As a woman, and in the service of my Lord the Emperor Wu, my life is governed by his command. At twenty I was summoned to this life at court and have made of it what I can, within the limitations of the courtesan I am supposed to be, and the poet I have now become. Unlike my male counterparts, some of whom have lately found seclusion in the wilderness of rivers and mountains, I have only my personal court of three rooms and its tiny garden and ornamental pond. But I live close to the surrounding walls of the Zu-lin Gardens with its astronomical observatories and bold attempts at recreating illusions of celebrated locations in the Tai mountains. There, walking with my cat Xi-Lu in the afternoons, I imagine a solitary life, a life suffused with the emptiness I crave.
 
In the hot, dry summer days my maid Mei-Lim and I have sought a temporary retreat in the pine forests above Lingzhi. Carried in a litter up the mountain paths we are left in a commodious hut, its open walls making those simple pleasures of drinking, eating and sleeping more acute, intense. For a few precious days I rest and meditate, breathe the mountain air and the resinous scents of the trees. I escape the daily commerce of the court and belong to a world that for the rest of the year I have to imagine, the world of the recluse. To gain the status of the recluse, open to my male counterparts, is forbidden to women of the court. I am woman first, a poet and calligrapher second. My brother, should he so wish, could present a petition to revoke his position as a man of letters, an official commentator on the affairs of state. But he is not so inclined. He has already achieved notoriety and influence through his writing on the social conditions of town and city. He revels in a world of chatter, gossip and intrigue; he appears to fear the wilderness life.  
 
I must be thankful that my own life is maintained on the periphery. I am physically distant from the hub of daily ceremonial. I only participate at my Lord’s express command. I regularly feign illness and fatigue to avoid petty conflict and difficulty. Yet I receive commissions I cannot waver: to honour a departed official; to celebrate a son’s birth to the Second Wife; to fulfil in verse my Lord’s curious need to know about the intimate sorrows of his young concubines, their loneliness and heartache.
 
Occasionally a Rhapsody is requested for an important visitor. The Emperor Wu is proud to present as welcome gifts such poetic creations executed in fine calligraphy, and from a woman of his court. Surely a sign of enlightment and progress he boasts! Yet in these creations my observations are parochial: early morning frost on the cabbage leaves in my garden; the sound of geese on their late afternoon flight to Star Lake; the disposition of the heavens on an Autumn night. I live by the Tao of Lao-Tzu, perceiving the whole world from my doorstep.
 
But I long for the reclusive life, to leave this court for my family’s estate in the valley my peasant mother lived as a child. At fourteen she was chosen to sustain the Emperor’s annual wish for young girls to be groomed for concubinage. Like her daughter she is tall, though not as plain as I; she put her past behind her and conceded her adolescence to the training required by the court. At twenty she was recommended to my father, the court archivist, as second wife. When she first met this quiet, dedicated man on the day before her marriage she closed her eyes in blessing. My father taught her the arts of the library and schooled her well. From her I have received keen eyes of jade green and a prestigious memory, a memory developed she said from my father’s joy of reading to her in their private hours, and before she could read herself. Each morning he would examine her to discover what she had remembered of the text read the night before. When I was a little child she would quote to me the Confucian texts on which she had been ****** schooled, and she then would tell me of her childhood home. She primed my imagination and my poetic world with descriptions of a domestic rural life.
 
Sometimes in the arms of my Lord I have freely rhapsodized in chusi metre these delicate word paintings of my mother’s home. She would say ‘We will walk now to the ruined tower beside the lake. Listen to the carolling birds. As the sparse clouds move across the sky the warm sun strokes the winter grass. Across the deep lake the forests are empty. Now we are climbing the narrow steps to the platform from which you and I will look towards the sun setting in the west. See the shadows are lengthening and the air becomes colder. The blackbird’s solitary song heralds the evening.  Look, an owl glides silently beneath us.’
 
My Lord will then quote from Hsieh Ling-yun,.
 
‘I meet sky, unable to soar among clouds,
face a lake, call those depths beyond me.’
 
And I will match this quotation, as he will expect.
 
‘Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity,
and too feeble to plough fields in seclusion.’
 
He will then gaze into my eyes in wonder that this obscure poem rests in my memory and that I will decode the minimal grammar of these early characters with such poetry. His characters: Sky – Bird – Cloud – Lake – Depth. My characters: Fool – Truth – Child – Winter field – Isolation.
 
Our combined invention seems to take him out of his Emperor-self. He is for a while the poet-scholar-sage he imagines he would like to be, and I his foot-sore companion following his wilderness journey. And then we turn our attention to our bodies, and I surprise him with my admonitions to gentleness, to patience, to arousing my pleasure. After such poetry he is all pleasure, sensitive to the slightest touch, and I have my pleasure in knowing I can control this powerful man with words and the stroke of my fingertips rather than by delicate youthful beauty or the guile and perverse ingenuity of an ****** act. He is still learning to recognise the nature and particularness of my desires. I am not as his other women: who confuse pleasure with pain.
 
Thoughts of my mother. Without my dear father, dead ten years, she is a boat without a rudder sailing on a distant lake. She greets each day as a gift she must honour with good humour despite the pain of her limbs, the difficulty of walking, of sitting, of eating, even talking. Such is the hurt that governs her ageing. She has always understood that my position has forbidden marriage and children, though the latter might be a possibility I have not wished it and made it known to my Lord that it must not be. My mother remains in limbo, neither son or daughter seeking to further her lineage, she has returned to her sister’s home in the distant village of her birth, a thatched house of twenty rooms,
 
‘Elms and willows shading the eaves at the back,
and, in front,  peach and plum spread wide.
 
Villages lost across mist-haze distances,
Kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,
 
Dogs bark deep among the back roads out here
And cockerels crow from mulberry treetops.
 
My esteemed colleague T’ao Ch’ien made this poetry. After a distinguished career in government service he returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on his family farm. Living alone in a three-roomed hut he lives out his life as a recluse and has endured considerable poverty. One poem I know tells of him begging for food. His world is fields-and-gardens in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yin who is rivers-and-mountains. Ch’ien’s commitment to the recluse life has brought forth words that confront death and the reality of human experience without delusion.
 
‘At home here in what lasts, I wait out life.’
 
Thus my mother waits out her life, frail, crumbling more with each turning year.
 
To live beyond the need to organise daily commitments due to others, to step out into my garden and only consider the dew glistening on the loropetalum. My mind is forever full of what is to be done, what must be completed, what has to be said to this visitor who will today come to my court at the Wu hour. Only at my desk does this incessant chattering in the mind cease, as I move my brush to shape a character, or as the needle enters the cloth, all is stilled, the world retreats; there is the inner silence I crave.
 
I long to see with my own eyes those scenes my mother painted for me with her words. I only know them in my mind’s eye having travelled so little these past fifteen years. I look out from this still dark room onto my small garden to see the morning gathering its light above the rooftops. My camellia bush is in flower though a thin frost covers the garden stones.
 
And so I must imagine how it might be, how I might live the recluse life. How much can I jettison? These fine clothes, this silken nightgown beneath the furs I wrap myself in against the early morning air. My maid is sleeping. Who will make my tea? Minister to me when I take to my bed? What would become of my cat, my books, the choice-haired brushes? Like T’ao Ch’ien could I leave the court wearing a single robe and with one bag over my shoulders? Could I walk for ten days into the mountains? I would disguise myself as a man perhaps. I am tall for a woman, and though my body flows in broad curves there are ways this might be assuaged, enough perhaps to survive unmolested on the road.
 
Such dreams! My Lord would see me returned within hours and send a servant to remain at my gate thereafter. I will compose a rhapsody about a concubine of standing, who has even occupied the purple chamber, but now seeks to relinquish her privileged life, who coverts the uncertainty of nature, who would endure pain and privation in a hut on some distant mountain, who will sleep on a mat on its earth floor. Perhaps this will excite my Lord, light a fire in his imagination. As though in preparation for this task I remove my furs, I loose the knot of my silk gown. Naked, I reach for an old under shift letting it fall around my still-slender body and imagine myself tying the lacings myself in the open air, imagine making my toilet alone as the sun appears from behind a distant mountain on a new day. My mind occupies itself with the tiny detail of living thus: bare feet on cold earth, a walk to nearby stream, the gathering of berries and mountain herbs, the making of fire, the washing of my few clothes, imagining. Imagining. To live alone will see every moment filled with the tasks of keeping alive. I will become in tune with my surroundings. I will take only what I need and rely on no one. Dreaming will end and reality will be the slug on my mat, the bone-chilling incessant mists of winter, the thorn in the foot, the wild winds of autumn. My hands will become stained and rough, my long limbs tanned and scratched, my delicate complexion freckled and wind-pocked, my hair tied roughly back. I will become an animal foraging on a dank hillside. Such thoughts fill me with deep longing and a ****** desire to be tzu-jan  - with what surrounds me, ablaze with ****** self.
 
It is not thought the custom of a woman to hold such desires. We are creatures of order and comfort. We do not live on the edge of things, but crave security and well-being. We learn to endure the privations of being at the behest of others. Husbands, children, lovers, our relatives take our bodies to them as places of comfort, rest and desire. We work at maintaining an ordered flow of existence. Whatever our station, mistress or servant we compliment, we keep things in order, whether that is the common hearth or the accounts of our husband’s court. Now my rhapsody begins:
 
A Rhapsody on a woman wishing to live as a recluse
 
As a lady of my Emperor’s court I am bound in service.
My court is not my own, I have the barest of means.
My rooms are full of gifts I am forced barter for bread.
Though the artefacts of my hands and mind
Are valued and widely renown,
Their commissioning is an expectation of my station,
With no direct reward attached.
To dress appropriately for my Lord’s convocations and assemblies
I am forced to negotiate with chamberlains and treasurers.
A bolt of silk, gold thread, the services of a needlewoman
Require formal entreaties and may lie dormant for weeks
Before acknowledgement and release.
 
I was chosen for my literary skills, my prestigious memory,
Not for my ****** beauty, though I have been called
‘Lady of the most gracious movement’ and
My speaking voice has clarity and is capable of many colours.
I sing, but plainly and without passion
Lest I interfere with the truth of music’s message.
 
Since I was a child in my father’s library
I have sought out the works of those whose words
Paint visions of a world that as a woman
I may never see, the world of the wilderness,
Of rivers and mountains,
Of fields and gardens.
Yet I am denied by my *** and my station
To experience passing amongst these wonders
Except as contrived imitations in the palace gardens.
 
Each day I struggle to tease from the small corner
Of my enclosed eye-space some enrichment
Some elemental thing to colour meaning:
To extend the bounds of my home
Across the walls of this palace
Into the world beyond.
 
I have let it be known that I welcome interviews
With officials from distant courts to hear of their journeying,
To gather word images if only at second-hand.
Only yesterday an emissary recounted
His travels to Stone Lake in the far South-West,
Beyond the gorges of the Yang-tze.
With his eyes I have seen the mountains of Suchan:
With his ears I have heard the oars crackling
Like shattering jade in the freezing water.
Images and sounds from a thousand miles
Of travel are extract from this man’s memory.
 
Such a sharing of experience leaves me
Excited but dismayed: that I shall never
Visit this vast expanse of water and hear
Its wild cranes sing from their floating nests
In the summer moonlight.
 
I seek to disappear into a distant landscape
Where the self and its constructions of the world may
Dissolve away until nothing remains but the no-mind.
My thoughts are full of the practicalities of journeying
Of an imagined location, that lonely place
Where I may be at one with myself.
Where I may delight in the everyday Way,
Myself among mist and vine, rock and cave.
Not this lady of many parts and purposes whose poems must
Speak of lives, sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain
Set amongst personal conflict and intrigue
That in containing these things, bring order to disorder;
Salve the conscience, bathe hurt, soothe sleight.

If one had a desire to define the word god where would he begin?  Why would he assign the traits he did to the word?  Would he want to assimilate traits that he perceived to be godlike?   Would he obtain a clearer vision in a realization of the futility of aspiration, or would pragmatism and adamant tenaciousness afford him a better route?  Perhaps we all could benefit by a reassessment of our affinity with god.
  
The metaphysical extremities of human nature provide man with a multifaceted image of the possible psychic states of God. Objectivity has led man away from the true nature of his need many times at this point.  Any retrospective analysis of man’s personifications of deity most often leaves one lost in the quandaries of the psychic quagmire.  The weaknesses created by man’s lack of a universally acceptable id conclusion have elevated many philosophical or theocratic hypotheses to the level of demagoguery.

One method which has been used by theologians in attempting to induct a sumerial derivation from the vast warehouse of human religious extrapolation is the concept that perhaps basic truths can be affirmed through the theory of sufficient constancy of conjunction. Which is to say that reasonably analogous conjectures can be found in the depths of religious pervasion.  But this is not strictly true.
  
The ancient Babylonians, like the Indians, were polytheistic. They worshiped gods of nature, tribal union, fertility.  Deifications created from allusion to natural analogies, yet often imbued with a euphemistic optimism.  Where as the pantheon of Grecian deities often seems an almost banal personification of psychological metaphors from the darker side of life.  Zeus a fallibly omnipotent being who pompously subverts all beneath him to his will.  Who along with Apollo and others roam the countryside ****** and adulterating the women of their choice.  And Ares the formidable God of war who’s natural lust for violence leads him and his cohorts to vicarious involvement with mankind’s altercations.

Egyptian theology seems to have been an amendable and progressive state that began with sun worship and gods of nature, and moved on to attempted assimilation of godlike traits through a natural alignment with the perceived nature of God.  There were in depth studies of the nature of time, and life, and notions of existential transcendentalism.  The momentum of this progression led them to the ultimate grandiose delusion in which the Pharaoh was worshiped as the universal supreme being, omniscient and omnipotent ruler of the ultimate utopian society. 
 
The Jews worshiped a God who was at once both a part of them  and an exogenous force believed to have created them in its own image. A God that deliberately instilled an understanding of it’s intended wisdom by instructing them of the laws they were to live by.  These divine revelations were often considered as the unadulterated word of God.  This God was jealous and demanded the adoration due him as the supreme essence.  His worship became the underlying force in their social conjecture as they attempted to inspire his continued grace and benevolence.  A seemingly irrational solution to the quandary of idealism.  An allegiance who’s impetus was unquestionable.  It seems by me to be improperly rooted on a personal level in that it overemphasizes the need or expectation of divine inspiration.

The ancient Chinese social wisdom was by me commendably rational.  Unlike the Jews they do not seem to have overemphasized the expectation of divine inspiration.  Instead they, like the Egyptians emphasized an alignment with the perceived nature of God on a personal level as the way to strength.  They of course had a conception of the possible natures of deity, but considered wisdom to be an honorably truthful self orientation.

Another realm of intellectual extrapolation from which one might hope to surmise a depthfully pervasive generality would be man’s philosophical treatises on the possible natures of God. Unfortunately due to the myriad nature of possibility this again appears paradoxically difficult.  To me this seems to be a product of the nonempirical nature of these conjectures.  Humans experience a reality which does not necessarily  have any relative effect on the transcendence of their conception of the possible nature of God. Although many have attempted to empiricise their conjectures through rational logic they are most often refuted by the possibility of ultimate transcendence or quandrified by the actuality of paradoxical argument.
  
Some good examples of these points are perhaps the arguments of Lucretius who attempted to empiricise that God can not revoke mathematical truths.  But what is the relative reality of those truths to the transcended essence of ultimate beingness.  They are refuted by irrelevance.  Another example might be the statement that God has aseity.  That is if he exists his existence is not caused.  This statement seems easy to refute for the supreme being could be all of the things possible for him except this and have evolved out of eons of cosmic continuum into natural omniscience and or through assimilation of the forces innate to the cosmos have achieved relative omnipotence.
  
One generally accepted statement that is refuted by these arguments is “the cosmos does not have infinite existence and is therefore not the supreme being.”  For if this supreme being has not yet evolved if it’s transcendental form could be said to have become out of cosmic continuum then the cosmos will indeed have achieved infiniteness.  But this already seems intuitively necessary to the ultimate cosmic essence regardless of a lack of self consciousness or even a physical form.  Perhaps what is possible and eons of void are the root of all force and matter, and perhaps this as yet unfulfilled sequence cycles on to nirvana.  Then again perhaps the supreme being does in fact preempt all as a self conscious entity.  This also would seem to be intuitively necessary to the essence of totality which of course has always existed and is in fact the supreme being in at that at that although not necessarily the true form of it’s transcendental being.
  
On this lofty note I would like to reiterate my thesis.  Perhaps we all could benefit from a reassessment of our affinity with God.

A man can accomplish many things with his concept of God. What is extraneous?  Perhaps the question would better be put what is expedient, but that becomes subjective.   You have to define your goals.  Where in lies wisdom?  Can man truly aspire to godhead or is this personally nonproductive?  Man seems to perceive a sort of manifest destiny for himself.  An intrinsic affinity with infiniteness that just must be dealt with.   Perhaps our beliefs in life after death are a grandiose delusion in which we hedonistically waste our time pampering our egos. Which brings me to my third and final argument.

Perhaps conscious regimentation and an affiliation with earth bound logic would bring us closer to our affinity with God.
One of the ideas presented by my philosophical references was that many of mankind’s inspirations to define his affinity with God grew inadvertently out of social realism and the powers assumed. Although often the subjective truths of these understandings went unmentioned out of a desire for objectivity.  For example what God must be if God is to be God.  Perhaps one would do better to relate personally to his affinity with God.

I think this is true.  Although we seem to lack omnipotence we are all individually speaking a preternatural corporeal state.  Perhaps we all should assert our godliness instead of hiding our talents in the sand.  Perhaps then we could construct a contractual reality.  An aspiration to the perfection of the human social mechanic.  I salute this concept.  In fact I firmly believe that by conscribing unalienable rights to our beings we have already performed the rights of the human social mechanic.  Our aspiration to godhead is complete in it’s conjecture.  All that is left is to obtain expedience and accuracy in our amendment toward continued obtainment of the majority goal.

Forget the days we shared
Forget the smiles, the tears, the words too coarse to bear.
Forget the blooms in Spring dancing through the air
Forget the garden we abandoned there
Leave thorns of plenty, and roses rare

Forget the voice of a sweet melody
Forget the buzzing bees tending to honey
Forget the notion of you and me
Forget the spices in recipes spoilt
The taste is a bitter sweet result

Forget what weather we braved together
Forget the cliche that everything gets better
Forget what you want to remember
Forget what should be and what doesn't matter
Revoke your thoughts, the hypocrisy they flatter.

Forget waking up in warming arms,
Seducing me with your charms
Forget whatever you gave me, though it wasn't much
A breath, A kiss, A touch.
Enough!
Forget all that I've said
These thoughts turning in my head
Filling me with dread
The words I've written and you have read
Forget it!
Those days are over my mind is set
Forget we ever met.

like Gatsby
no longer happy
hosting a party I know longer enjoy
all I have wanted
and now I want nothing

so like Gatsby
I revoke my R.S.V.P
I leave my party

I go
I leave
I die

nothing like Gatsby
just happy

Heretical Poems by Michael R. Burch

Bible Libel
by Michael R. Burch

If God
is good,
half the Bible
is libel.

NOTE: I came up with this epigram to express my conclusions after reading the Bible from cover to cover, ten chapters per day, at age eleven.



Saving Graces
for the Religious Right
by Michael R. Burch

Life’s saving graces are love, pleasure, laughter
(wisdom, it seems, is for the Hereafter).



Multiplication, Tabled
for the Religious Right
by Michael R. Burch

“Be fruitful and multiply”—
great advice, for a fruitfly!
But for women and men,
simple Simons, say, “WHEN!”



***** Nilly
for the Demiurge, aka Yahweh/Jehovah
by Michael R. Burch

Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?
You made the stallion,
you made the filly,
and now they sleep
in the dark earth, stilly.
Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?

Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?
You forced them to run
all their days uphilly.
They ran till they dropped—
life’s a pickle, dilly.
Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?

Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?
They say I should worship you!
Oh, really!
They say I should pray
so you’ll not act illy.
Isn’t it silly, ***** Nilly?



What Would Santa Claus Say
by Michael R. Burch

What would Santa Claus say,
I wonder,
about Jesus returning
to **** and Plunder?

For he’ll likely return
on Christmas Day
to blow the bad
little boys away!

When He flashes like lightning
across the skies
and many a homosexual
dies,

when the harlots and heretics
are ripped asunder,
what will the Easter Bunny think,
I wonder?



A Child’s Christmas Prayer of Despair for a Hindu Saint
by Michael R. Burch

Santa Claus,
for Christmas, please,
don’t bring me toys, or games, or candy . . .
just . . . Santa, please . . .
I’m on my knees! . . .
please don’t let Jesus torture Gandhi!



gimME that ol’ time religion!
by michael r. burch

fiddle-dee-dum, fiddle-dee-dee,
jesus loves and understands ME!
safe in his grace, I’LL **** them to hell—
the strumpet, the harlot, the wild jezebel,
the alky, the druggie, all queers short and tall!
let them drink ashes and wormwood and gall,
’cause fiddle-dee-DUMB, fiddle-dee-WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEee . . .
jesus loves and understands
ME!



Red State Religion Rejection Slip
by Michael R. Burch

I’d like to believe in your LORD
but I really can’t risk it
when his world is as badly composed
as a half-baked biscuit.



Evil Cabal
by Michael R. Burch

those who do Evil
do not know why
what they do is wrong
as they spit in ur eye.

nor did Jehovah,
the original Devil,
when he murdered eve,
our lovely rebel.



The Heimlich Limerick
by Michael R. Burch

for T. M.

The sanest of poets once wrote:
"Friend, why be a sheep or a goat?
Why follow the leader
or be a blind *******?"
But almost no one took note.



Be very careful what you pray for!
by Michael R. Burch

Now that his T’s been depleted
the Saint is upset, feeling cheated.
His once-fiery lust?
Just a chemical bust:
no “devil” cast out or defeated.


Practice Makes Perfect
by Michael R. Burch

I have a talent for sleep;
it’s one of my favorite things.
Thus when I sleep, I sleep deep ...
at least till the stupid clock rings.

I frown as I squelch its **** beep,
then fling it aside to resume
my practice for when I’ll sleep deep
in a silent and undisturbed tomb.



Enough!
by Michael R. Burch

It’s not that I don’t want to die;
I shall be glad to go.
Enough of diabetes pie,
and eating sickly crow!
Enough of win and place and show.
Enough of endless woe!

Enough of suffering and vice!
I’ve said it once;
I’ll say it twice:
I shall be glad to go.

But why the hell should I be nice
when no one asked for my advice?
So grumpily I’ll go ...
although
(most probably) below.



Redefinitions
by Michael R. Burch

Faith: falling into the same old claptrap.
Religion: the ties that blind.



pretty pickle
by michael r. burch

u’d blaspheme if u could
because ur God’s no good,
but of course u cant:
ur a lowly ant
(or so u were told by a Hierophant).



Defenses
by Michael R. Burch

Beyond the silhouettes of trees
stark, naked and defenseless
there stand long rows of sentinels:
these pert white picket fences.

Now whom they guard and how they guard,
the good Lord only knows;
but savages would have to laugh
observing the tidy rows.



Listen
by Michael R. Burch

Listen to me now and heed my voice;
I am a madman, alone, screaming in the wilderness,
but listen now.

Listen to me now, and if I say
that black is black, and white is white, and in between lies gray,
I have no choice.

Does a madman choose his words? They come to him,
the moon’s illuminations, intimations of the wind,
and he must speak.

But listen to me now, and if you hear
the tolling of the judgment bell, and if its tone is clear,
then do not tarry,

but listen, or cut off your ears, for I Am weary.



fog
by michael r. burch

ur just a bit of fluff
drifting out over the ocean,
unleashing an atom of rain,
causing a minor commotion,
for which u expect awesome GODS
to pay u SUPREME DEVOTION!
... but ur just a smidgen of mist
unlikely to be missed ...
where did u get the notion?



thanksgiving prayer of the parasites
by michael r. burch

GODD is great;
GODD is good;
let us thank HIM
for our food.

by HIS hand
we all are fed;
give us now
our daily dead:

ah-men!

(p.s.,
most gracious
& salacious
HEAVENLY LORD,
we thank YOU in advance for
meals galore
of loverly gore:
of precious
delicious
sumptuous
scrumptious
human flesh!)



no foothold
by michael r. burch

there is no hope;
therefore i became invulnerable to love.
now even god cannot move me:
nothing to push or shove,
no foothold.

so let me live out my remaining days in clarity,
mine being the only nativity,
my death the final crucifixion
and apocalypse,

as far as the i can see ...



u-turn: another way to look at religion
by michael r. burch

... u were borne orphaned from Ecstasy
into this lower realm: just one of the inching worms
dreaming of Beatification;
u'd love to make a u-turn back to Divinity, but
having misplaced ur chrysalis,
can only chant magical phrases,
like Circe luring ulysses back into the pigsty ...



You
by Michael R. Burch

For thirty years You have not spoken to me;
I heard the dull hollow echo of silence
as though a communion between us.

For thirty years You would not open to me;
You remained closed, hard and tense,
like a clenched fist.

For thirty years You have not broken me
with Your alien ways and Your distance.
Like a child dismissed,

I have watched You prey upon the hope in me,
knowing “mercy” is chance
and “heaven”—a list.



I’ve got Jesus’s face on a wallet insert
by Michael R. Burch

for the Religious Right

I’ve got Jesus’s face on a wallet insert
and "Hell is for Queers" on the back of my shirt.
     And I uphold the Law,
     for Grace has a Flaw:
the Church must have someone to drag through the dirt.

I’ve got ten thousand reasons why Hell must exist,
and you’re at the top of my fast-swelling list!
     You’re nothing like me,
     so God must agree
and slam down the Hammer with His Loving Fist!

For what are the chances that God has a plan
to save everyone: even Boy George and Wham!?
     Eternal fell torture
     in Hell’s pressure scorcher
will separate **** from Man.

I’m glad I’m redeemed, ecstatic you’re not.
Did Christ die for sinners? Perish the thought!
     The "good news" is this:
     soon My vengeance is his!,
for you’re not the lost sheep We sought.



Pagans Protest the Intolerance of Christianity
by Michael R. Burch

“We have a common sky.” — Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c. 345-402)

We had a common sky
before the Christians came.

We thought there might be gods
but did not know their names.

The common stars above us?
They winked, and would not tell.

Yet now our fellow mortals claim
our questions merit hell!

The cause of our damnation?
They claim they’ve seen the LIGHT ...

but still the stars wink down at us,
as wiser beings might.



jesus hates me, this i know
by michael r. burch

jesus hates me, this I know,
for Church libel tells me so:
"little ones to him belong"
but if they use their dongs, so long!
    yes, jesus hates me!
    yes, jesus baits me!
    yes, he berates me!
    Church libel tells me so!

jesus fleeces us, i know,
for Religion scams us so:
little ones are brainwashed to
believe god saves the Chosen Few!
    yes, jesus fleeces!
    yes, he deceases
    the bunny and the rhesus
    because he's mad at you!

jesus hates me—christ who died
so i might be crucified:
for if i use my active brain,
that will drive the "lord" insane!
    yes, jesus hates me!
    yes, jesus baits me!
    yes, he berates me!
    Church libel tells me so!

jesus hates me, this I know,
for Church libel tells me so:
first priests tell me "look above,"
that christ's the lamb and god's the dove,
but then they sentence me to Hell
for using my big brain too well!
    yes, jesus hates me!
    yes, jesus baits me!
    yes, he berates me!
    Church libel tells me so!



and then i was made whole
by michael r. burch

... and then i was made whole,
but not a thing entire,
glued to a perch
in a gilded church,
strung through with a silver wire ...

singing a little of this and of that,
warbling higher and higher:
a thing wholly dead
till I lifted my head
and spat at the Lord and his choir.



Starting from Scratch with Ol’ Scratch
by Michael R. Burch

for the Religious Right

Love, with a small, fatalistic sigh
went to the ovens. Please don’t bother to cry.
You could have saved her, but you were all *******
complaining about the Jews to Reichmeister Grupp.

Scratch that. You were born after World War II.
You had something more important to do:
while the children of the Nakba were perishing in Gaza
with the complicity of your government, you had a noble cause (a
religious tract against homosexual marriage
and various things gods and evangelists disparage.)

Jesus will grok you? Ah, yes, I’m quite sure
that your intentions were good and ineluctably pure.
After all, what the hell does he care about Palestinians?
Certainly, Christians were right about serfs, slaves and Indians.
Scratch that. You’re one of the Devil’s minions.



In His Kingdom of Corpses
by Michael R. Burch

In His kingdom of corpses,
God has been heard to speak
in many enraged discourses,
high, high from some mountain peak
where He’s lectured man on compassion
while the sparrows around Him fell,
and babes, for His meager ration
of rain, died and went to hell,
unbaptized, for that’s His fashion.

In His kingdom of corpses,
God has been heard to vent
in many obscure discourses
on the need for man to repent,
to admit that he’s a sinner;
give up ***, and riches, and fame;
be disciplined at his dinner
though always he dies the same,
whether fatter or thinner.

In his kingdom of corpses,
God has been heard to speak
in many absurd discourses
of man’s Ego, precipitous Peak!,
while demanding praise and worship,
and the bending of every knee.
And though He sounds like the Devil,
all religious men now agree
He loves them indubitably.



Beast 666
by Michael R. Burch

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

Brutality is a cross
wooden, blood-stained,
gas hissing, sibilant,
lungs gilled, deveined,
red flecks on a streaked glass pane,
jeers jubilant,
mocking.

Brutality is shocking―
tiny orifices torn
by cruel adult lust,
the fetus unborn
tossed in a dust-
bin. The scarred skull shorn,
nails bloodied, tortured,
an old wound sutured
over, never healed.

Brutality, all its faces revealed,
is legion:
Death March, Trail of Tears, Inquisition . . .
always the same.
The Beast of the godless and of man’s “religion”
slouching toward Jerusalem:
horned, crowned, gibbering, drooling, insane.



I AM
by Michael R. Burch

I am not one of ten billion―I―
sunblackened Icarus, chary fly,
staring at God with a quizzical eye.
I am not one of ten billion, I.

I am not one life has left unsquashed―
scarred as Ulysses, goddess-debauched,
pale glowworm agleam with a tale of panache.
I am not one life has left unsquashed.

I am not one without spots of disease,
laugh lines and tan lines and thick-callused knees
from begging and praying and girls sighing "Please! "
I am not one without spots of disease.

I am not one of ten billion―I―
scion of Daedalus, blackwinged fly
staring at God with a sedulous eye.
I am not one of ten billion, I
AM!



Snap Shots
by Michael R. Burch

Our daughters must be celibate,
die virgins. We triangulate
their early paths to heaven (for
the martyrs they'll soon conjugate).

We like to hook a little tail.
We hope there's decent ** in jail.
Don't fool with us; our bombs are smart!
(We'll send the plans, ASAP, e-mail.)

The soul is all that matters; why
hoard gold if it offends the eye?
A pension plan? Don't make us laugh!
We have your plan for sainthood. (Die.)



Unwhole
by Michael R. Burch

What is it that we strive to remember, to regain,
as memory deserts us,
leaving us destitute of even ourselves,
of all but pain?

How can something so essential be forgotten,
if we are more than our bodies?
How can a soul
become so unwhole?



Nonbeliever
by Michael R. Burch writing as Kim Cherub

She smiled a thin-lipped smile
(What do men know of love?)
then rolled her eyes toward heaven
(Or that Chauvinist above?).



evol-u-shun
by Michael R. Burch

does GOD love the Tyger
while it's ripping ur lamb apart?

does GOD applaud the Bubonic 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?



Breakings
by Michael R. Burch

I did it out of pity.
I did it out of love.
I did it not to break the heart of a tender, wounded dove.
But gods without compassion
ordained: Frail things must break!
Now what can I do for her shattered psyche's sake?

I did it not to push.
I did it not to shove.
I did it to assist the flight of indiscriminate Love.

But gods, all mad as hatters,
who legislate in all such matters,
ordained that everything irreplaceable shatters.



Alien
by Michael R. Burch

for  a "Christian" poet

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

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

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

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



Crescendo Against Heaven
by Michael R. Burch

As curiously formal as the rose,
the imperious Word grows
until its sheds red-gilded leaves:
then heaven grieves
love's tiny pool of crimson recrimination
against God, its contention
of the price of salvation.

These industrious trees,
endlessly losing and re-losing their leaves,
finally unleashing themselves from earth, lashing
themselves to bits, washing
themselves free
of all but the final ignominy
of death, become
at last: fast planks of our coffins, dumb.

Together now, rude coffins, crosses,
death-cursed but bright vermilion roses,
bodies, stumps, tears, words: conspire
together with a nearby spire
to raise their Accusation Dire...
to scream, complain, to point out these
and other Dark Anomalies.

God always silent, ever afar,
distant as Bethlehem's retrograde star,
we point out now, in resignation:
You asked too much of man's beleaguered nation,
gave too much strength to his Enemy,
as though to prove Your Self greater than He,
at our expense, and so men die
(whose accusations vex the sky)
yet hope, somehow, that You are good...
just, O greatest of Poets!, misunderstood.



Advice for Evangelicals
by Michael R. Burch

"... so let your light shine before men..."

Consider the example of the woodland anemone:
she preaches no sermons but―immaculate―shines,
and rivals the angels in bright innocence and purity,
the sweetest of divines.

And no one has heard her engage in hypocrisy
since the beginning of time―an oracle so mute,
so profound in her silence and exemplary poise
she makes lessons moot.

So consider the example of the saintly anemone
and if you'd convince us Christ really exists,
then let him be just as sweet, just as guileless
and equally as gracious to bless.



Heaven Bent
by Michael R. Burch

This life is hell; it can get no worse.
Summon the coroner, the casket, the hearse!
I'm upwardly mobile; this one thing I know:
I can only go up; I'm already below!



Shock and Awe
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Lay Down Your Arms
by Michael R. Burch

Lay down your arms; come, sleep in the sand.
The battle is over and night is at hand.
Our voyage has ended; there's nowhere to go...
the earth is a cinder still faintly aglow.

Lay down your pamphlets; let's bicker no more.
Instead, let us sleep here on this ravaged shore.
The sea is still boiling; the air is wan, thin...
lay down your pamphlets; now no one will "win."

Lay down your hymnals; abandon all song.
If God was to save us, He waited too long.
A new world emerges, but this world is through...
so lay down your hymnals, or write something new.



What Immense Silence
by Michael R. Burch

What immense silence
comforts those who kneel here
beneath these vaulted ceilings
cavernous and vast?

What luminescence stained
by patchwork panels of bright glass
illuminates drained faces
as the crouching gargoyles leer?

What brings them here―
pale, tearful congregations,
knowing all Hope is past,
faithfully, year upon year?

Or could they be right? Perhaps
Love is, implausibly, near
and I alone have not seen It...
But, if so, still, I must ask:

why is it God that they fear?



Intimations
by Michael R. Burch

Let mercy surround us
with a sweet persistence.

Let love propound to us
that life is infinitely more than existence.



Altared Spots
by Michael R. Burch

The mother leopard buries her cub,
then cries three nights for his bones to rise
clad in new flesh, to celebrate the sunrise.

Good mother leopard, pensive thought
and fiercest love's wild insurrection
yield no certainty of a resurrection.

Man's tried them both, has added tears,
chants, dances, drugs, séances, tombs'
white alabaster prayer-rooms, wombs

where dead men's frozen genes convene...
there is no answer―death is death.
So bury your son, and save your breath.

Or emulate earth's "highest species"―
write a few strange poems and odd treatises.



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

Poetry captures
less than reality
the spirit of things

being the language
not of the lordly falcon
but of the dove with broken wings

whose heavenward flight
though brutally interrupted
is ever towards the light.



Winter Night
by Michael R. Burch

Who will be ******,
who embalmed
for all eternity?

The night weighs heavy on me―
leaden, sullen, cold.
O, but my thoughts are light,

like the weightless windblown snow.



Tonight, Let's Remember
by Michael R. Burch

July 7,2007 (7-7-7)

Tonight, let's remember the fond ways
our fingers engendered new methods to praise
the gray at my temples, your thinning hair.
Tonight, let's remember, and let us draw near...

Tonight, let's remember, as mortals do,
how cutely we chortled when work was through,
society sated, all gods put to rest,
and you in my arms, and I at your breast...

Tonight, let's remember how daring, how free
the Madeira made us, recumbently.
Our inhibitions?―we laid them to rest.
Earth, heaven or hell―we knew we were blessed.

Tonight, let's remember the dwindling days
we've spent here together―the sun's rays
spending their power beyond somber hills.
Soon we'll rest together; there'll be no more bills.

Tonight, let's remember: we've paid all our dues,
we've suffered our sorrows, we've learned how to lose.
What's left now to take, only God can tell.
Be with me in heaven, or "bliss" will be hell!

I do not want God; I want to see you
free from all sorrow, your labor through,
a song on your tongue, a smile on your lips,
sweet, sultry and vagrant, a child at your hips,

laughing and beaming and ready to frolic
in a world free from cancer and gout and colic.
For you were courageous, and kind, and true.
There must be a heaven for someone like you.



I, Lazarus
by Michael R. Burch

I, Lazarus, without a heart,
devoid of blood and spiritless,
lay in the darkness, meritless:
my corpse―a thing cold, dead, apart.

But then I thought I heard―a Voice,
a Voice that called me from afar.
And so I stood and laughed, bizarre:
a thing embalmed, made to rejoice!

I ran ungainly-legged to see
who spoke my name, and then I knew
him by the light. His name is True,
and now he is the life in me!

I never died again! Believe!
(Oops! Seems it was a brief reprieve.)



To Know You as Mary
by Michael R. Burch

To know You as Mary,
when You spoke her name
and her world was never the same...
beside the still tomb
where the spring roses bloom.

O, then I would laugh
and be glad that I came,
never minding the chill, the disconsolate rain...
beside the still tomb
where the spring roses bloom.

I might not think this earth
the sharp focus of pain
if I heard You exclaim―
beside the still tomb
where the spring roses bloom

my most unexpected, unwarranted name!
But you never spoke. Explain?



Peers
by Michael R. Burch

These thoughts are alien, as through green slime
smeared on some lab tech's brilliant slide, I *****,
positioning my bright oscilloscope
for better vantage, though I cannot see,
but only peer, as small things disappear―
these quanta strange as men, as passing queer.

And you, Great Scientist, are you the One,
or just an intern, necktie half undone,
white sleeves rolled up, thick documents in hand
(dense manuals you don't quite understand) ,
exposing me, perhaps, to too much Light?
Or do I escape your notice, quick and bright?

Perhaps we wield the same dull Instrument
(and yet the Thesis will be Eloquent!).



Gethsemane in Every Breath
by Michael R. Burch

LORD, we have lost our way, and now
we have mislaid love―earth's fairest rose.
We forgot hope's song―the way it goes.
Help us reclaim their gifts, somehow.

LORD, we have wondered long and far
in search of Bethlehem's retrograde star.
Now in night's dead cold grasp, we gasp:
our lives one long-drawn rattling rasp

of misspent breath... before we drown.
LORD, help us through this spiral down
because we faint, and do not see
above or beyond despair's trajectory.

Remember that You, too, once held
imperiled life within your hands
as hope withdrew... that where You knelt
―a stranger in a stranger land―

the chalice glinted cold afar
and red with blood as hellfire.
Did heaven ever seem so far?
Remember―we are as You were,

but all our lives, from birth to death―
Gethsemane in every breath.



A Possible Argument for Mercy
by Michael R. Burch

Did heaven ever seem so far?
Remember-we are as You were,
but all our lives, from birth to death―
Gethsemane in every breath.



Birthday Poem to Myself
by Michael R. Burch

LORD, be no longer this Distant Presence,
Star-Afar, Righteous-Anonymous,
but come! Come live among us;
come dwell again,
happy child among men―
men rejoicing to have known you
in the familiar manger's cool
sweet light scent of unburdened hay.
Teach us again to be light that way,
with a chorus of angelic songs lessoned above.
Be to us again that sweet birth of Love
in the only way men can truly understand.
Do not frown darkening down upon an unrighteous land
planning fierce Retributions we require, and deserve,
but remember the child you were; believe
in the child I was, alike to you in innocence
a little while, all sweetness, and helpless without pretense.
Let us be little children again, magical in your sight.
Grant me this boon! Is it not my birthright―
just to know you, as you truly were, and are?
Come, be my friend. Help me understand and regain Hope's long-departed star!



Learning to Fly
by Michael R. Burch

We are learning to fly
every day...

learning to fly―
away, away...

O, love is not in the ephemeral flight,
but love, Love! is our destination―

graced land of eternal sunrise, radiant beyond night!
Let us bear one another up in our vast migration.



The Gardener's Roses
by Michael R. Burch

Mary Magdalene, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, "Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away."

I too have come to the cave;
within: strange, half-glimpsed forms
and ghostly paradigms of things.
Here, nothing warms

this lightening moment of the dawn,
pale tendrils spreading east.
And I, of all who followed Him,
by far the least...

The women take no note of me;
I do not recognize
the men in white, the gardener,
these unfamiliar skies...

Faint scent of roses, then―a touch!
I turn, and I see: You.
"My Lord, why do You tarry here:
Another waits, Whose love is true? "

"Although My Father waits, and bliss;
though angels call―ecstatic crew!―
I gathered roses for a Friend.
I waited here, for You."



Kingdom Freedom
by Michael R. Burch

LORD, grant me a rare sweet spirit of forgiveness.
Let me have none of the lividness
of religious outrage.

LORD, let me not be over-worried
about the lack of "morality" around me.
Surround me,

not with law's restrictive cage,
but with Your spirit, freer than the wind,
so that to breathe is to have freest life,

and not to fly to You, my only sin.



Cædmon's Face
by Michael R. Burch

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

while the wind and Time blew all around,
I paced that dusk-enamored ground
and thought I heard the steps resound

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

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



He wrote here in an English tongue,
a language so unlike our own,
unlike―as father unto son.

But when at last a child is grown.
his heritage is made well-known:
his father's face becomes his own.



He wrote here of the Middle-Earth,
the Maker's might, man's lowly birth,
of every thing that God gave worth

suspended under heaven's roof.
He forged with simple words His truth
and nine lines left remain the proof:

his face was Poetry's, from youth.



Prayer for a Merciful, Compassionate, etc., God to ****** His Creations Quickly & Painlessly, Rather than Slowly & Painfully
by Michael R. Burch

Lord, **** me fast and please do it quickly!
Please don’t leave me gassed, archaic and sickly!
Why render me mean, rude, wrinkly and prickly?
Lord, why procrastinate?

Lord, we all know you’re an expert killer!
Please, don’t leave me aging like Phyllis Diller!
Why torture me like some poor sap in a thriller?
God, grant me a gentler fate!

Lord, we all know you’re an expert at ******
like Abram—the wild-eyed demonic goat-herder
who’d slit his son’s throat without thought at your order.
Lord, why procrastinate?

Lord, we all know you’re a terrible sinner!
What did dull Japheth eat for his 300th dinner
after a year on the ark, growing thinner and thinner?
God, grant me a gentler fate!

Dear Lord, did the lion and tiger compete
for the last of the lambkin’s sweet, tender meat?
How did Noah preserve his fast-rotting wheat?
God, grant me a gentler fate!

Lord, why not be a merciful Prelate?
Do you really want me to detest, loathe and hate
the Father, the Son and their Ghostly Mate?
Lord, why procrastinate?



Is there any Light left?
by Michael R. Burch

Is there any light left?
Must we die bereft
of love and a reason for being?
Blind and unseeing,
rejecting and fleeing
our humanity, goat-hooved and cleft?

Is there any light left?
Must we die bereft
of love and a reason for living?
Blind, unforgiving,
unworthy of heaven
or this planet red, reeking and reft?

NOTE: While “hoofed” is the more common spelling, I preferred “hooved” for this poem. Perhaps because of the contrast created by “love” and “hooved.”



Modern Dreams
by Michael R. Burch

after David B. Gosselin

I dreamed that God was good, but then I woke
and all his goodness vanished—****!—
like smoke.

I dreamed his Word was good, but then I heard
commandments evil, awful, weird,
absurd.

I dreamed of Heaven where cruel Angels flew
above my head and screamed, the Chosen Few,
“We’re not like you!”

I dreamed of Hell below, where prostitutes
adored by Jesus, played on lovely lutes
“True Love Commutes.”

I dreamed of Earth then woke to hear a Gong’s
repellent echoes in Religion’s song
of right gone wrong.



Star Crossed
by Michael R. Burch

Remember—
night is not like day;
the stars are closer than they seem ...
now, bending near, they seem to say
the morning sun was merely a dream
ember.




Well, Almost
by Michael R. Burch

All Christians say “Never again!”
to the inhumanity of men
(except when the object of phlegm
is a Palestinian).



O, My Redeeming Angel
by Michael R. Burch

O my Redeeming Angel, after we
have fought till death (and soon the night is done) ...
then let us rest awhile, await the sun,
and let us put aside all enmity.

I might have been the “victor”—who can tell?—
so many wounds abound. All out of joint,
my groin, my thigh ... and nothing to anoint
but sunsplit, shattered stone, as pillars hell.

Light, easy flight to heaven, Your return!
How hard, how dark, this path I, limping, walk.
I only ask Your blessing; no more talk!

Withhold Your name, and yet my ears still burn
and so my heart. You asked me, to my shame:
for Jacob—trickster, shyster, sham—’s my name.



To Know You as Mary
by Michael R. Burch

To know you as Mary,
when you spoke her name
and her world was never the same ...
beside the still tomb
where the spring roses bloom.

O, then I would laugh
and be glad that I came,
never minding the chill, the disconsolate rain ...
beside the still tomb
where the spring roses bloom.

I might not think this earth
the sharp focus of pain
if I heard you exclaim—
beside the still tomb
where the spring roses bloom

my most unexpected, unwarranted name!
But you never spoke. Explain?



ur-gent
by Michael R. Burch

if u would be a good father to us all,
revoke the Curse,
extract the Gall;

but if the abuse continues,
look within
into ur Mindless Soulless Emptiness Grim,

& admit ur sin,
heartless jehovah,
slayer of widows and orphans ...

quick, begin!



Bible libel (ii)
by Michael R. Burch

ur savior’s a cad
—he’s as bad as his dad—
according to your strange Bible.

demanding belief
or he’ll bring u to grief?
he’s worse than his horn-sprouting rival!

was the man ever good
before made a “god”?
if so, half your Bible is libel!



stock-home sin-drone
by Michael R. Burch

ur GAUD created this hellish earth;
thus u FANTAsize heaven
(an escape from rebirth).

ur GUAD is a monster,
**** ur RELIGION lied
and called u his frankensteinian bride!

now, like so many others cruelly abused,
u look for salve-a-shun
to the AUTHOR of ur pain’s selfish creation.

cons preach the “TRUE GOSPEL”
and proudly shout it,
but if ur GAUD were good
he would have to doubt it.



un-i-verse-all love
by Michael R. Burch

there is a Gaud, it’s true!
and furthermore, tHeSh(e)It loves u!
unfortunately
the
He
Sh(e)
It
,even more adorably,
loves cancer, aids and leprosy.



yet another post-partum christmas blues poem
by michael r. burch

ur GAUD created hell; it’s called the earth;
HE mused u briefly, clods of little worth:
let’s conjure some little monkeys
to be BIG RELIGION’s flunkeys!
GAUD belched, went back to sleep, such was ur birth.



wee the many
by michael r. burch

wee never really lived: was that our fault?
now thanks to ur GAUD wee lie in an underground vault.
wee lie here, the little ones ur GAUD despised!
HE condemned us to death before wee opened our eyes!
as it was in the days of noah, it still remains:
GAUD kills us with floods he conjures from murderous rains.



Untitled ur poems

since GOD created u so gullible
how did u conclude HE’s so lovable?
—Michael R. Burch

limping to the grave under the sentence of death,
should i praise ur LORD? think i’ll save my breath!
—Michael R. Burch



One of the Flown
by Michael R. Burch

Forgive me for not having known
you were one of the flown—
flown from the distant haunts
of someone else’s enlightenment,
alighting here to a darkness all your own . . .

I imagine you perched,
pretty warbler, in your starched
dress, before you grew bellicose . . .
singing quaint love’s highest falsetto notes,
brightening the pew of some dilapidated church . . .

But that was before autumn’s
messianic dark hymns . . .
Deepening on the landscape—winter’s inevitable shadows.
Love came too late; hope flocked to bare meadows,
preparing to leave. Then even the thought of life became grim,

thinking of Him . . .
To flee, finally,—that was no whim,
no adventure, but purpose.
I see you now a-wing: pale-eyed, intent, serious:
always, always at the horizon’s broadening rim . . .

How long have you flown now, pretty voyager?
I keep watch from afar: pale lover and ******.



what the “Chosen Few” really pray for
by Michael R. Burch

We are ready to be robed in light,
angel-bright

despite
Our intolerance;

ready to enter Heaven and never return
(dark, this sojourn);

ready to worse-ship any gaud
able to deliver Us from this flawed

existence;
We pray with the persistence

of actual saints
to be delivered from all earthly constraints:

just kiss each uplifted Face
with lips of gentlest grace,

cooing the sweetest harmonies
while brutally crushing Our enemies!

ah-Men!



wild wild west-east-north-south-up-down
by Michael R. Burch

each day it resumes—the great struggle for survival.

the fiercer and more perilous the wrath,
the wilder and wickeder the weaponry,
the better the daily odds
(just don’t bet on the long term, or revival).

so ur luvable Gaud decreed, Theo-retically,
if indeed He exists
as ur Bible insists—
the Wildest and the Wickedest of all
with the brightest of creatures in thrall
(unless u
somehow got that bleary
Theo-ry
wrong too).



The Strangest Rain
by Michael R. Burch

"I ... am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur?and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves ..."?Emily Dickinson

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry."--Emily Dickinson

The strangest rain, a few bright sluggish drops,
unsure if they should fall, run through with sun,
came tumbling down and touched me, one by one,
too few to animate the shriveled crops
of nearby farmers (though their daughters might
feel each cool splash, a-shiver with delight).

I thought again of Emily Dickinson,
who felt the tingle down her spine, inspired
to lifting hairs, to nerves’ electric song
of passion for a thing so deep-desired
the heart and gut agree, and so must tremble
as all the neurons of the brain assemble
to whisper: This is love, but what is love?
Wrens darting rainbows, laughter high above.



Note to a Chick on a Religious Kick
by Michael R. Burch

Daisy,
when you smile, my life gets sunny;
you make me want to spend all my ****** money;
but honey,
you can be a bit ... um ... hazy,
perhaps mentally lazy?,
okay, downright crazy,
praying to the Easter Bunny!



lust!
by michael r. burch

i was only a child
in a world dark and wild
seeking affection
in eyes mild

and in all my bright dreams
sweet love shimmered, beguiled ...

but the black-robed Priest
who called me the least
of all god’s creation
then spoke for the Beast:

He called my great passion a thing base, defiled!

He condemned me to hell,
the foul Ne’er-Do-Well,
for the sake of the copper
His Pig-Snout could smell
in the purse of my mother,
“the ***** jezebel.”

my sweet passions condemned
by degenerate men?
and she so devout
she exclaimed, “yay, aye-men!” ...

together we learned why Religion is hell.

Published by Lucid Rhythms, The HyperTexts and Black Waters of Melancholy


A coming day
by Michael R. Burch

for my mother, due to her hellish religion

There will be a day,
a day when the lightning strikes from a rainbowed mist
when it will be too late, too late for me to say
that I found your faith unblessed.

There will be a day,
a day when the storm clouds gather, ominous,
when it will be too late, too late to put away
this darkness that came between us.



Hellbound
by Michael R. Burch

Mother, it’s dark
and you never did love me
because you put Yahweh and Yeshu
above me.

Did they ever love you
or cling to you? No.
Now Mother, it’s cold
and I fear for my soul.

Mother, they say
you will leave me and go
to some distant “heaven”
I never shall know.

If that’s your choice,
you made it. Not me.
You brought me to life;
will you nail me to the tree?

Christ! Mother, they say
God condemned me to hell.
If the Devil’s your God
then farewell, farewell!

Or if there is Love
in some other dimension,
let’s reconcile there
and forget such cruel detention.

Keywords/Tags: god, Jesus, Christ, Christian, prayer, Bible, angel, atheist, faith, blasphemy, heresy, heresies, heretic, heretic, heretical, pagan, pagans, god, gods, mrbhere



He Lived: Excerpts from “Gilgamesh”
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I.
He who visited hell, his country’s foundation,
Was well-versed in mysteries’ unseemly dark places.
He deeply explored many underworld realms
Where he learned of the Deluge and why Death erases.

II.
He built the great ramparts of Uruk-the-Sheepfold
And of holy Eanna. Then weary, alone,
He recorded his thoughts in frail scratchings called “words”:
But words made immortal, once chiseled in stone.

III.
These walls he erected are ever-enduring:
Vast walls where the widows of dead warriors weep.
Stand by them. O, feel their immovable presence!
For no other walls are as strong as this keep’s.

IV.
Come, climb Uruk’s tower on a starless night—
Ascend its steep stairway to escape modern error.
Cross its ancient threshold. You are close to Ishtar,
The Goddess of Ecstasy and of Terror!

V.
Find the cedar box with its hinges of bronze;
Lift the lid of its secrets; remove its dark slate;
Read of the travails of our friend Gilgamesh—
Of his descent into hell and man’s terrible fate!

VI.
Surpassing all kings, heroic in stature,
Wild bull of the mountains, the Goddess his dam
—Bedding no other man; he was her sole rapture—
Who else can claim fame, as he thundered, “I am!”



Enkidu Enters the House of Dust
an original poem by Michael R. Burch

I entered the house of dust and grief.
Where the pale dead weep there is no relief,
for there night descends like a final leaf
to shiver forever, unstirred.

There is no hope left when the tree’s stripped bare,
for the leaf lies forever dormant there
and each man cloaks himself in strange darkness, where
all company’s unheard.

No light’s ever pierced that oppressive night
so men close their eyes on their neighbors’ plight
or stare into darkness, lacking sight ...
each a crippled, blind bat-bird.

Were these not once eagles, gallant men?
Who sits here—pale, wretched and cowering—then?
O, surely they shall, they must rise again,
gaining new wings? “Absurd!

For this is the House of Dust and Grief
where men made of clay, eat clay. Relief
to them’s to become a mere windless leaf,
lying forever unstirred.”

“Anu and Enlil, hear my plea!
Ereshkigal, they all must go free!
Beletseri, dread scribe of this Hell, hear me!”
But all my shrill cries, obscured

by vast eons of dust, at last fell mute
as I took my place in the ash and soot.



Reclamation
an original poem by Michael R. Burch

after Robert Graves, with a nod to Mary Shelley

I have come to the dark side of things
where the bat sings
its evasive radar
and Want is a crooked forefinger
attached to a gelatinous wing.

I have grown animate here, a stitched corpse
hooked to electrodes.
And night
moves upon me—progenitor of life
with its foul breath.

Blind eyes have their second sight
and still are deceived. Now my nature
is softly to moan
as Desire carries me
swooningly across her threshold.

Stone
is less infinite than her crone’s
gargantuan hooked nose, her driveling lips.
I eye her ecstatically—her dowager figure,
and there is something about her that my words transfigure

to a consuming emptiness.
We are at peace
with each other; this is our venture—
swaying, the strings tautening, as tightropes
tauten, as love tightens, constricts

to the first note.
Lyre of our hearts’ pits,
orchestration of nothing, adits
of emptiness! We have come to the last of our hopes,
sweet as congealed blood sweetens for flies.

Need is reborn; love dies.

Keywords/Tags: Epic of Gilgamesh, epic, epical, orient occident, oriental, ancient, ancestors, ancestry, primal



Double Dactyls

Sniggledy-Wriggledy
Jesus Christ’s enterprise
leaves me in awe of
the rich men he loathed!

But should a Sadducee
settle for trifles?
His disciples now rip off
the Lord they betrothed.
―Michael R. Burch

Donald Double Dactyl

Higgledy Piggledy
Ronald McDonald
cursed Donald Trump,
his least favorite clown:

"Why should I try to be
funny as Donald? He
gets all the laughs
saying upside is down!"
―Michael R. Burch



Lines for My Ascension
by Michael R. Burch

I.
If I should die,
there will come a Doom,
and the sky will darken
to the deepest Gloom.

But if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

II.
If I should die,
let no mortal say,
“Here was a man,
with feet of clay,

or a timid sparrow
God’s hand let fall.”
But watch the sky darken
to an eerie pall

and know that my Spirit,
unvanquished, broods,
and scoffs at quaint churchyards
littered with roods.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

III.
If I should die,
let no man adore
his incompetent Maker:
Zeus, Yahweh, or Thor.

Think of Me as the One
who never died—
the unvanquished Immortal
with the unriven side.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.

IV.
And if I should “die,”
though the clouds grow dark
as fierce lightnings rend
this bleak asteroid, stark ...

If you look above,
you will see a bright Sign—
the sun with the moon
in its arms, Divine.

So divine, if you can,
my bright meaning, and know—
my Spirit is mine.
I will go where I go.

And if my body
should not be found,
never think of me
in the cold ground.



Listen
by Immanuel A. Michael (an alias of Michael R. Burch)

1.
Listen to me now
and heed my voice;
I am a madman, alone,
screaming in the wilderness,
but listen now.

Listen to me now, and if I say
that black is black
and white is white
and in between lies gray,
I have no choice.

Does a madman choose his words?
They come to him:
the moon's illuminations,
intimations of the wind,
and he must speak.

But listen to me now,
and if you hear
the tolling of the judgment bell,
and if its tone is clear,
then do not tarry,
but listen,
or cut off your ears,
for I Am weary.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

2.
Listen to me now: I had a Vision.
An elevated train derailed, and Fell.
It was the Church brought low, almost to Hell.
And I alone survived, who dream of Mercy:
the Heretic, who speaks behind the Veil.

3.
Listen to me now: I saw an airplane
fall from the sky. And why should I explain?
The Visions are the same. It is my Heresy
that I survive, because I sing of Mercy,
while elevated "saints" go down in flames.

4.
Listen to me now: I saw in Nashville
how those who "soar" will plummet―Fame in flames!―
and fall on those below, as if to **** them.
The lowly, saved, will understand their names.

5.
Listen to me now: I heard another
say, "That which died shall Resurrect and Live."
An angel with a Rose bestowing Mercy!
What can it mean, but that my Visions give
fair warning to the world that God wants Mercy.
My Heresy is that we must forgive!

6.
Listen to me now: she heard god calling―
O, who will love me, who will be my friend?
Does he want Perfect Saints, the whitewashed Purists,
who frown down on their "brothers," without end?

7.
Listen to me now: you are not perfect,
and your "wise counsel" helps no one at all:
unless it's sweetened with the sweetest Mercy,
it's pure astringent antiseptic gall.

8.
Listen to me now, and learn this lesson:
If God wants mercy, why dig at the speck
in your brother's eye, when even now the Beam,
your lack of mercy, spares, no, neither neck,
becomes the Hangman's Millstone. We're all children,
all little ones! Be patient with the fleck!

9.
Listen to me now: for the Announcer
explained that wars have given Presidents
the precedents to soon assume all Power.
Vote, citizens, or be mere residents!

10.
O, listen to me now: I saw the Warheads
stored safely underground, except for One.
A red-haired woman with a bright complexion
seduced the guard. Translucent blouse, red thong,
white bra―these were her fearsome antique weapons.

I saw the Skull and Crossbones! Heed my Song!

11.
O, listen to me now, and hear my Gospel:
three verses of such sweet simplicity!
God is Light: in Him there is no darkness.
In Christ, no condemnation: Liberty!
God want no Sacrifice, but only Mercy.
O, who could ask for sweeter Heresy?

12.
Theology? I swear that I disdain it!
If Love can be explained, why then explain it!
If Love can't be explained why, then, should God,
if God is Love? Nor hell nor cattle ****
is needed, if God's good, and God's supreme.
Ask, children, what "re-ligion" truly means:
"return to *******! " Heed the bondsman's screams!

13.
Heed, children, which Theologies you dream
when Hellish Nightmares wake you, when you Scream
for comfort, but no comforter is there.
Which Voices do you heed, which Crosses bear?
If god is light, whence do Dark Visions come
which leave the Taste of Venom on your Tongue,
with which you **** your brother for one Sin
you do not share, ten thousand underskin
like Itching Worms that Squirm and Vilely Hiss:
"Your brother's sin will keep him from god's bliss,
but You are safe because god favors You! "
If God is Love, how can this voice be true?

14.
For God is not a favorer of men.
Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.

Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven firstborn,
Or of the Eternal coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam’d?  since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Or hear”st thou rather pure ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell?  before the sun,
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.
Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing,
Escap’d the Stygian pool, though long detain’d
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight
Through utter and through middle darkness borne,
With other notes than to the Orphean lyre
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night;
Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
Though hard and rare:  Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
Revisit’st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So  thick a drop serene hath quench’d their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veil’d.  Yet not the more
Cease I to wander, where the Muses haunt,
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallow’d feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit:  nor sometimes forget
So were I equall’d with them in renown,
Thy sovran command, that Man should find grace;
Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old:
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note.  Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature’s works to me expung’d and ras’d,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
Now had the Almighty Father from above,
From the pure empyrean where he sits
High thron’d above all highth, bent down his eye
His own works and their works at once to view:
About him all the Sanctities of Heaven
Stood thick as stars, and from his sight receiv’d
Beatitude past utterance; on his right
The radiant image of his glory sat,
His only son; on earth he first beheld
Our two first parents, yet the only two
Of mankind in the happy garden plac’d
Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love,
Uninterrupted joy, unrivall’d love,
In blissful solitude; he then survey’d
Hell and the gulf between, and Satan there
Coasting the wall of Heaven on this side Night
In the dun air sublime, and ready now
To stoop with wearied wings, and willing feet,
On the bare outside of this world, that seem’d
Firm land imbosom’d, without firmament,
Uncertain which, in ocean or in air.
Him God beholding from his prospect high,
Wherein past, present, future, he beholds,
Thus to his only Son foreseeing spake.
Only begotten Son, seest thou what rage
Transports our Adversary?  whom no bounds
Prescrib’d no bars of Hell, nor all the chains
Heap’d on him there, nor yet the main abyss
Wide interrupt, can hold; so bent he seems
On desperate revenge, that shall redound
Upon his own rebellious head.  And now,
Through all restraint broke loose, he wings his way
Not far off Heaven, in the precincts of light,
Directly towards the new created world,
And man there plac’d, with purpose to assay
If him by force he can destroy, or, worse,
By some false guile pervert; and shall pervert;
For man will hearken to his glozing lies,
And easily transgress the sole command,
Sole pledge of his obedience:  So will fall
He and his faithless progeny:  Whose fault?
Whose but his own?  ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the ethereal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood, and them who fail’d;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have given sincere
Of true allegiance, constant faith or love,
Where only what they needs must do appear’d,
Not what they would?  what praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid,
When will and reason (reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoil’d,
Made passive both, had serv’d necessity,
Not me?  they therefore, as to right belong$ ‘d,
So were created, nor can justly accuse
Their Maker, or their making, or their fate,
As if predestination over-rul’d
Their will dispos’d by absolute decree
Or high foreknowledge they themselves decreed
Their own revolt, not I; if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.
So without least impulse or shadow of fate,
Or aught by me immutably foreseen,
They trespass, authors to themselves in all
Both what they judge, and what they choose; for so
I form’d them free: and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves; I else must change
Their nature, and revoke the high decree
Unchangeable, eternal, which ordain’d
$THeir freedom: they themselves ordain’d their fall.
The first sort by their own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self-deprav’d:  Man falls, deceiv’d
By the other first:  Man therefore shall find grace,
The other none:  In mercy and justice both,
Through Heaven and Earth, so shall my glory excel;
But Mercy, first and last, shall brightest shine.
Thus while God spake, ambrosial fragrance fill’d
All Heaven, and in the blessed Spirits elect
Sense of new joy ineffable diffus’d.
Beyond compare the Son of God was seen
Most glorious; in him all his Father shone
Substantially express’d; and in his face
Divine compassion visibly appear’d,
Love without end, and without measure grace,
Which uttering, thus he to his Father spake.
O Father, gracious was that word which clos’d
Thy sovran command, that Man should find grace;
, that Man should find grace;
For which both Heaven and earth shall high extol
Thy praises, with the innumerable sound
Of hymns and sacred songs, wherewith thy throne
Encompass’d shall resound thee ever blest.
For should Man finally be lost, should Man,
Thy creature late so lov’d, thy youngest son,
Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though join’d
With his own folly?  that be from thee far,
That far be from thee, Father, who art judge
Of all things made, and judgest only right.
Or shall the Adversary thus obtain
His end, and frustrate thine?  shall he fulfill
His malice, and thy goodness bring to nought,
Or proud return, though to his heavier doom,
Yet with revenge accomplish’d, and to Hell
Draw after him the whole race of mankind,
By him corrupted?  or wilt thou thyself
Abolish thy creation, and unmake
For him, what for thy glory thou hast made?
So should thy goodness and thy greatness both
Be question’d and blasphem’d without defence.
To whom the great Creator thus replied.
O son, in whom my soul hath chief delight,
Son of my *****, Son who art alone.
My word, my wisdom, and effectual might,
All hast thou spoken as my thoughts are, all
As my eternal purpose hath decreed;
Man shall not quite be lost, but sav’d who will;
Yet not of will in him, but grace in me
Freely vouchsaf’d; once more I will renew
His lapsed powers, though forfeit; and enthrall’d
By sin to foul exorbitant desires;
Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand
On even ground against his mortal foe;
By me upheld, that he may know how frail
His fallen condition is, and to me owe
All his deliverance, and to none but me.
Some I have chosen of peculiar grace,
Elect above the rest; so is my will:
The rest shall hear me call, and oft be warn’d
Their sinful state, and to appease betimes
The incensed Deity, while offer’d grace
Invites; for I will clear their senses dark,
What may suffice, and soften stony hearts
To pray, repent, and bring obedience due.
To prayer, repentance, and obedience due,
Though but endeavour’d with sincere intent,
Mine ear shall not be slow, mine eye not shut.
And I will place within them as a guide,
My umpire Conscience; whom if they will hear,
Light after light, well us’d, they shall attain,
And to the end, persisting, safe arrive.
This my long sufferance, and my day of grace,
They who neglect and scorn, shall never taste;
But hard be harden’d, blind be blinded more,
That they may stumble on, and deeper fall;
And none but such from mercy I exclude.
But yet all is not done; Man disobeying,
Disloyal, breaks his fealty, and sins
Against the high supremacy of Heaven,
Affecting God-head, and, so losing all,
To expiate his treason hath nought left,
But to destruction sacred and devote,
He, with his whole posterity, must die,
Die he or justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.
Say, heavenly Powers, where shall we find such love?
Which of you will be mortal, to redeem
Man’s mortal crime, and just the unjust to save?
Dwells in all Heaven charity so dear?
And silence was in Heaven: $ on Man’s behalf
He ask’d, but all the heavenly quire stood mute,
Patron or intercessour none appear’d,
Much less that durst upon his own head draw
The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set.
And now without redemption all mankind
Must have been lost, adjudg’d to Death and Hell
By doom severe, had not the Son of God,
In whom the fulness dwells of love divine,
His dearest mediation thus renew’d.
Father, thy word is past, Man shall find grace;
And shall grace not find means, that finds her way,
The speediest of thy winged messengers,
To visit all thy creatures, and to all
Comes unprevented, unimplor’d, unsought?
Happy for Man, so coming; he her aid
Can never seek, once dead in sins, and lost;
Atonement for himself, or offering meet,
Indebted and undone, hath none to bring;
Behold me then:  me for him, life for life
I offer: on me let thine anger fall;
Account me Man; I for his sake will leave
Thy *****, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleased; on me let Death wreak all his rage.
Under his gloomy power I shall not long
Lie vanquished. Thou hast given me to possess
Life in myself for ever; by thee I live;
Though now to Death I yield, and am his due,
All that of me can die, yet, that debt paid,
$ thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave
His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul
For ever with corruption there to dwell;
But I shall rise victorious, and subdue
My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil.
Death his death’s wound shall then receive, and stoop
Inglorious, of his mortal sting disarmed;
I through the ample air in triumph high
Shall lead Hell captive maugre Hell, and show
The powers of darkness bound. Thou, at the sight
Pleased, out of Heaven shalt look down and smile,
While, by thee raised, I ruin all my foes;
Death last, and with his carcase glut the grave;
Then, with the multitude of my redeemed,
Shall enter Heaven, long absent, and return,
Father, to see thy face, wherein no cloud
Of anger shall remain, but peace assured
And reconcilement: wrath shall be no more
Thenceforth, but in thy presence joy entire.
His words here ended; but his meek aspect
Silent yet spake, and breathed immortal love
To mortal men, above which only shone
Filial obedience: as a sacrifice
Glad to be offered, he attends the will
Of his great Father. Admiration seized
All Heaven, what this might mean, and whither tend,
Wondering; but soon th’ Almighty thus replied.
O thou in Heaven and Earth the only peace
Found out for mankind under wrath, O thou
My sole complacence! Well thou know’st how dear
To me are all my works; nor Man the least,
Though last created, that for him I spare
Thee from my ***** and right hand, to save,
By losing thee a while, the whole race lost.

Thou, therefore, whom thou only canst redeem,
Their nature also to thy nature join;
And be thyself Man among men on Earth,
Made flesh, when time shall be, of ****** seed,
By wondrous birth; be thou in Adam’s room
The head of all mankind, though Adam’s son.
As in him perish all men, so in thee,
As from a second root, shall be restored
As many as are restored, without thee none.
His crime makes guilty all his sons; thy merit,
Imputed, shall absolve them who renounce
Their own both righteous and unrighteous deeds,
And live in thee transplanted, and from thee
Receive new life.  So Man, as is most just,
Shall satisfy for Man, be judged and die,
And dying rise, and rising with him raise
His brethren, ransomed with his own dear life.
So heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate,
Giving to death, and dying to redeem,
So dearly to redeem what hellish hate
So easily destroyed, and still destroys
In those who, when they may, accept not grace.
Nor shalt thou, by descending to assume
Man’s nature, lessen or degrade thine own.
Because thou hast, though throned in highest bliss
Equal to God, and equally enjoying
God-like fruition, quitted all, to save
A world from utter loss, and hast been found
By merit more than birthright Son of God,
Found worthiest to be so by being good,
Far more than great or high; because in thee
Love hath abounded more than glory abounds;
Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt
With thee thy manhood also to this throne:
Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt reign
Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man,
Anointed universal King; all power
I give thee; reign for ever, and assume
Thy merits; under thee, as head supreme,
Thrones, Princedoms, Powers, Dominions, I reduce:
All knees to thee shall bow, of them that bide
In Heaven, or Earth, or under Earth in Hell.
When thou, attended gloriously from Heaven,
Shalt in the sky appear, and from thee send
The summoning Arch-Angels to proclaim
Thy dread tribunal; forthwith from all winds,
The living, and forthwith the cited dead
Of all past ages, to the general doom
Shall hasten; such a peal shall rouse their sleep.
Then, all thy saints assembled, thou shalt judge
Bad Men and Angels; they, arraigned, shall sink
Beneath thy sentence; Hell, her numbers full,
Thenceforth shall be for ever shut.  Mean while
The world shall burn, and from her ashes spring
New Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell,
And, after all their tribulations long,
See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds,
With joy and peace triumphing, and fair truth.
Then thou thy regal scepter shalt lay by,
For regal scepter then no more shall need,
God shall be all in all.  But, all ye Gods,
Adore him, who to compass all this dies;
Adore the Son, and honour him as me.
No sooner had the Almighty ceased, but all
The multitude of Angels, with a shout
Loud as from numbers without number, sweet
As from blest voices, uttering joy, Heaven rung
With jubilee, and loud Hosannas filled
The eternal regions:  Lowly reverent
Towards either throne they bow, and to the ground
With solemn adoration down they cast
Their crowns inwove with amarant and gold;
Immortal amarant, a flower which once
In Paradise, fast by the tree of life,
Began to bloom; but soon for man’s offence
To Heaven removed, where first it grew, there grows,
And flowers aloft shading the fount of life,
And where the river of bliss through midst of Heaven
Rolls o’er Elysian flowers her amber stream;
With these that never fade the Spirits elect
Bind their resplendent locks inwreathed with beams;
Now in loose garlands thick thrown off, the bright
Pavement, that like a sea of jasper shone,
Impurpled with celestial roses smiled.
Then, crowned again, their golden harps they took,
Harps ever tuned, that glittering by their side
Like quivers hung, and with preamble sweet
Of charming symphony they introduce
Their sacred song, and waken raptures high;
No voice exempt, no voice but well could join
Melodious part, such concord is in Heaven.
Thee, Father, first they sung

If one had a desire to define the word god where would he begin?  Why would he assign the traits he did to the word?  Would he want to assimilate traits that he perceived to be godlike?   Would he obtain a clearer vision in a realization of the futility of aspiration, or would pragmatism and adamant tenaciousness afford him a better route?  Perhaps we all could benefit by a reassessment of our affinity with god.
  
The metaphysical extremities of human nature provide man with a multifaceted image of the possible psychic states of God. Objectivity has led man away from the true nature of his need many times at this point.  Any retrospective analysis of man’s personifications of deity most often leaves one lost in the quandaries of the psychic quagmire.  The weaknesses created by man’s lack of a universally acceptable id conclusion have elevated many philosophical or theocratic hypotheses to the level of demagoguery.

One method which has been used by theologians in attempting to induct a summerial derivation from the vast warehouse of human religious extrapolation is the concept that perhaps basic truths can be affirmed through the theory of sufficient constancy of conjunction. Which is to say that reasonably analogous conjectures can be found in the depths of religious pervasion.  But this is not strictly true.
  
The ancient Babylonians, like the Indians, were polytheistic. They worshiped gods of nature, tribal union, fertility.  Deifications created from allusion to natural analogies, yet often imbued with a euphemistic optimism.  Where as the pantheon of Grecian deities often seems an almost banal personification of psychological metaphors from the darker side of life.  Zeus a fallibly omnipotent being who pompously subverts all beneath him to his will.  Who along with Apollo and others roam the countryside ****** and adulterating the women of their choice.  And Ares the formidable God of war who’s natural lust for violence leads him and his cohorts to vicarious involvement with mankind’s altercations.

Egyptian theology seems to have been an amendable and progressive state that began with sun worship and gods of nature, and moved on to attempted assimilation of godlike traits through a natural alignment with the perceived nature of God.  There were in depth studies of the nature of time, and life, and notions of existential transcendentalism.  The momentum of this progression led them to the ultimate grandiose delusion in which the Pharaoh was worshiped as the universal supreme being, omniscient and omnipotent ruler of the ultimate utopian society.

The Jews worshiped a God who was at once both a part of them  and an exogenous force believed to have created them in its own image. A God that deliberately instilled an understanding of it’s intended wisdom by instructing them of the laws they were to live by.  These divine revelations were often considered as the unadulterated word of God.  This God was jealous and demanded the adoration due him as the supreme essence.  His worship became the underlying force in their social conjecture as they attempted to inspire his continued grace and benevolence.  A seemingly irrational solution to the quandary of idealism.  An allegiance who’s impetus was unquestionable.  It seems by me to be improperly rooted on a personal level in that it overemphasizes the need or expectation of divine inspiration.

The ancient Chinese social wisdom was by me commendably rational.  Unlike the Jews they do not seem to have overemphasized the expectation of divine inspiration.  Instead they, like the Egyptians emphasized an alignment with the perceived nature of God on a personal level as the way to strength.  They of course had a conception of the possible natures of deity, but considered wisdom to be an honorably truthful self orientation.

Another realm of intellectual extrapolation from which one might hope to surmise a depthfully pervasive generality would be man’s philosophical treatises on the possible natures of God. Unfortunately due to the myriad nature of possibility this again appears paradoxically difficult.  To me this seems to be a product of the nonempirical nature of these conjectures.  Humans experience a reality which does not necessarily  have any relative effect on the transcendence of their conception of the possible nature of God. Although many have attempted to empiricise their conjectures through rational logic they are most often refuted by the possibility of ultimate transcendence or quandrified by the actuality of paradoxical argument.
  
Some good examples of these points are perhaps the arguments of Lucretius who attempted to empiricise that God can not revoke mathematical truths.  But what is the relative reality of those truths to the transcended essence of ultimate beingness.  They are refuted by irrelevance.  Another example might be the statement that God has aseity.  That is if he exists his existence is not caused.  This statement seems easy to refute for the supreme being could be all of the things possible for him except this and have evolved out of eons of cosmic continuum into natural omniscience and or through assimilation of the forces innate to the cosmos have achieved relative omnipotence.
  
One generally accepted statement that is refuted by these arguments is “the cosmos does not have infinite existence and is therefore not the supreme being.”  For if this supreme being has not yet evolved if it’s transcendental form could be said to have become out of cosmic continuum then the cosmos will indeed have achieved infiniteness.  But this already seems intuitively necessary to the ultimate cosmic essence regardless of a lack of self consciousness or even a physical form.  Perhaps what is possible and eons of void are the root of all force and matter, and perhaps this as yet unfulfilled sequence cycles on to nirvana.  Then again perhaps the supreme being does in fact preempt all as a self conscious entity.  This also would seem to be intuitively necessary to the essence of totality which of course has always existed and is in fact the supreme being in at that at that although not necessarily the true form of it’s transcendental being.
  
On this lofty note I would like to reiterate my thesis.  Perhaps we all could benefit from a reassessment of our affinity with God.

A man can accomplish many things with his concept of God. What is extraneous?  Perhaps the question would better be put what is expedient, but that becomes subjective.   You have to define your goals.  Where in lies wisdom?  Can man truly aspire to godhead or is this personally nonproductive?  Man seems to perceive a sort of manifest destiny for himself.  An intrinsic affinity with infiniteness that just must be dealt with.   Perhaps our beliefs in life after death are a grandiose delusion in which we hedonistically waste our time pampering our egos. Which brings me to my third and final argument.

Perhaps conscious regimentation and an affiliation with earth bound logic would bring us closer to our affinity with God.
One of the ideas presented by my philosophical references was that many of mankind’s inspirations to define his affinity with God grew inadvertently out of social realism and the powers assumed. Although often the subjective truths of these understandings went unmentioned out of a desire for objectivity.  For example what God must be if God is to be God.  Perhaps one would do better to relate personally to his affinity with God.

I think this is true.  Although we seem to lack omnipotence we are all individually speaking a preternatural corporeal state.  Perhaps we all should assert our godliness instead of hiding our talents in the sand.  Perhaps then we could construct a contractual reality.  An aspiration to the perfection of the human social mechanic.  I salute this concept.  In fact I firmly believe that by conscribing unalienable rights to our beings we have already performed the rights of the human social mechanic.  Our aspiration to godhead is complete in it’s conjecture.  All that is left is to obtain expedience and accuracy in our amendment toward continued obtainment of the majority goal.

I found her savaged
Embodied luxuriously over
what evoked to be a torn up of sequence of awesome tapestries, adjourned past a thin web of carefully traced emblems.
To this day, I find not a thought so beautiful and out of many
those which may come about
and those which could’ve never come.

I find myself without a motive,
without a sacred scent of pride nor
stigma of freedom,
yet I am only enslaved to my very demons.
Were they not as grotesque,
were not in the hopeless, drunken sake
to revoke their perseverance
they wouldn’t be anywhere near as precious.

In fact, they are perhaps the most precious elements I can behold.
Though they have not always ruled over guidance,
they have never left my course
and my curse, is to fancy them dear.

For lord, how could one ever wish to cease dreaming?
I can only let go upon the rabid clearance of my faithful pen,
even the latter, couldn’t ever suffice the magnificence of the given.

For it’s not ignorance, nor enlightenment;
It is whatever I wish it to be,
and none which I’ll come close to explain.
It is the mere and absolute pleasure
one finds in darkness.
That which comes over me,
that which sways my tidings and gathers
my rhythms and rushes my rhymes,
that which tides my emotions to the velvet
envelopes entitled in marks,
to the sunken, undecipherable verses,
to the crimson, wilted rashes of a silvermoon
slenderlight.
Oh, for such foul words are now used to demean one’s art
“thou art my lady, my gleam of heaven in sorrowful sight”
What terrible night,
what a terrific subject
what tremulous manner to execute a
tremendous gal.

I could never stop dreaming,
not while the dances
on melted vine;
not even whilst it dwells my words
into senseless specters,
not while the mind yet thrives,
nor will I ever fear such a splendid rhyme.

I found myself upon a creature whose tender slight
had abandoned the very virtue
and could only see myself glowing vile,
tangling amongst amazement and disappointment
why should I deny one the pleasure
my very fate has forbidden to attire?

What makes me,
of all people,
the soul to advantage of given pride?
Cowardly, the stench of curiosity bewildered
by an apologetic reign of might.

Whatever may have become of me,
where I to act upon my gifted intervention;
I often wonder.
I often regret it upon the moments when the mind
speaks the soul’s verdict, and one consoles
over the truth, acclaiming to change by the night’s passing.
Yet lament, sorrow and forlorn
only help me remember her last stance ever so beautifully;
and in the quelled noise of a risen,
renders the violent solemnity of a kiss.
For a lady always rests upon the velvet of her silhouette.

Oh, how I wish you still called
To hear that crack in your voice
Flaws and all
You were still my first choice.

Oh, how I wish you still called
To talk the fears back
Because since we fell off
It brought the tears back.

The comforted words you spoke*
The *life in your laugh
All the memories I have to revoke
Brings all the pain back.

What happened to the dandies
Those gentlemen of the grandest Culture
Destroyers of dreaded boundaries
Mockers of meaningless morality
Inquisitors of a profound lack of imagination
Guardians of good taste
Messengers of modernity

What happened to those 19th century hipsters
Who so gracefully dissected Society
And whose wit and wisdom
Shook the foundations
Of mainstream hypocrisy
Of inept intellectualism
And lamentable lies

We are in dire need of retrieving
The lost art of being a dandy
To shake the foundations once more
And to revoke the righteous rage
Of the cultural creed
To set society aflame
With wit and wisdom

in same place as last writing, wondering
what context this end of sweating will
bring. what this one's lackadaisical - to
juxtapose, let's write Bardical - musings
are found to be. treacherous thoughts pa-
tterned, knit in pearls of alternating colors
from the many revelized experiences of the
months since fleeted. this one's catacombed
mind filled with ex-grievances, and a once
real question of primordial retaliation. of
how to revoke Nature's iron grasp thought
to be called deity's divined fate of this kilned
clay vessel. and wondering on creation, life
given only to spite slaves formed of fire. and
now to leave aside psychpomic thoughts, and
now to return to ground. to stand firm upon an
earth that is essence entirety of this one's base
of creation. only, blood absorbed in place of
retained in circulation. going back, traversing
thought, bringing forth the white man's implic-
ation as ruler of time though known always that
circulation must cease, must become no longer
fluid. and with history being that of the sole
victor. that of labeling, defining, forcing selfish
perception as truth. and this one realizes reason
in fire's hatred of earth. to need to burn out, to
need to consume, but fire lacks choice of will to
action. this one can never leave aside idyllic thou-
ght of a primordial war of elements merged.
digressing, even though the end must find full-
circle. I the Destroyer writing in hopes of finding
thoughts on We the Emerging, all the while
Gregorian has foreseen existence from time beg-
inning. guaranteeing only that structure will
survive time's ending. history of sorts pre-writ
day for day for week for years for aeons of never
ceasing circulation. all the while, victor shedding
for the earth to absorb. Thoth the great, the great,
the great; of lacking elemental composition. the only
one in this one's knowledge whom defies either
circulation of absorption. We the Emerging consume
of the firmament. He the great, the great, the great
witnessing from without the firmament. He the
ancestors taking trice-form to malleate clay from
perpetual fermentation. and digressing more, but
again stating the achievement of culmination of words.
this one stating understanding that perceiving self
as a psychopomp stems from earthen forged vanity.
and all writ is true in belief of prisca theologia.
perhaps this one's words are found to be Hermetic,
found defying interred ideologies as ink rushes to
awaken We the Emerging before dreaming mind
collides with the dawn. and perhaps only Nature may
be found as decided for those taking their cycles of
mindless bliss. and digressing, merging trained-thought
into the next. merged here to be found, We the Emergent
modernity with open palms for another's thoughts. and
here to be found, this one, of I the Destroyer choosing
a percepted chaos to the permanent pre-dawn bliss.

oh my baby
expectant seeds of memory
and truth do surge in unanticipated but ******
flows

surge and bring thee closer;
no, into my realm; devolve mysteries
resolve the unsolved, evoke and revoke my stain, my misery

be my home: forlorn as i am I stand proud
as your knight
and you my Queen.

On crimson tides we ebb and flow
no technicolor dreams to show
the darkness falls at our behest
as from our hands the senses wrest

take the tincture to ease the pain
release the heart from this dark refrain
shadows revoke our light of day
to incumbent solace we must sway

By: Cedric McClester

Be careful what you say
Your words can convey
A message that uplifts
Just like birthday gifts
Or by their mere sound
Bring someone down
Cos words can be profound
Whether adjective or noun

Think before you speak
And be kind to the meek
Words can soothe away
The worries of the day
Or words can cause pain
And bring nothing but disdain
They can linger and remain
Implanted in your brain

Words can be like tools
For geniuses or fools
But once they're cast about
They remove any doubt
About whoever spoke them
And it's hard to revoke them
So try not to provoke them
Better that you yoke them

Words better left unsaid
Should remain in your head
Once they're in the atmosphere
They can't simply disappear
Consider this when you speak
Or an errant word might leak
Even when it's tongue and cheek
That excuse is very weak



(c) Copyright 2015, Cedric McClester.  All rights reserved.

My soul ached
For his skin and bones
And all the beating somethings in between-
That nothing,
Perhaps not even time,
Could revoke the hormone-driven,
Empty-souled desire I had
For every participle of his being
To deluge me through my core
And past every withering remain
Of sanity or stability
I so feebly clung to.

I got lost in a feeling, pried myself open to be understood when every part of my nature said to conceal. I wanted to feel human like the rest of them, I wanted to stop feeling so alien. Distance had become me so I exposed myself and now I’m faltering. My deepest crevices of thought are now known, this openness that kills me has also served me. I realized I was raw art, that the strokes of a paint brush within the walls of my mind were defined by complexities of thought echoing so loud until my lips sung my soul once again. I realized that not everyone could simply understand and I wanted to revoke all I said, I wanted to close myself again but I couldn’t erase the damage already done…
Well I got lost in a feeling, I became slave to it and did all I could to serve this unquenchable thirst that my soul holds. I grab at my heart with both hands and clench so tight at the restraints of this suit of skin that keeps me held in. I felt like painting the walls with my brain and it wasn’t for my disdain towards this life I lead, I was actually fond of life but that’s the thing. See I was so devoured by a moment, that I couldn’t bare letting go, and I knew time would shift and the faces would change but I was so loyal I didn’t want to adapt. I was in love with everyone I knew and life was tearing us apart, breaking us down and I saw the light behind so many eyes that used to burn with the intensity of the sun, fall so dim it resembled an empty void and one by one iron wills were broken.
I felt like crying in rooms full of people, when the alcohol was long gone and everyone escaped but I just sat there absorbing the fact that I was the only one present. That I got so lost in this feeling, in this very moment, I could no longer run. So I waited patiently for intoxication to leave my mind and I walk outside to my car, I put the key in the ignition and drive. The sun is now rising and there’s a baby blue fuzz surrounding me. I parked in front of my house and thought about the hell that awaits for me behind closed doors. So I drove, I broke free, I gave myself away to the bohemian screaming to be set free. Reality was sure to crash upon me, I looked at the sun while it caved in and I called up an old friend but was reminded of how desolate a moment can be when the answering machine fooled me...
I looked out the window and everyone was going on with their lives in full acceptance. The man walking to the grocery store, the people gathered around the bus stop, and I fell slave yet again. I parked the car in the parking lot behind the bus stop being sure to lock my keys inside so I wouldn’t turn back and dug for some change and I walked up to the bus stop as the bus was just arriving, this moment I can only describe as fate. I dreamed of a clean slate and it was right there in front of me the whole time, my life became centered around riding the busses and people watching. I dug my head in a book in fear of being noticed but somehow I feel as if my deepest fear was my only hope now.
So I was waiting for the right moment, a moment to set my mind free on some poor individual and then the bus stopped, it was late and I was the only one on now. Some of the bus drivers knew me by name and I didn’t know whether to feel proud or pathetic about that but as the bus screeched to the stop before the last one. I saw a leg extend, and pull up a person of slender figure, it was a beautiful woman around my age, I felt sorry for her because the only stop after this one was the bus station and that’s where the bus driver awkwardly kicks you off and tells you to go home.
This is the moment that got me, I was in complete and utter submission as I buried my head into an upside down book, the title read “I am the messenger” and out of all the seats she picked the back corner next to me, she sat too close and I couldn’t focus on my book at all, I was too caught by her presence, I didn’t even realize my book was upside down. She looks down towards my book and doesn’t say a word as she adjust it to be right side up and pats the book twice, almost to assure it will stay upright. I looked over to her with my empty cold eyes and starred dully and she smiled a sweet, closed eye smile.
The coals in my head must had found the furnace again because in that moment I was relit, the fire behind my eyes roared and my soul was awoken again. I felt so very human but I also felt so very human, my shyness lead me to falter and she linked her arm to mine and said “do you mind?” I hadn’t spoken in so long, so very long, I almost forgot how and I said “uh-uh… of course” I clear my throat immediately after and say “I would introduce myself but I don’t believe in names” she smiled with understanding and told me to read aloud and I did with no questions. Two chapter later the bus screeches to a halt and the bus driver gestures for us to leave.
The girl grabs me by the wrist and guides me away, we start walking to a diner that you can see the light to in the far distance. Nothing existed besides for us as far as I was concerned, only the path beneath our feet. She starts telling me how she’s seen me before that she’s been watching me from a distance, and she knew I road the bus all the way to the end and that she wanted to ask me why but I couldn’t tell her why exactly because I didn’t know myself.
So I said what I felt “I fell out of existence and the bus helps me feel like I exist” she smiles again and we are just now sitting down for stale coffee and waffles. She starts drawing on napkins asking me questions, the first one read “why did you fall out of existence?”
I scribbled down “I didn’t feel human” and slid it back to her.
She flips the napkin over and writes a simple “why?”
And I scribble down “well that’s hard to explain”
and she writes “well I can understand”
and right as she slides the napkin over the waffles arrive and the sun is rebirthed as it rises and she looks at me and says “it’s a baby blue fuzz you know?”
As she stuffs a fork full of waffle into her mouth. I’m breathless and overwhelmed by a moment that can only be explained by fate and I feel like crying but I disguise it with a yawn. I write down on a new napkin “I think I feel human” and I crumple it up and put it in my pocket.
She asked what I wrote and I respond “the moment."

We will live like smoke. Free and flowing and forever changing. Shaped by the wind and carried by invisible powers. Love will lift us, trust will twist us, energy will enter us and in the dark assist us. We will be tendrils tumbling smooth. Never captured never controlled. If people were fire, you'd be a pyre and we'd be the sparks in the wind.

      We will live like shooting stars. Bright and surprising and ever-enticing. Burned in your sight so even when you close your eyes we shine. When you sleep we will soar, when you're wishing for more, t'will be us that you see out your window.

      We will live like dragons of old. The legends become us, and we become told. You'll hear of our ventures, 'How daring!' 'How bold!', but your eyes only glisten with the flash of fool's gold. We dragons have secrets to uplift your soul, we can strip off your shackles and let wings unfold. If only you'll listen to tales gone untold, we whisper the truth; You're being controlled.

      Just like the mice who are trapped in a maze, you sense out your prize and move on your way. But all routes have been found, to keep you contained, and though down on the ground, you feel unafraid, if you look up and around, you can see that you're caged.

      Even our paper has lines there to rule us, but essence and vapor have no need for cruel 'must'. So if you find out that the chains are unjust, remember that even iron can rust.

      A word of advice, for those who revoke, do not fear fire, once you've awoke. There's no hidden danger, dagger or cloak; For it is us Dragons, that live in the smoke.

Anonymous  (1730s ?)

In good King Charles's golden days,
When Loyalty no harm meant;
A Furious High-Church man I was,
And so I gain'd Preferment.
Unto my Flock I daily Preached,
Kings are by God appointed,
And ****'d are those who dare resist,
Or touch the Lord's Anointed.

And this is law, I will maintain
Unto my Dying Day, Sir.
That whatsoever King may reign,
I shall be Vicar of Bray, Sir!

When Royal James possessed the crown,
And popery grew in fashion;
The Penal Law I hooted down,
And read the Declaration:
The Church of Rome I found would fit
Full well my Constitution,
And I had been a Jesuit,
But for the Revolution.

 And this is Law, &c.

When William our Deliverer came,
To heal the Nation's Grievance,
I turned the Cat in Pan again,
And swore to him Allegiance:
Old Principles I did revoke,
Set conscience at a distance,
Passive Obedience is a Joke,
A Jest is non-resistance.

  And this is Law, &c.;

When Royal Ann became our Queen,
Then Church of England's Glory,
Another face of things was seen,
And I became a Tory:
Occasional Conformists base
I ****'d, and Moderation,
And thought the Church in danger was,
From such Prevarication.

  And this is Law, &c.;

When George in Pudding time came o'er,
And Moderate Men looked big, Sir,
My Principles I changed once more,
And so became a Whig, Sir.
And thus Preferment I procured,
From our Faith's great Defender,
And almost every day abjur'd
The Pope, and the Pretender.

  And this is Law, &c.;

The Illustrious House of Hanover,
And Protestant succession,
To these I lustily will swear,
Whilst they can keep possession:
For in my Faith, and Loyalty,
I never once will falter,
But George, my lawful king shall be,
Except the Times should alter.

  *And this is Law, &c;.

in the tumbles of ice and snow
a small spark of a crystal did grow
i sprang out borne, not still
into a world of ice and chill
i loved the ice, the tumbling start
of snowflakes that cascaded through the dark
for what could hold me with such care
as the snow and ice that kissed my hair?
i held my heart in a hardened vice
of a sweetly spun smoldering ice
but i grew older
that layer of solder
quickly cracked over
my heart pounded newly awaken
in a wild flutter, i had forsaken
the quiet isolation of ice and snow
for a life i didn't know
i longed for years for a frosty companion
to lead me through the wild abandon
that people once called love

i crept, i crawled, i spit and spied
i let the hope shroud me with lies
and then one day in Holland dear
i cast about, i found the boy
playing with his small wooden toy
one look at him and i knew it was true
this boy longed to feel the cold too
all at once so far and so near
all at once my path was clear
his name was Kay
and at the break of day
i shattered the mirror
and left a shard of my love clearer
slipped into his heart and eye

but there was a girl, a wretched thing
who in winter still smelled of summer and spring
she had my king by the throat
a sappy pestilence that would revoke
my claim to my sweet one Kay
and ruin my chance for love, that wicked fae

so i came to  him on a day i loved best
and when he came close i clutched him to my chest
for now he saw the beauty seared
into my face, so ruthless and dear
i cried pure flakes as we pulled away
to my joy there was no delay

for he was on the brink of manhood
a sweet young thing that would soon leave the stage in which he stood
and grow to love me safe and sound
in my castle where he would never frown
and would tumble happily among the drifts and cold down

but i'd forgotten the girl, the awful thing
who claimed love for  my soon to be king
like the sun in autumn loves the far away spring
in my carelessness i left her to sing
a song of melancholy with a bitter ring

i took my love far away
to the brink of my frozen quay
and then i first saw him smile
he kissed my cheek and asked to stay awhile

years passed and he grew
i was mother, friend, then lover true
he was pure and sweet and warm
by me Kay would never come to harm
a man who loved the cold and snow
and the woman whom held it, all aglow
he led my frozen heart to love

but the girl crept up and tried to sway
the heart of my beloved Kay
she begged she pleaded, she did whispered and shout
but of my palace dear Kay wouldn't come out
he protested, told her a story
of a beautiful ice queen and a love of glory
but the girl did twisted and pout
she pleaded for my love to cast on me his doubt
i lied, she cried
i'd stolen Kay, so he should cast me aside

i told him once as i felt my heart crack
that if he left he could never come back
the ice and snow would be strangers forevermore
if he walked through that door
he smiled his brilliant way
and said he would never live to see that day
but as he turned to shout out go home
a single tear that that ***** had thrown
landed in his glass shard eye
and with a sigh he followed through the night
the sound of sun and cruel warmth and harsh light

i was dead, abandoned
choked
as though my dearest had cut my throat
she melted away the sight of beauty he once held dear
and his eyes for once weren't clear
the ice and snow now held no power
and he slipped farther away with every hour
until she made him forget all about me

i pledged  i would never have another
and until death came forever my lover
i would never remind him of the loss
of the world she made him toss

so years went by
and with every day he breathed and sighed
laced with crystal goodbyes
she couldn't melt the ice in his heart
and in my frozen palace there were starts
when ever he thought of a life that he quite remember

but ten years later in late December
a young man stood in the snowy weather
calling out my name
in a way so tender
the cold and snow wrapped him in its arms
and bore him away to my broken form
he kissed me once
his lips still cold
and the ice queen learned what it was to truly hold
a willing heart and love, fully thawed and smoldering
i will love this man, my Kay
until the world starts over and makes our hearts say
that a deathless death will be the right way

but until then we dance away the days
in immortal youth
with no decay
for it was a snowy world with just an ice queen
and a molten man smitten with the cold serene.

Wonthelimar, in the last transmigration that he planned from Nyons in the cavern on the eastern side of the Rhone, surrounded himself with mountains that dwarfed them with promiscuous caves of the Eygues. From these buckets as a margin of power and go referring to the nocturnal wind of the Pontias; created his fundamental tool of attraction of the Mementos de Cartography of the Seleucids, decomplexing the logistical notions of the Diadocos after having resuscitated and liberating Alexander the Great from a Cartesian Underworld in the manner of apocryphal late Aristotelianism, mechanizing existential dualisms of Hades with formulas and psychotropic and geometric tricks, licensing them theologies of habeas corpus, coexisting in the first instance with Etréstles de Kalavrita who would establish the term of definitive transmigration of Alexander the Great, so that between the Diadocos and Wonthelimar they would contend the final and disciplinary action to revoke the high arrest, transhuming the sovereign as Macedonian next to the Hexagonal Birthright finally very close to Saint John the Apostle and Vernarth in the vicinity of the Megaron Spilaion Apokalypseos.

The generals of Alexander the Great shared his legitimate Ark without royal titles, they were Perdiccas, Antipater, Craterus, Eumenes de Cardia, and others like the satraps who came to be proclaimed as kings; Antigonus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus. Residing the most substantial in this parapsychological saga in Vernarth; his brother Etrestles de Kalavrita who seconded and predestined his monolithic and constituent sovereignty of Polis, for the purpose of ruling and raising his Kopis and Xifos in the independence of aldehyde and alcoholic carbonyl residues emanated from the ferment of the Backhoi and Nepente, depositing LSD in substantial amounts. to align himself with Seleucus, and materially present himself in the sphere of Patmos as two representatives of both empires, one ancient Christian and the other Panhellenic, placing himself in that totalitarianism of Seleucus over that of Alexander the Great who was splendid in the cosmogony of a king similar to David of Judea, solvent and illustrious in the conception of Apological dynasty and identity, of Zeusian roots and of eternal numeral politics. In the quantitative of the champion of Alexander the Great revived on Patmos, the Mashiach of Gethsemane will continue to be deified with such a signature of both in ****** skies in two absolutist emperors and of dogmatic differential Pythagorean, propagandizing both dynasties with domains in regencies and different latitudes of the conceptual decision. Base, to refute proposals to follow them in part of anti-Alexandrian perplexities or opposed to marginalizing himself from following them after they abandoned him in Babylon. This was sensed in the confrontation between both forces of univocal polarization, for the good of one and the bad of the other of having to distract them from the proposal to enlist and harass dethroned kings on purpose from their deaths and revive them in others than in their own court of observers and bosses, they will only exist in the empty temples and idols without dates to know to avoid and in prevailing dates that will not happen.

Seleucus says: “Khaire my Commander…, unite the divine sanctuaries of Apollo, and take up the harangue of Tel Gomel with us disunited and lost by you. This dating will remain in the offices of reforming Macedonian armies and we will both command our generals in the Panhellenic dynasty, overall the heavenly armies that you will ever have here with fragile oracles confusing your divine blood! "

Wonthelimar, already manifesting from Nyons, lightened his Bucephalus bases, having a great somatic affinity with the bridles of Alexander the Great's steed, unraveling here a great mystery in his parapsychological regression directed from the cavern of Chauvet.

Wonthelimar says: “I have been confined with early Neolithic alloys, here I have dwelt livid among all your intrepid adventures channeling the axons and sketches of manifestations of superior cause and effect of correspondence of the ages and their Aeon and paleo-uncrossing precessions of you and your new death, from the Ardeche river together with Medea and Hypnos, among all of them being aerial, visionaries and northern lights who traveled to my redoubt to spray them in river waters, on the night of Agios San Ioannis. The gorges that swallow the seal of the Pontias, make rivers form with their name since the bulk of their waves of gusts are grandiloquent and robust like a gaseous river that becomes hydrological in larynxes where the wind is astonished when entering the concavity that it is wasted in its nature of time and qualitative content. Unusually I have been the progeny of organisms of rapture and cytological drama, in each one that is represented in these walls in which they are trapped next to me as tricks, and radiocarbon tricks by these vicissitudes, and of their actions that have dated my radiation of radioactive carbon in these caverns and so-called fourteen carbon spaces, for more than fifty million radiometric years. I lived here with my parents until as a child I stayed with my godmother, but one day my father did not return. From that moment on I became after the anticipated axial carbon, to keep myself as a torch in the caverns to see where no one was light but me, only of someone who was more than a dawn to illuminate what they wanted to know in my organic depressions, my trident of dating and carbon, by my parents and I in incisive philanthropy staining all the walls detesting the otherness that made me move towards a Wonthelimar; with dated apparitions and curtains that behind them always like gargoyles appeared before Hypnos, and then Medea, taking me as a child with her hands. When they left, I was left alone and patiently waited for them, when they did not return in the harsh winters they would send me Gerakis Falcons, to deal with your pain my lord Vernarth. In this field, I live, but now I am on my way to grasp the horns of the ibex, which took me to their lair with their goat colonies to give me milk and ursid ***** herbs that shielded me from a lethal genre, although not every day. Remain so. The lord that you will be now is the reflection of the bodyguard along with his ibex that will cordon off your rebirth after leaving the traces and rods of your bone marrow, spleen, and glandular that now belongs to me, to take you to the coldest waters that run inside me since the last ice age. The interference of the Diádocos tried to convince Alexander the Great, this is already a new rock piece to represent him in numismatics, walls, and ceramics in a predominant and complacent way of historical, shamanic record and of astonishing parapsychological fold that I have projected on the walls of Chauvet without your consent "

The new turn from Nyons to Patmos was one of the seizures and ecstatic agonies, for a former little prodigy boy and son of an Íbez and a Bucephalus named Wonthelmar, who comes to rescue the entelechies of someone who was an ignorant man who carried in his arms his divine death, without knowing that before she was eternal life waiting for her in the Katapausis, after building the Megaron and negotiating with Seleucus the evolutionary stylistics of the resurrected Alexander the Great in the flames of the candle enlisted in the night lanterns and united with Saint John the Theologian. Seleucus' talks will be one of the stubborn and ****** visits to persuade and catechize his major general, in periods that do not elapse in real-time, and that will be the fatal fate of his obstinacies because Vernarth was already a prodigal son of the Duoverso-Universe., whose basal was unparalleled in attacking their ideals and hegemonic settlements of the material of minimal cause and effect, a wonder of worthy to lean on invisible gods who at a great speed never seen before..., trafficked in front of every gap or shoulder of their destiny, wandering under a pendulum of a sword and under the support of the farmer, who held prey and meat between a lightning bolt and an elder that supports him, cushioning all earthly sufferings, even more coming out from the silence and the most hidden isolation of those who dare to release from the vaporous darkness of Chauvet, Wonthelimar, already forging paths and ups and downs from where no one comes or goes.

She laughed.
It was a mirthless sound, full of echoes
and taught with strain

A sharp flash of insight
to some pulsing, deep-rooted ache;
A crackling outburst of electricity

With heat and light searing through,
The passageway opportunely provided
By the void in the afflicted sound

All which dimmed swiftly
As the noise abruptly faltered,
Caught, died.

With it died his illumination
Of some burning passion she kept,
Deeply hidden, closely guarded.

The sound and percipience had ended.
She could not revoke the gesture.
A silent ambivalence grew quickly.

Litigation of repressed distraught,
Ambiguous embellishments of euphoria,
Cast asunder infatuation in hopes her eyes capture,
Perchance hell revoke my admission and allow an old soul
A craved desire coveted keenly upon the heaving *****.
Lest I cling tight with passion adieu,
And ****** not skin but a heeded heart,
summation of abysmal damnation.
Capture my love hold dearly my heart in your claimed hand...

<soft spoken intro>

...see your still here again,
    .....think your still welcome here?
                 ...here,
huh

Closed our mills, took our jobs, put in down our throats,
Fed us lies, took the pensions, thought we were a joke,
Media all bia's -steal my sentence, voted 'ere to revoke,
Cratering down! Cratering down the steepest *****!

We're taking you, out back and to the side,
Gonna be a genocide...

We're taking you, out back and to the side,
Gonna be a genocide...

White people,
     are raging, against,
           The Machine..

So Welcome, welcome...welcome...
      To The Machine...
            Floyd

I once woke up covered in blood on my parent's steps,
My truck was miles away on the side of the road.

We're taking you, out back and to the side,
Gonna be a genocide...

I'll keep drinking my coffee, but i'm afraid of the crash
the life i've lived lying in front of me in tiny remnants
staring at the basket, i wish to smell that sweet orange
i wish i felt something when my young sister dances
"just open your eyes" she said "you will see the pathway"
darling, you know i would, but i'm afraid to peek

"But i remember you running in the dark, never reluctant to peek
you knew that i had you, i'd never let you crash
i crushed all of the sticks under my feet, creating a pathway
all you had left were the shameful remnants
at the end of the night you said that the leaves did their dances
don't you remember when i picked you that orange?"

she thinks i can smell that sweet scent of an orange
i'm certain i could, if i were back at my peak
those were the times i could join in on her dances
the days when beauty could revoke the crash
before my soul felt scattered to remnants
an illuminating light created my pathway

"sister, my darling, your pathway is gold
the grass that surrounds it turns orange from light
soon all the green will be remnants of dark
the sun will shine bright from the peak
the crash you are feeling only hurts for a while
it all blows away when the leaves do their dances"

my sister she dances at the thought of this all
leaving her pathway of charm and beauty
i've never seen such perfection crash or come close
her twirling body, her orange locks
falling gently at the peak of her shoulders

my sister she left me her remnants of toast
i watch her continue her dances of joy
she noticed me peak as i sipped on my tea
her pathway, large enough for us both to enjoy
i peeled the last orange, breathed in its citrus scent
the empty tea mug made a crash in the sink

Giving kisses won't take back the excuses you gave
an embrace can't erase what you did
"good deeds" don't make up for the terrible ones
being here now doesn't change that you hid
words won't rebuild the bridges you burned
silence won't forget the words that were spoken
time won't heal the wounds you inflicted
good intentions can't remake what was broken
lending a hand won't wipe old tears away
telling the truth won't atone for your lies
being friendly doesn't revoke you as a traitor
there is no gift that could un-sever our ties
there is no response in which I answer your call
no plead that would sway my last choice
nothing is persuading my mind otherwise
I can't stand the sound of you voice
it doesn't matter what you believe
i don't care if you thinks it's a crime
nothing you do will break down these walls
sorry for wasting your time

When breathing will only bring pain,

The kind of pain that is emotional,

You have no choice that seems rational

But to exert all force to feign

Some sort of spirit that seems real

To everyone around you.

Only the slightest few

Will understand how you really feel.

That small percentage of folk

Might even only include one

Who will straighten your backbone

And your right to whine revoke.

Forever you’ll have someone to defend,

As she has become your best friend.

it was
                                                                ­                                                              Des­demona




                                                 deceiver of new Edens
                                                           ­ 
                                           left black fields        flooded
           by the sewage coming from the open wells cut into her skin.
I've been here before. A place where saints can be violent, and still   pleading
                                              for father, please, let me go?

he releases.

Desdemona follows,
dragging her corpse
through the minds
that unhinge
for the cold mechanics
of violence;

how the Savage
                            tick
                            and sputter
their jagged gears.        how the human bits,
human bang bang
counts to an unknown number,
waiting
for Desdemona to click her tongue

to spit out
to splatter
wingless
hysterical angels
across the walls of liberty

who with flaming swords
in their hands, slay
to the bellows
of a martyr's sweet rendition,
muttering
words of annihilation,
scavenging for faithful men

that
from the droning
of hissing solicitors
become fettered
to the yin
of fractured knowing
underneath skies
of starry nobility

                                                       ­                                                                 ­ Desdemona



sees this country
through a thimble

knows the name
of every state,
every citizen  that assumes
today, they will be protected
by glory
and that tomorrows
list will not get longer
with each new birth
stamped
American,
maybe It's American.?

this fleshy
and gentle
citizen soldier

quickly taught
to remember
their place
In this

grand Nation,

already paying
the tithing
of mind
and
body
cleaned
in a kitchen sink
       baptised

in the plasma of terror
with the wet
hands
of good hearted parents
commercially radicalized
by tv frenetic
freedom mobs,

fleshy

gentle

soldiers

remember to take
until swollen, because


there lives a longing,
and there lives
other monsters
caste in lighter
shades of violence.



                                             America. You eat your own children.
                                                America­, that dines more divine
                                                     when there is a different
                                                                ­    heathen
                                                     ­      at the dinner table,
                                          
                                                             Land of the brave,
                                                              yo­u worship fear.


                                                         ­                                               American Desdemona
does not know
of her own death song,
she leaves the grieving
alone to paint a tableau
of future Gods
to spring from barrels
sprouting
beheaded bouquets of metal
seen in the slow motion chaos
crawling in the gallery
of methadone media.

the harbinger of all things
seemingly unimportant,

who's orders
are definite



urging stillness.    



to sit with them in the   quiet   room
where lamenting will not be heard

told hush in the morning,

why the **** are you screaming.?
this is the ******   quiet     room

this is existence, this is what surrounds us.
                 "What did you see?"

said
the ones warned to behave
in the silence of tragedy,
But are still sent to the
purgatory
of tin rooftops
in the midwest
or a brick cloud by the shore

bouldering their fists
to beat bright punctures
into the sky
before the eleventh hour
pushes them down eternal twilight.

here again
are the bells that toll
with the kind sound of ammunition

with the voices of
all those disagreeable people
moaning
their grim
disenchantment
for yesterday's sorrows


who stay up late, dizzy
and red faced, shouting
about the guns
of politics,
shouting
about the guns
of politics,
vomiting guns guns guns
and political despair
throwing their voices
out of windows
broken
by
expletives
twisted in the
left over red lights
that bathe rallies
in mayhem
to be taken back
to small boxes
where
young
and numb lips
smoke turpentine
   after *******
to political ****

No longer shocked by politicians
who remind the masses about
9/11 jumpers
falling
to the concrete
in ten
second
intervals

they want you to
remember terror in the 10,000

Terror.

get down on your knees
and bow to obsession--


accept this
as indulgence

for what it is,

you live to be whole
but revoke
the thoughts
you inact in a soft blanket
of cerebral vices.

This is what purity
seeks in the wilds,    

bloodwood virginity
wet with the constitutional lust
of victimless moaning
victimless crimes

oh

holy holy
I arch my back for you
I bend for you
I writhe painlessly
with every moment that passes
your gun can lay at the alter of my temple,  surly
it will be an anointed dimming

a secret that is kept in the chest
of dual gatekeepers
who yearn for unison
and longs to tell the other,
     do not be afraid

Or,    Don't you dare
stand in front of
a podium, condemning
slaughter like a daily prayer
at the dinner table,      prayer

that sounds like faith
and God splitting in half, prayer
which has always been
a plea to change life
into what we think it should be

like the once happy

Elitists,
now soft belly sickened
by the obscured notion
of protecting
the people they
claim as their own, if only?

apostates
of folklore,
weren't so full
with grievances,
with their
own wars

brooding and
burdened by lax limitation,
seething angry
at
the great agenda

utterly raging

against the talking mouths
too loud with
freedoms thoughts,    swelling
with maddening repetition
and promptly ridiculed
into the execution
of sentimental insanity,

crazed

enough
to arm themselves with something
that does not feed the machine
in the pursuits of destroying it.




                                                         ­                                                                 ­  this is
                                                                ­                                                       Desdemona

that seeps into the burrow
of a throat

is the auditory creeping
that dredges a chemical longing

until everyone is gasping
at the horrid image of death,
or in the middle of a vitriolic
death cry

only accepting finality
if the afterlife
proved to be as infinite
as a blue sky slitting itself open
to let in the burnt offerings of the sun.

And no one will ask,

what have you taken to the inferno.?

flesh and blood,
That which is not yours.


bodies for the dead, you say.
well, how many?

not everyone
has a key
to the quiet room

away from the decidedly
unlucky,

we
Will be the ones
behind the locked door
pretending
she is not
on the other side,
unhindered by her cracked skull,
she is listlessly
heaving
dissected torso
through
junkyard corridors
collecting the dead
for tomorrow's congregation

who have become
sinfully reincarnated
by the flesh
of their own belief,
or fed into zombie culture
to sing and sway
in the pews, reciting

My people
I love you.

my God!
do I love you.
do I love you.

My God,
my Desdemona, I love you.

All it takes is you believing
we could make this work,
    but leaving
         just to lurk
    prompting grieving
         just to perk
                me up ascending on some chariot you broke
                            defending all the arson in the mirrors with the smoke
I cough, and choke
til I awoke
       the words still stuck inside my throat
       you swore you wrote this swollen note
Tell me then, pleading, revoke
to which you reply, I misspoke.

All it takes is you believing
faintly, even so
I'll pound pavement retrieving
anything we need to go.

All it takes is you believing
and I'll vicious fight our cause
til I'm buried or I'm ashes
consuming body by my mind
which precedence for you defined
to hush protests below mustaches
bristled veil the daily grind
and anyone leaves us behind
sees our reflections brightly shined
and they all crashes
and they all crashes

all it takes is you believing.

I've seen more beer cans on the ground of the backstreets of my town than kids playing outside
I hear the background music of apps like temple run more often than I hear book pages being flipped on a train
While hearing the explanation to why my friend is in a fight with her boyfriend key words like "opened my snapchat" "read my text" "ignored my dm" are brought up more than you can ever imagine
I stand up for millennials, I am a millennial but in light of the good we cannot ignore the bad
we have made technological advances that once were unfathomable
We have made scientific discoveries that were once unimaginable
We are the future
But we can not ignore how we might lead to our own downfall
We are the future
But do we want our kids to live in an even more intense version of this technological blur
This addiction, this technological addiction will lead to our own demise
The youth will never see another playground again because they can visit one in their screen for points
Children today are addicted to phones before they can even project their own sentences
Adults use it as an escape to quiet their kids for a little, "to distract them" "keep them occupied"
A few years later they ask them why they never leave their room, why they are glued to their laptop
You cannot punish the robot you created
You cannot revoke the escape key you once gave them
There is a problem in today's generation
And we need it to change
One day iWish to walk the streets of my town and see more children than empty bud lights

i am the forgotten son.
cast down from the kingdom,
kicked out of the family name,
removed from patriarchal figures

all my fathers now revoke
the names they'd given me.

i am the forgotten son.
my loud words resonate in
none of the senses of my fathers.

i am truly the son, forsaken.
thank god.

The depths
of nothing
rise and fall
creating tones
unknowable
to the human ear
invisible
to the eye
Creating a labyrinth
to confuse her
to evoke feelings in her
to make her revoke those feelings
and crush them into nothing
to be plunged into the depths
And become the depths themselves.