night with a raging fever
and thirstily lapping up water, my mouth to the silver tap;
like unwrapping the unwieldy box the postman delivers,
unable to guess what's inside,
feeling fluttery, happy, doubtful.
I love you―
like flying over the sea the first time
as something stirs within me
while the sky softly darkens over Istanbul.
I love you―
as men thank God gratefully for life.



Sparrow
by Nazim Hikmet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Little sparrow,
perched on the clothesline,
do you regard me with pity?
Even so, I will watch you
soar away through the white spring leaves.



The Divan of the Lover

the oldest extant Turkish poem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

All the universe as one great sign is shown:
God revealed in his creative acts unknown.
Who sees or understands them, jinn or men?
Such works lie far beyond mere mortals’ ken.
Nor can man’s mind or reason reach that strand,
Nor mortal tongue name Him who rules that land.
Since He chose nothingness with life to vest,
who dares to trouble God with worms’ behests?
For eighteen thousand worlds, lain end to end,
Do not with Him one atom's worth transcend!



Fragment
by Prince Jem
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Behold! The torrent, dashing against the rocks, flails wildly.
The entire vast realm of Space and Being oppresses my soul idly.
Through bitterness of grief and woe the sky has rent its morning robe.
Look! See how in its eastern palace, the sun is a ****** globe!
The clouds of heaven rain bright tears on the distant mountain peaks.
Oh, hear how the deeply wounded thunder slowly, mournfully speaks!



An Ecstasy of Fumbling
by Michael R. Burch

The poets believe
everything resolves to metaphor—
a distillation,
a vapor
beyond filtration,
though perhaps not quite as volatile as before.

The poets conceive
of death in the trenches
as the price of art,
not war,
fumbling with their masque-like
dissertations
to describe the Hollywood-like gore

as something beyond belief,
abstracting concrete bunkers to Achaemenid bas-relief.



Excerpts from “Travels with Einstein”
by Michael R. Burch

for Trump

I went to Berlin to learn wisdom
from Adolph. The wild spittle flew
as he screamed at me, with great conviction:
“Please despise me! I look like a Jew!”

So I flew off to ’Nam to learn wisdom
from tall Yankees who cursed “yellow” foes.
“If we lose this small square,” they informed me,
earth’s nations will fall, dominoes!”

I then sat at Christ’s feet to learn wisdom,
but his Book, from its genesis to close,
said: “Men can enslave their own brothers!”
(I soon noticed he lacked any clothes.)

So I traveled to bright Tel Aviv
where great scholars with lofty IQs
informed me that (since I’m an Arab)
I’m unfit to lick dirt from their shoes.

At last, done with learning, I stumbled
to a well where the waters seemed sweet:
the mirage of American “justice.”
There I wept a real sea, in defeat.

Originally published by Café Dissensus



The Leveler
by Michael R. Burch

The nature of Nature
is bitter survival
from Winter’s bleak fury
till Spring’s brief revival.

The weak implore Fate;
bold men ravish, dishevel her . . .
till both are cut down
by mere ticks of the Leveler.

I believe I wrote this poem around age 20, in 1978 or thereabouts. It has since been published in The Lyric, Tucumcari Literary Review, Romantics Quarterly and The Aurorean.



The Hippopotami
by Michael R. Burch

There’s no seeing eye to eye
with the awesomely huge Hippopotami:
on the bank, you’re much taller;
going under, you’re smaller
and assuredly destined to die!



Ballade of the Bicameral Camel
by Michael R. Burch

There once was a camel who loved to ****.
Please get your lewd minds out of their slump!
He loved to give RIDES on his large, lordly lump!



The Echoless Green
by Michael R. Burch

for and after William Blake

At dawn, laughter rang
on the echoing green
as children at play
greeted the day.

At noon, smiles were seen
on the echoing green
as, children no more,
many fine vows they swore.

By twilight, their cries
had subsided to sighs.

Now night reigns supreme
on the echoless green.



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.



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



The Shijing or **** Jing (“Book of Songs” or “Book of Odes”) is the oldest Chinese poetry collection, with the poems included believed to date from around 1200 BC to 600 BC. According to tradition the poems were selected and edited by Confucius himself. Since most ancient poetry did not rhyme, these may be the world’s oldest extant rhyming poems.

Shijing Ode #4: “JIU MU”
ancient Chinese rhyming poem circa (1200 BC - 600 BC)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

In the South, beneath trees with drooping branches
thick with vines that make them shady,
we find our lovely princely lady:
May she repose in happiness!

In the South, beneath trees with drooping branches
whose clinging vines make hot days shady,
we wish love’s embrace for our lovely lady:
May she repose in happiness!

In the South, beneath trees with drooping branches
whose vines, entwining, make them shady,
we wish true love for our lovely lady:
May she repose in happiness!

Shijing Ode #6: “TAO YAO”
ancient Chinese rhyming poem circa (1200 BC - 600 BC)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The peach tree is elegant and tender;
its flowers are fragrant, and bright.
A young lady now enters her future home
and will manage it well, day and night.

The peach tree is elegant and tender;
its fruits are abundant, and sweet.
A young lady now enters her future home
and will make it welcome to everyone she greets.

The peach tree is elegant and tender;
it shelters with bough, leaf and flower.
A young lady now enters her future home
and will make it her family’s bower.

Shijing Ode #9: “HAN GUANG”
ancient Chinese rhyming poem circa (1200 BC - 600 BC)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

In the South tall trees without branches
offer men no shelter.
By the Han the girls loiter,
but it’s vain to entice them.
For the breadth of the Han
cannot be swum
and the length of the Jiang
requires more than a raft.

When cords of firewood are needed,
I would cut down tall thorns to bring them more.
Those girls on their way to their future homes?
I would feed their horses.
But the breadth of the Han
cannot be swum
and the length of the Jiang
requires more than a raft.

When cords of firewood are needed,
I would cut down tall trees to bring them more.
Those girls on their way to their future homes?
I would feed their colts.
But the breadth of the Han
cannot be swum
and the length of the Jiang
requires more than a raft.

Shijing Ode #10: “RU FEN”
ancient Chinese rhyming poem circa (1200 BC - 600 BC)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

By raised banks of the Ru,
I cut down branches in the brake.
Not seeing my lord
caused me heartache.

By raised banks of the Ru,
I cut down branches by the tide.
When I saw my lord at last,
he did not cast me aside.

The bream flashes its red tail;
the royal court’s a blazing fire.
Though it blazes afar,
still his loved ones are near ...

It was apparently believed that the bream’s tail turned red when it was in danger. Here the term “lord” does not necessarily mean the man in question was a royal himself. Chinese women of that era often called their husbands “lord.” Take, for instance, Ezra Pound’s famous loose translation “The River Merchant’s Wife.” Speaking of Pound, I borrowed the word “brake” from his translation of this poem, although I worked primarily from more accurate translations. In the final line, it may be that the wife or lover is suggesting that no matter what happens, the man in question will have a place to go, or perhaps she is urging him to return regardless. The original poem had “mother and father” rather than “family” or “loved ones,” but in those days young married couples often lived with the husband’s parents. So a suggestion to return to his parents could be a suggestion to return to his wife as well.

Shijing Ode #12: “QUE CHAO”
ancient Chinese rhyming poem circa (1200 BC - 600 BC)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The nest is the magpie's
but the dove occupies it.
A young lady’s soon heading to her future home;
a hundred carriages will attend her.

The nest is the magpie's
but the dove takes it over.
A young lady’s soon heading to her future home;
a hundred carriages will escort her.

The nest is the magpie's
but the dove possesses it.
A young lady’s soon heading to her future home;
a hundred carriages complete her procession.

Shijing Ode #26: “BO ZHOU” from “The Odes of Bei”
ancient Chinese rhyming poem circa (1200 BC - 600 BC)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This cypress-wood boat floats about,
meandering with the current.
Meanwhile, I am distraught and sleepless,
as if inflicted with a painful wound.
Not because I have no wine,
and can’t wander aimlessly about!

But my mind is not a mirror
able to echo all impressions.
Yes, I have brothers,
but they are undependable.
I meet their anger with silence.

My mind is not a stone
to be easily cast aside.
My mind is not a mat
to be conveniently rolled up.
My conduct so far has been exemplary,
with nothing to criticize.

Yet my anxious heart hesitates
because I’m hated by the herd,
inflicted with many distresses,
heaped with insults, not a few.
Silently I consider my case,
until, startled, as if from sleep, I clutch my breast.

Consider the sun and the moon:
how did the latter exceed the former?
Now sorrow clings to my heart
like an unwashed dress.
Silently I consider my options,
but lack the wings to fly 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



On the Horns of a Dilemma (I)
by Michael R. Burch

Love has become preposterous
for the over-endowed rhinoceros:
when he meets the right miss
how the hell can he kiss
when his horn is so ***** it lofts her thus?

I need an artist or cartoonist to create an image of a male rhino lifting his prospective mate into the air during an abortive kiss. Any takers?



On the Horns of a Dilemma (II)
by Michael R. Burch

Love has become preposterous
for the over-endowed rhinoceros:
when he meets the right miss
how the hell can he kiss
when his horn deforms her esophagus?



On the Horns of a Dilemma (III)
by Michael R. Burch

A wino rhino said, “I know!
I have a horn I cannot blow!
And so,
ergo,
I’ll watch the lovely spigot flow!



The Horns of a Dilemma Solved, if not Solvent
by Michael R. Burch

A wine-addled rhino debated
the prospect of living unmated
due to the scorn
gals showed for his horn,
then lost it to poachers, sedated.



The Arrival of the Sea Lions
by Michael R. Burch

The sound
of hounds
resounds in the sound.



Hounds Impounded
by Michael R. Burch

The sound
of hounds
resounds
in the pound.



Prince Kiwi the Great
by Michael R. Burch

Kiwi’s
a ***-wee
but incredibly bright:
he sleeps half the day,
pretending it’s night!

Prince Kiwi
commands us
with his regal air:
“Come, humans, and serve me,
or I’ll yank your hair!”

Kiwi
cries “Kree! Kree!”
when he wants to be fed ...
suns, preens, flutters, showers,
then it’s off to bed.

Kiwi’s
a ***-wee
but incredibly bright:
he sleeps half the day,
pretending it’s night!

Kiwi is our family’s green-cheeked parakeet. Parakeets need to sleep around 12 hours per day, hence the pun on “bright” and “half the day.”



Ah! Sunflower
by Michael R. Burch

after William Blake

O little yellow flower
like a star ...
how beautiful,
how wonderful
we are!

Published as the collection "When Pigs Fly"