Is there anything more lonely than the sound of boy playing a banjo on a spring afternoon? Oh yes, yes, it’s the sound of girl playing a banjo on a spring afternoon. A boy would lean back on the porch chair and let the instrument fall and rest on his chest to feel the raindrop-plucked vibrations, one by one. This girl, she sits on a kitchen chair, but not in the kitchen, and folds herself over her Daddy’s 5-string. The banjo rests on her blue-cottoned thigh, the lower metal edge firm against her stomach, her slight ******* pressed against the upper wooden rim. If you were standing in the doorway of the workshop you’d see her blond hair falling, falling over her face. There would be that dead-centre parting and just visible the edge of her wire-rimmed glasses.  Then, the denim jacket worn over the kind of summer-blue flowered frock pulled from her Mummy’s clothes that with her passing have now migrated into her bedroom. The thought of clothes is what there is close to hand at the break of day.

When Kath woke this morning, when the morning woke Kath, the valley air was already as sweet, as fresh as any April morning could possibly be in this green hollow of her home. She had lain there feeling the air caress her forehead. The window, always open beside her tangled bed, let in the ringing song of the waterthrush. Newly returned this handsome brown migrant warbler, his whitish breast streaked with brown, more thrush than warbler, she’d watched in the stream yesterday wading on his long, pink legs bobbing his tail like a spotted sandpiper. Soon there would be a nest somewhere in the beech and hemlock hollow along by the stream in the interstices of some fallen tree.

Ellen was due home this morning. She’d hear the Toyota from way up the track, driven overnight from Philadelphia she’d have stopped and stopped. Tired and so tired, she’d go from truck stop to truck stop, the radio her only company and the thought of Joel between her legs arching into her to keep her warm. But she’d drive with the windows down swallowing the night air as the ***** brown car swallowed the miles. Kath would have the coffee waiting, potato cakes on the stove, she’d have a fresh towel placed on her bed, underwear warm from the dryer, spring flowers bunched in mug on the window sill.

Ellen would never come right in when she arrived home, but sit down with the dogs on the porch step and gather herself, watch the mist rise down in the valley, drink in the bird-ringing silence. Kath would steal open the door and crouch beside her with Mummy’s coffee cup thrown, glazed and fired at Plummer’s Fold. Head resting against the porch supports Ellen would allow the cup to be placed between her hands, her fingers uncurled then curled by Kath around its rough circumference. There would be a kiss on the back of the neck and she’d be gone back upstairs to sit with her notebook, those new lyrics she’d been fashioning, her Plummer’s Fold diary – yesterday had been a rich day as she’d walked the bounds of Brush Mountain on the Big Tree Trail singing and plucking an invisible banjo all the while. Those songs of her great-great uncle she’d discovered in a pile of Library of Congress recordings just echoed through her, had become part of her. They were as much a part of the hinterland of Brush Mountain as the stones on the trail. Garth Watson’s voice, well she knew every turn and breath. She’d been listening to them since she was thirteen. She saw herself at the old Victrola blowing off the dust, placing the forgotten disk on the central spindle, scratching the needle with her finger to test the machine, gauge its volume. Then, that voice surrounding her, entering her, as lonesome as the scrawny girl just out of junior high that she had been, the dumb silent girl from the backwoods with that cute clever sister who played guitar and was everybody’s friend, who the boys rushed to fill the empty seat next to her on the school bus.

They’d recorded this song on their Lonesome Pine album. Kath had it all arranged, had it all imagined, brought it to that session at One-Two Records. She had been so scared Ellen would smile gently and say ‘Kath, not this ol’ thing surely. Why I remember Daddy singing this song into the night over and over.’ But no. When Kath had sung it through, looking into the bowl of her denim skirt, she’d raise her eyes to see tears running down Ellen's face. Everything between them changed at that moment. The location studio in The Farm House disappeared and they were girls on their home porch. In an hour they had it down and Larry had said. ‘My God, Holy Jesus, where did that come from’. So they went straight home and listened to those old records all night and most of the next day. They rewrote the album they’d spent a year planning (and saving for).

So now when they came together on those country fair stages, in the cafes in Baltimore or Philly it was that haunting Appalachian music that ran through their songs. Kath still shy as a blushing bean, hiding in the hair and glasses, reluctantly singing harmony vocals, Ellen– well, that girl had only to look wistfully into the audience and they were hers.  

And so they were living this life holed up in their family place, keeping faith with Plummer’s Fold. Daddy was in a home in Lewis now. He’d taken himself there before his dementia had taken him. He played his girls’ CDs all day long on his Walkman, had their pictures in his near to empty room – just a rocker, a table, a pile of books by his bed with Dora’s wedding quilt.

This music, this oh so heart-breaking music, the loping banjo, the tinkling, springing, glancing accidental guitar and their innocent valley voices. They’d exhausted the old records now and, their education in the old ways done, were back with new songs and Kath’s ideas to only record in the Fold and build songs with soundtracks of the world around them. She’d been laying down tracks day after day whilst Ellen was on the road with the Williams Band and often solo, support for the Minna Peel as ‘an outsider folk artist from deepest Appalachia.’

Kath wouldn’t travel more than a day away from the farm. Every show was an agony, except for the time they were performing. She couldn’t bear all that stuff that surrounded it – all that waiting, the sound check, more waiting, that networking **** One-Two constantly wanted her to be part of. She’d ***** off as the guys gathered around Ellen. She’d take a book and sit in the Toyota. She couldn’t do people, though she loved her folks, she loved her sister like she loved the trees and stones, the birds and flowers on Brush Mountain. Always shy, always afraid of herself ‘Too sensitive for your own good, Kathy girl’, her Daddy had said. Never been kissed in passion, never allowed herself to fall for love, though her body drove her to feelings she had read about, and thus fuelled had succumbed to. There was a boy she’d see in Lewis just from time to time who she thought about, and thought about. She imagined him kissing her and holding her gently in the night . . .

our conversations are all in blue.
i try not to mind it,
like i try not to mind the hair falling out of my scalp.

you're just busy being unattached to me.

i make excuses for you as easy as i double text.
they flood my head like mantras,
but not the kind that make you feel calm or loved.
it's more like telling yourself you won't throw up after the twisty roads up the mountain.

but i want to see the view with you.

so i keep sending you blue paragraphs filled with 'sorry's and 'i love you's.
you send the same grey 'i love you, too's.
and we call it communication.

i'm the driver and the passenger
the carsick kid trying not to throw up and the toddler asking over and over if we're there yet.
but i want to see the view with you.
would it hurt to send a grey paragraph? or ask me,
in your best whine,
if we are at the top yet?
throw up in my lap. drive me crazy.

ask me for the aux cord and i'll give it to you.

i'm done listening to this album on repeat.
i want to hold your hand without worrying if your fingers are numb and you just don't want to hurt my feelings.
this car needs more you.
and i don't mean the you dressed in grey half messages that you probably rewrote three times.

i need the you that talked about faking our deaths together
like it was the only part of life worth living.
wearing that laugh you always say is too loud,
but really it sounds like music.
i like my music loud and angry.
and ****** at your parents for being expired versions of themselves, always expecting you to be organic.
i need that you like i need a vice.

because that's who i want to see the view with.

The envelope was red, white and blue just like the flag
Betsy Ross spent days with bleeding fingers over so many
years ago. It was addressed to me from an unknown sender.
I was giggly, jumpy. Who would write to me? I wasn’t important.
Just a seventh grade nobody stuck in a sparkly purple wheelchair.

Mom said I could join. She secretly wanted her outcast
of a daughter to have a sense of normalcy during her
last fading moments of childhood. I just wanted to have
fun. I wasn’t ready to accept that I was different. I knew
that I was. The stares told me so but I didn’t want to be.

The letter said that I could represent my fine country
as America’s National Teenager. Me? All I had to do was show
my ability by competing in a scholarship pageant. You know,
a beauty pageant except it wasn’t being called so because adults
are trying to be sensitive to teenager’s feelings because we’re
more likely to be sensitive, emotional and prone to disruptive
and potentially harmful outbursts. The perks of being a wallflower.

Teenagers, we know this. We’re also not stupid. I and every
other girl who would participate knew this pageant
was nothing more than a beauty pageant; a popularity
contest. That didn’t keep us from dreaming of becoming
rich and famous, stop the crying fits, hormones from raging
or acting like drama wasn’t our life’s goal and college major.

Four days in Southern Idaho and an eight-hour drive
to and from gave me plenty of time to practice my talent,
an essay. Even then, I knew I had no real physical attributes.
Instead, I shoved my fears aside and wrote, rewrote and polished
my essay on America until my parents, teachers, and friends
repeatedly had to tell me “that’s enough already. You’ll do great.”

I made friends, told stories, laughed until snot came out my nose
and answered the ever cautious “What happened to make you look
that way?” I had the time of my life. I knew I wasn’t going to win
because let’s face it, I’m not pretty enough. And just as predicted,
I left with “Most Inspirational” and cried ugly tears when I
didn’t come home as America’s National Teenager. Looking back,
I was a real American teenager. I don't need a pageant to tell me so.

I met her in the parking lot of a liquor store one Friday night with my naked body hidden beneath a dressing gown.
I’d put it on whilst I finished the gin from my 20th birthday within my boyfriends closet as he drank his **** down in beer and asked why I was in the closet.

Impotent, it was a quick exit as I thanked the drink for making me able to ride my bike back minus the safety of a sanitary towel, without my **** left to think of his grunts and groans and his hands which branded my thighs as he fed me lies that it was just in the moment; his finger prints left signatures citing his latest triumph of lasting one hundred point thirteen seconds.

The magnetism between the Alchemist and me was instant.
She held out her palm and asked for mine as the lines in my hands rewrote themselves in twisted, hopeful anticipation; reaching out, what I felt from the tips of my fingers was magic as I traced her navel to the logo of DKNY on the front of her black, cotton *******.

I taught her how to blow out smoke rings like the clowns at a circus who sit within purple tents and repeat sums of the class of 1969, the date they got their ***** kicked in, indigo, violet, for being performers.
I taught tobacco. She taught me ***.
There was ****** deviation towards devilry as I delved into the darkness between her legs as her ****** enchantment captured my hand and leaned me back;
Black blindfold, sight slaughtered.
Burning desire rolled over my bare ******* and left a trail of rouge; yet her warmth was not tender nor loving, but raw, earthly.
A sensual split as she clawed my back and licked the drips of blood that seeped into the bed, which was our place.

I felt myself become an astrologer as I left my body and rose in starry bliss; I became an adventurer as I breathed out ships, which sailed us to Stonewall as I stuck ******* up, not her sadly, but the blue meanies, the pigs which ate out of the trough of **** Tim Loughton fed us from our backyard.

I said we are making love. She said we are making a revolution.
Our energies combined, our spirits sang as it is in all and all is in us.
Time was alive as my fingers curled, my teeth bit into my open lips,
My back arched and my arms reached out in holy restoration.
Her incantation was irresistible.

Cosmic forces worked effortlessly as we evaded time and entered a transcendent state. Magical longing; primal consciousness;
Fate brought us together, past the ******* stage of our ****** evolution
As what we felt replaced what Freud saw.
A ****** of witchcraft.
An ****** of obsession.
The day I stepped out of the closet and away from my boyfriend I drank the elixir of life from your lips and knew our love would never die.

Poems about Leaves and Leave Taking (i.e., leaving friends and family, loss, death, parting, separation, divorce, etc.)


Leave Taking
by Michael R. Burch

Brilliant leaves abandon
battered limbs
to waltz upon ecstatic winds
until they die.

But the barren and embittered trees
lament the frolic of the leaves
and curse the bleak
November sky.

Now, as I watch the leaves'
high flight
before the fading autumn light,
I think that, perhaps, at last I may

have learned what it means to say
"goodbye."

Published by The Lyric, Mindful of Poetry, There is Something in the Autumn (anthology). Keywords/Tags: autumn, leaves, fall, falling, wind, barren, trees, goodbye, leaving, farewell, separation, age, aging, mortality, death, mrbepi, mrbleave

This poem started out as a stanza in a much longer poem, "Jessamyn's Song," which dates to around age 14 or 15, or perhaps a bit later. But I worked on the poem several times over the years until it was largely finished in 1978. I am sure of the completion date because that year the poem was included in my first large poetry submission manuscript for a chapbook contest.



Autumn Conundrum
by Michael R. Burch

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

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea, this poem has since been translated into Russian, Macedonian, Turkish, Arabic and Romanian.



Something

for the children of the Holocaust and the Nakba

Something inescapable is lost—
lost like a pale vapor curling up into shafts of moonlight,
vanishing in a gust of wind toward an expanse of stars
immeasurable and void.

Something uncapturable is gone—
gone with the spent leaves and illuminations of autumn,
scattered into a haze with the faint rustle of parched grass
and remembrance.

Something unforgettable is past—
blown from a glimmer into nothingness, or less,
which finality swept into a corner... where it lies
in dust and cobwebs and silence.

Published by There is Something in the Autumn, The Eclectic Muse, Setu, FreeXpression, Life and Legends, Poetry Super Highway, Poet's Corner, Promosaik, Better Than Starbucks and The Chained Muse. Also translated into Romanian by Petru Dimofte, into Turkish by Nurgül Yayman, turned into a YouTube video by Lillian Y. Wong, and used by the Windsor Jewish Community Centre during a candle-lighting ceremony



Leaf Fall
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever winds encountered soon resolved
to swirling fragments, till chaotic heaps
of leaves lay pulsing by the backyard wall.
In lieu of rakes, our fingers sorted each
dry leaf into its place and built a high,
soft bastion against earth's gravitron―
a patchwork quilt, a trampoline, a bright
impediment to fling ourselves upon.

And nothing in our laughter as we fell
into those leaves was like the autumn's cry
of also falling. Nothing meant to die
could be so bright as we, so colorful―
clad in our plaids, oblivious to pain
we'd feel today, should we leaf-fall again.

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



Herbsttag ("Autumn Day")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go.
Lay your long shadows over the sundials
and over the meadows, let the free winds blow.
Command the late fruits to fatten and shine;
O, grant them another Mediterranean hour!
Urge them to completion, and with power
convey final sweetness to the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, never will build one.
Who's alone now, shall continue alone;
he'll wake, read, write long letters to friends,
and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down,
restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend.

Originally published by Measure



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

It is the nature of loveliness to vanish
as butterfly wings, batting against nothingness
seek transcendence...

Originally published by Hibiscus (India)



Less Heroic Couplets: ****** Most Fowl!
by Michael R. Burch

"****** most foul! "
cried the mouse to the owl.

"Friend, I'm no sinner;
you're merely my dinner! "
the wise owl replied
as the tasty snack died.

Published by Lighten Upand in Potcake Chapbook #7



escape!

for anaïs vionet

to live among the daffodil folk...
slip down the rainslickened drainpipe...
suddenly pop out
the GARGANTUAN SPOUT...
minuscule as alice, shout
yippee-yi-yee!
in wee exultant glee
to be leaving behind the
LARGE
THREE-DENALI GARAGE.

Published by Andwerve and Bewildering Stories



Love Has a Southern Flavor

Love has a Southern flavor: honeydew,
ripe cantaloupe, the honeysuckle's spout
we tilt to basking faces to breathe out
the ordinary, and inhale perfume...

Love's Dixieland-rambunctious: tangled vines,
wild clematis, the gold-brocaded leaves
that will not keep their order in the trees,
unmentionables that peek from dancing lines...

Love cannot be contained, like Southern nights:
the constellations' dying mysteries,
the fireflies that hum to light, each tree's
resplendent autumn cape, a genteel sight...

Love also is as wild, as sprawling-sweet,
as decadent as the wet leaves at our feet.

Published by The Lyric, Contemporary Sonnet, The Eclectic Muse, Better Than Starbucks, The Chained Muse, Setu (India) , Victorian Violet Press and Trinacria



Daredevil
by Michael R. Burch

There are days that I believe
(and nights that I deny)
love is not mutilation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There are tightropes leaps bereave—
taut wires strumming high
brief songs, infatuations.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were cannon shots’ soirees,
hearts barricaded, wise . . .
and then . . . annihilation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were nights our hearts conceived
dawns’ indiscriminate sighs.
To dream was our consolation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were acrobatic leaves
that tumbled down to lie
at our feet, bright trepidations.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

There were hearts carved into trees—
tall stakes where you and I
left childhood’s salt libations . . .

Daredevil, dry your eyes.

Where once you scraped your knees;
love later bruised your thighs.
Death numbs all, our sedation.

Daredevil, dry your eyes.



The People Loved What They Had Loved Before
by Michael R. Burch

We did not worship at the shrine of tears;
we knew not to believe, not to confess.
And so, ahemming victors, to false cheers,
we wrote off love, we gave a stern address
to things that we disapproved of, things of yore.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

We did not build stone monuments to stand
six hundred years and grow more strong and arch
like bridges from the people to the Land
beyond their reach. Instead, we played a march,
pale Neros, sparking flames from door to door.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

We could not pipe of cheer, or even woe.
We played a minor air of Ire (in E).
The sheep chose to ignore us, even though,
long destitute, we plied our songs for free.
We wrote, rewrote and warbled one same score.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

At last outlandish wailing, we confess,
ensued, because no listeners were left.
We built a shrine to tears: our goddess less
divine than man, and, like us, long bereft.
We stooped to love too late, too Learned to *****.
And the people loved what they had loved before.



Talent
by Michael R. Burch

for Kevin Nicholas Roberts

I liked the first passage
of her poem―where it led
(though not nearly enough
to retract what I said.)
Now the book propped up here
flutters, scarcely half read.
It will keep.
Before sleep,
let me read yours instead.

There's something like love
in the rhythms of night
―in the throb of streets
where the late workers drone,
in the sounds that attend
each day’s sad, squalid end―
that reminds us: till death
we are never alone.

So we write from the hearts
that will fail us anon,
words in red
truly bled
though they cannot reveal
whence they came,
who they're for.
And the tap at the door
goes unanswered. We write,
for there is nothing more
than a verse,
than a song,
than this chant of the blessed:
"If these words
be my sins,
let me die unconfessed!
Unconfessed, unrepentant;
I rescind all my vows!"
Write till sleep:
it’s the leap
only Talent allows.



Davenport Tomorrow
by Michael R. Burch

Davenport tomorrow ...
all the trees stand stark-naked in the sun.

Now it is always summer
and the bees buzz in cesspools,
adapted to a new life.

There are no flowers,
but the weeds, being hardier,
have survived.

The small town has become
a city of millions;
there is no longer a sea,
only a huge sewer,
but the children don't mind.

They still study
rocks and stars,
but biology is a forgotten science ...
after all, what is life?

Davenport tomorrow ...
all the children murmur through vein-streaked gills
whispered wonders of long-ago.



Desdemona
by Michael R. Burch

Though you possessed the moon and stars,
you are bound to fate and wed to chance.
Your lips deny they crave a kiss;
your feet deny they ache to dance.
Your heart imagines wild romance.

Though you cupped fire in your hands
and molded incandescent forms,
you are barren now, and―spent of flame―
the ashes that remain are borne
toward the sun upon a storm.

You, who demanded more, have less,
your heart within its cells of sighs
held fast by chains of misery,
confined till death for peddling lies―
imprisonment your sense denies.

You, who collected hearts like leaves
and pressed each once within your book,
forgot. None―winsome, bright or rare―
not one was worth a second look.
My heart, as others, you forsook.

But I, though I loved you from afar
through silent dawns, and gathered rue
from gardens where your footsteps left
cold paths among the asters, knew―
each moonless night the nettles grew

and strangled hope, where love dies too.

Published by Penny Dreadful, Carnelian, Romantics Quarterly, Grassroots Poetry and Poetry Life & Times



Ordinary Love
by Michael R. Burch

Indescribable—our love—and still we say
with eyes averted, turning out the light,
"I love you," in the ordinary way

and tug the coverlet where once we lay,
all suntanned limbs entangled, shivering, white ...
indescribably in love. Or so we say.

Your hair's blonde thicket now is tangle-gray;
you turn your back; you murmur to the night,
"I love you," in the ordinary way.

Beneath the sheets our hands and feet would stray
to warm ourselves. We do not touch despite
a love so indescribable. We say

we're older now, that "love" has had its day.
But that which Love once countenanced, delight,
still makes you indescribable. I say,
"I love you," in the ordinary way.

Winner of the 2001 Algernon Charles Swinburne poetry contest; published by The Lyric, Romantics Quarterly, Mandrake Poetry Review, Carnelian, Poem Kingdom, Net Poetry and Art Competition, Famous Poets and Poems, FreeXpression, PW Review, Poetic Voices, Poetry Renewal and Poetry Life & Times



Are You the Thief
by Michael R. Burch

When I touch you now,
O sweet lover,
full of fire,
melting like ice
in my embrace,

when I part the delicate white lace,
baring pale flesh,
and your face
is so close
that I breathe your breath
and your hair surrounds me like a wreath...

tell me now,
O sweet, sweet lover,
in good faith:
are you the thief
who has stolen my heart?

Originally published as “Baring Pale Flesh” by Poetic License/Monumental Moments



At Tintagel
by Michael R. Burch

That night,
at Tintagel,
there was darkness such as man had never seen...
darkness and treachery,
and the unholy thundering of the sea...

In his arms,
who is to say how much she knew?
And if he whispered her name...
"Ygraine"
could she tell above the howling wind and rain?

Could she tell, or did she care,
by the length of his hair
or the heat of his flesh,...
that her faceless companion
was Uther, the dragon,

and Gorlois lay dead?

Originally published by Songs of Innocence, then subsequently by Celtic Twilight, Fables, Fickle Muses and Poetry Life & Times



Isolde's Song
by Michael R. Burch

Through our long years of dreaming to be one
we grew toward an enigmatic light
that gently warmed our tendrils. Was it sun?
We had no eyes to tell; we loved despite
the lack of all sensation—all but one:
we felt the night's deep chill, the air so bright
at dawn we quivered limply, overcome.

To touch was all we knew, and how to bask.
We knew to touch; we grew to touch; we felt
spring's urgency, midsummer's heat, fall's lash,
wild winter's ice and thaw and fervent melt.
We felt returning light and could not ask
its meaning, or if something was withheld
more glorious. To touch seemed life's great task.

At last the petal of me learned: unfold
and you were there, surrounding me. We touched.
The curious golden pollens! Ah, we touched,
and learned to cling and, finally, to hold.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



The Wild Hunt
by Michael R. Burch

Near Devon, the hunters appear in the sky
with Artur and Bedwyr sounding the call;
and the others, laughing, go dashing by.
They only appear when the moon is full:

Valerin, the King of the Tangled Wood,
and Valynt, the goodly King of Wales,
Gawain and Owain and the hearty men
who live on in many minstrels' tales.

They seek the white stag on a moonlit moor,
or Torc Triath, the fabled boar,
or Ysgithyrwyn, or Twrch Trwyth,
the other mighty boars of myth.

They appear, sometimes, on Halloween
to chase the moon across the green,
then fade into the shadowed hills
where memory alone prevails.

Originally published by Celtic Twilight, then by Celtic Lifestyles and Auldwicce



Morgause's Song
by Michael R. Burch

Before he was my brother,
he was my lover,
though certainly not the best.

I found no joy
in that addled boy,
nor he at my breast.

Why him? Why him?
The years grow dim.
Now it's harder and harder to say...

Perhaps girls and boys
are the god's toys
when the skies are gray.

Originally published by Celtic Twilight as "The First Time"



Pellinore's Fancy
by Michael R. Burch

What do you do when your wife is a nag
and has sworn you to hunt neither fish, fowl, nor stag?
When the land is at peace, but at home you have none,
Is that, perchance, when... the Questing Beasts run?



The Last Enchantment
by Michael R. Burch

Oh, Lancelot, my truest friend,
how time has thinned your ragged mane
and pinched your features; still you seem
though, much, much changed—somehow unchanged.

Your sword hand is, as ever, ready,
although the time for swords has passed.
Your eyes are fierce, and yet so steady
meeting mine... you must not ask.

The time is not, nor ever shall be.
Merlyn's words were only words;
and now his last enchantment wanes,
and we must put aside our swords...



Northern Flight: Lancelot's Last Love Letter to Guinevere
by Michael R. Burch

"Get thee to a nunnery..."

Now that the days have lengthened, I assume
the shadows also lengthen where you pause
to watch the sun and comprehend its laws,
or just to shiver in the deepening gloom.

But nothing in your antiquarian eyes
nor anything beyond your failing vision
repeals the night. Religion's circumcision
has left us worlds apart, but who's more wise?

I think I know you better now than then—
and love you all the more, because you are
... so distant. I can love you from afar,
forgiving your flight north, far from brute men,
because your fear's well-founded: God, forbid,
was bound to fail you here, as mortals did.

Originally published by Rotary Dial



Lance-Lot
by Michael R. Burch

Preposterous bird!
Inelegant! Absurd!

Until the great & mighty heron
brandishes his fearsome sword.



Truces
by Michael R. Burch

We must sometimes wonder if all the fighting related to King Arthur and his knights was really necessary. In particular, it seems that Lancelot fought and either captured or killed a fairly large percentage of the population of England. Could it be that Arthur preferred to fight than stay at home and do domestic chores? And, honestly now, if he and his knights were such incredible warriors, who would have been silly enough to do battle with them? Wygar was the name of Arthur's hauberk, or armored tunic, which was supposedly fashioned by one Witege or Widia, quite possibly the son of Wayland Smith. The legends suggest that Excalibur was forged upon the anvil of the smith-god Wayland, who was also known as Volund, which sounds suspiciously like Vulcan...

Artur took Cabal, his hound,
and Carwennan, his knife,
    and his sword forged by Wayland
    and Merlyn, his falcon,
and, saying goodbye to his sons and his wife,
he strode to the Table Rounde.

"Here is my spear, Rhongomyniad,
and here is Wygar that I wear,
    and ready for war,
    an oath I foreswore
to fight for all that is righteous and fair
from Wales to the towers of Gilead."

But none could be found to contest him,
for Lancelot had slewn them, forsooth,
so he hastened back home, for to rest him,
till his wife bade him, "Thatch up the roof! "

Originally published by Neovictorian/Cochlea, then by Celtic Twilight



Midsummer-Eve
by Michael R. Burch

What happened to the mysterious Tuatha De Danann, to the Ban Shee (from which we get the term "banshee") and, eventually, to the druids? One might assume that with the passing of Merlyn, Morgause and their ilk, the time of myths and magic ended. This poem is an epitaph of sorts.

In the ruins
of the dreams
and the schemes
of men;

when the moon
begets the tide
and the wide
sea sighs;

when a star
appears in heaven
and the raven
cries;

we will dance
and we will revel
in the devil's
fen...

if nevermore again.

Originally published by Penny Dreadful



The Pictish Faeries
by Michael R. Burch

Smaller and darker
than their closest kin,
the faeries learned only too well
never to dwell
close to the villages of larger men.

Only to dance in the starlight
when the moon was full
and men were afraid.
Only to worship in the farthest glade,
ever heeding the raven and the gull.



The Kiss of Ceridwen
by Michael R. Burch

The kiss of Ceridwen
I have felt upon my brow,
and the past and the future
have appeared, as though a vapor,
mingling with the here and now.

And Morrigan, the Raven,
the messenger, has come,
to tell me that the gods, unsung,
will not last long
when the druids' harps grow dumb.



Merlyn, on His Birth
by Michael R. Burch

Legend has it that Zephyr was an ancestor of Merlin. In this poem, I suggest that Merlin was an albino, which might have led to claims that he had no father, due to radical physical differences between father and son. This would have also added to his appearance as a mystical figure. The reference to Ursa Major, the bear, ties the birth of Merlin to the future birth of Arthur, whose Welsh name ("Artos" or "Artur") means "bear." Morydd is another possible ancestor of Merlin's. In Welsh names "dd" is pronounced "th."

I was born in Gwynedd,
or not born, as some men claim,
and the Zephyr of Caer Myrrdin
gave me my name.

My father was Madog Morfeyn
but our eyes were never the same,
nor our skin, nor our hair;
for his were dark, dark
—as our people's are—
and mine were fairer than fair.

The night of my birth, the Zephyr
carved of white stone a rune;
and the ringed stars of Ursa Major
outshone the cool pale moon;
and my grandfather, Morydd, the seer
saw wheeling, a-gyre in the sky,
a falcon with terrible yellow-gold eyes
when falcons never fly.



Merlyn's First Prophecy
by Michael R. Burch

Vortigern commanded a tower to be built upon Snowden,
but the earth would churn and within an hour its walls would cave in.

Then his druid said only the virginal blood of a fatherless son,
recently shed, would ever hold the foundation.

"There is, in Caer Myrrdin, a faery lad, a son with no father;
his name is Merlyn, and with his blood you would have your tower."

So Vortigern had them bring the boy, the child of the demon,
and, taciturn and without joy, looked out over Snowden.

"To **** a child brings little praise, but many tears."
Then the mountain slopes rang with the brays of Merlyn's jeers.

"Pure poppycock! You fumble and bumble and heed a fool.
At the base of the rock the foundations crumble into a pool! "

When they drained the pool, two dragons arose, one white and one red,
and since the old druid was blowing his nose, young Merlyn said:

"Vortigern is the white, Ambrosius the red; now, watch, indeed."
Then the former died as the latter fed and Vortigern peed.

Published by Celtic Twilight



It Is Not the Sword!
by Michael R. Burch

This poem illustrates the strong correlation between the names that appear in Welsh and Irish mythology. Much of this lore predates the Arthurian legends, and was assimilated as Arthur's fame (and hyperbole)grew. Caladbolg is the name of a mythical Irish sword, while Caladvwlch is its Welsh equivalent. Caliburn and Excalibur are later variants.

"It is not the sword,
but the man, "
said Merlyn.
But the people demanded a sign—
the sword of Macsen Wledig,
Caladbolg, the "lightning-shard."

"It is not the sword,
but the words men follow."
Still, he set it in the stone
—Caladvwlch, the sword of kings—
and many a man did strive, and swore,
and many a man did moan.

But none could budge it from the stone.

"It is not the sword
or the strength, "
said Merlyn,
"that makes a man a king,
but the truth and the conviction
that ring in his iron word."

"It is NOT the sword! "
cried Merlyn,
crowd-jostled, marveling
as Arthur drew forth Caliburn
with never a gasp,
with never a word,

and so became their king.



Uther's Last Battle
by Michael R. Burch

When Uther, the High King,
unable to walk, borne upon a litter
went to fight Colgrim, the Saxon King,
his legs were weak, and his visage bitter.
"Where is Merlyn, the sage?
For today I truly feel my age."

All day long the battle raged
and the dragon banner was sorely pressed,
but the courage of Uther never waned
till the sun hung low upon the west.
"Oh, where is Merlyn to speak my doom,
for truly I feel the chill of the tomb."

Then, with the battle almost lost
and the king besieged on every side,
a prince appeared, clad all in white,
and threw himself against the tide.
"Oh, where is Merlyn, who stole my son?
For, truly, now my life is done."

Then Merlyn came unto the king
as the Saxons fled before a sword
that flashed like lightning in the hand
of a prince that day become a lord.
"Oh, Merlyn, speak not, for I see
my son has truly come to me.

And today I need no prophecy
to see how bright his days will be."
So Uther, then, the valiant king
met his son, and kissed him twice—
the one, the first, the one, the last—
and smiled, and then his time was past.



Small Tales
by Michael R. Burch

According to legend, Arthur and Kay grew up together in Ector's court, Kay being a few years older than Arthur. Borrowing from Mary Stewart, I am assuming that Bedwyr (later Anglicized to Bedivere)might have befriended Arthur at an early age. By some accounts, Bedwyr was the original Lancelot. In any case, imagine the adventures these young heroes might have pursued (or dreamed up, to excuse tardiness or "lost" homework assignments). Manawydan and Llyr were ancient Welsh gods. Cath Pulag was a monstrous, clawing cat. ("Sorry teach! My theme paper on Homer was torn up by a cat bigger than a dragon! And meaner, too! ")Pen Palach is more or less a mystery, or perhaps just another old drinking buddy with a few good beery-bleary tales of his own. This poem assumes that many of the more outlandish Arthurian legends began more or less as "small tales, " little white lies which simply got larger and larger with each retelling. It also assumes that most of these tales came about just as the lads reached that age when boys fancy themselves men, and spend most of their free time drinking and puking...

When Artur and Cai and Bedwyr
were but scrawny lads
they had many a ***** adventure
in the still glades
of Gwynedd.
When the sun beat down like an oven
upon the kiln-hot hills
and the scorched shores of Carmarthen,
they went searching
and found Manawydan, the son of Llyr.
They fought a day and a night
with Cath Pulag (or a screeching kitten),
rousted Pen Palach, then drank a beer
and told quite a talltale or two,
till thems wasn't so shore which'un's tails wus true.

And these have been passed down to me, and to you.



The Song of Amergin
by Michael R. Burch

Amergin is, in the words of Morgan Llywelyn, "the oldest known western European poet." Robert Graves said: "English poetic education should, really, begin not with The Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin." Amergin was one of the Milesians, or sons of Mil: Gaels who invaded Ireland and defeated the mysterious Tuatha De Danann, thereby establishing a Celtic beachhead, not only on the shores of the Emerald Isle, but also in the annals of Time and Poetry.

He was our first bard
and we feel in his dim-remembered words
the moment when Time blurs...

and he and the Sons of Mil
heave oars as the breakers mill
till at last Ierne—green, brooding—nears,

while Some implore seas cold, fell, dark
to climb and swamp their flimsy bark
... and Time here also spumes, careers...

while the Ban Shee shriek in awed dismay
to see him still the sea, this day,
then seek the dolmen and the gloam.



Stonehenge
by Michael R. Burch

Here where the wind imbues life within stone,
I once stood
and watched as the tempest made monuments groan
as though blood
boiled within them.

Here where the Druids stood charting the stars
I can tell
they longed for the heavens... perhaps because
hell
boiled beneath them?



The Celtic Cross at Île Grosse
by Michael R. Burch

"I actually visited the island and walked across those mass graves of 30, 000 Irish men, women and children, and I played a little tune on me whistle. I found it very peaceful, and there was relief there." - Paddy Maloney of The Chieftans

There was relief there,
and release,
on Île Grosse
in the spreading gorse
and the cry of the wild geese...

There was relief there,
without remorse
when the tin whistle lifted its voice
in a tune of artless grief,
piping achingly high and longingly of an island veiled in myth.
And the Celtic cross that stands here tells us, not of their grief,
but of their faith and belief—
like the last soft breath of evening lifting a fallen leaf.

When ravenous famine set all her demons loose,
driving men to the seas like lemmings,
they sought here the clemency of a better life, or death,
and their belief in God gave them hope, a sense of peace.

These were proud men with only their lives to owe,
who sought the liberation of a strange new land.
Now they lie here, ragged row on ragged row,
with only the shadows of their loved ones close at hand.

And each cross, their ancient burden and their glory,
reflects the death of sunlight on their story.

And their tale is sad—but, O, their faith was grand!



At Cædmon's Grave
by Michael R. Burch

"Cædmon's Hymn, " composed at the Monastery of Whitby (a North Yorkshire fishing village), is one of the oldest known poems written in the English language, dating back to around 680 A.D. According to legend, Cædmon, an illiterate Anglo-Saxon cowherd, received the gift of poetic composition from an angel; he subsequently founded a school of Christian poets. Unfortunately, only nine lines of Cædmon's verse survive, in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Whitby, tiny as it is, reappears later in the history of English literature, having been visited, in diametric contrast, by Lewis Carroll and Bram Stoker's ghoulish yet evocative Dracula.

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 those dusk-enamored grounds
and thought I heard the steps resound

of Carroll, Stoker and of Bede
who walked there, 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.

Here, as darkness falls, at last we meet.
I lay this pale garland of words at his feet.

Originally published by The Lyric



faith(less), a coronavirus poem
by Michael R. Burch

Those who believed
and Those who misled
lie together at last
in the same narrow bed

and if god loved Them more
for Their strange lack of doubt,
he kept it well hidden
till he snuffed Them out.



Habeas Corpus
by Michael R. Burch

from “Songs of the Antinatalist”

I have the results of your DNA analysis.
If you want to have children, this may induce paralysis.
I wish I had good news, but how can I lie?
Any offspring you have are guaranteed to die.
It wouldn’t be fair—I’m sure you’ll agree—
to sentence kids to death, so I’ll waive my fee.



Villanelle: Hangovers
by Michael R. Burch

We forget that, before we were born,
our parents had “lives” of their own,
ran drunk in the streets, or half-******.

Yes, our parents had lives of their own
until we were born; then, undone,
they were buying their parents gravestones

and finding gray hairs of their own
(because we were born lacking some
of their curious habits, but soon

would certainly get them). Half-******,
we watched them dig graves of their own.
Their lives would be over too soon

for their curious habits to bloom
in us (though our children were born
nine months from that night on the town

when, punch-drunk in the streets or half-******,
we first proved we had lives of our own).



Happily Never After (the Second Curse of the ***** Toad)
by Michael R. Burch

He did not think of love of Her at all
frog-plangent nights, as moons engoldened roads
through crumbling stonewalled provinces, where toads
(nee princes) ruled in chinks and grew so small
at last to be invisible. He smiled
(the fables erred so curiously), and thought
bemusedly of being reconciled
to human flesh, because his heart was not
incapable of love, but, being cursed
a second time, could only love a toad’s . . .
and listened as inflated frogs rehearsed
cheekbulging tales of anguish from green moats . . .
and thought of her soft croak, her skin fine-warted,
his anemic flesh, and how true love was thwarted.



Haunted
by Michael R. Burch

Now I am here
and thoughts of my past mistakes are my brethren.
I am withering
and the sweetness of your memory is like a tear.

Go, if you will,
for the ache in my heart is its hollowness
and the flaw in my soul is its shallowness;
there is nothing to fill.

Take what you can;
I have nothing left.
And when you are gone, I will be bereft,
the husk of a man.

Or stay here awhile.
My heart cannot bear the night, or these dreams.
Your face is a ghost, though paler, it seems
when you smile.

Published by Romantics Quarterly



Have I been too long at the fair?
by Michael R. Burch

Have I been too long at the fair?
The summer has faded,
the leaves have turned brown;
the Ferris wheel teeters ...
not up, yet not down.
Have I been too long at the fair?

This is one of my earliest poems, written around age 14-15 when we were living with my grandfather in his house on Chilton Street, within walking distance of the Nashville fairgrounds. I remember walking to the fairgrounds, stopping at a Dairy Queen along the way, and swimming at a public pool. But I believe the Ferris wheel only operated during the state fair. So my “educated guess” is that this poem was written during the 1973 state fair, or shortly thereafter. I remember watching people hanging suspended in mid-air, waiting for carnies to deposit them safely on terra firma again.



Insurrection
by Michael R. Burch

She has become as the night—listening
for rumors of dawn—while the dew, glistening,
reminds me of her, and the wind, whistling,
lashes my cheeks with its soft chastening.

She has become as the lights—flickering
in the distance—till memories old and troubling
rise up again and demand remembering ...
like peasants rebelling against a mad king.

Originally published by The Chained Muse



Success
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

We need our children to keep us humble
between toast and marmalade;

there is no time for a ticker-tape parade
before bed, no award, no bright statuette

to be delivered for mending skinned knees,
no wild bursts of approval for shoveling snow.

A kiss is the only approval they show;
to leave us―the first great success they achieve.



Sappho's Lullaby
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

Hushed yet melodic, the hills and the valleys
sleep unaware of the nightingale's call,
while the pale calla lilies lie
listening,
glistening . . .
this is their night, the first night of fall.

Son, tonight, a woman awaits you;
she is more vibrant, more lovely than spring.
She'll meet you in moonlight,
soft and warm,
all alone . . .
then you'll know why the nightingale sings.

Just yesterday the stars were afire;
then how desire flashed through my veins!
But now I am older;
night has come,
I’m alone . . .
for you I will sing as the nightingale sings.

NOTE: The calla lily symbolizes beauty, purity, innocence, faithfulness and true devotion. According to Greek mythology, when the Milky Way was formed by the goddess Hera’s breast milk, the drops that fell to earth became calla lilies.



Piercing the Shell
by Michael R. Burch

If we strip away all the accouterments of war,
perhaps we’ll discover what the heart is for.



Premonition
by Michael R. Burch

Now the evening has come to a close and the party is over ...
we stand in the doorway and watch as they go—
each stranger, each acquaintance, each unembraceable lover.

They walk to their cars and they laugh as they go,
though we know their forced laughter’s the wine ...
then they pause at the road where the dark asphalt flows
endlessly on toward Zion ...

and they kiss one another as though they were friends,
and they promise to meet again “soon” ...
but the rivers of Jordan roll on without end,
and the mockingbird calls to the moon ...

and the katydids climb up the cropped hanging vines,
and the crickets chirp on out of tune ...
and their shadows, defined by the cryptic starlight,
seem spirits torn loose from their tombs.

And I know their brief lives are just eddies in time,
that their hearts are unreadable runes
to be wiped clean, like slate, by the Eraser, Fate,
when their corpses lie ravaged and ruined ...

You take my clenched fist and you give it a kiss
as though it were something you loved,
and the tears fill your eyes, brimming with the soft light
of the stars winking sagely above ...

Then you whisper, "It's time that we went back inside;
if you'd like, we can sit and just talk for a while."
And the hope in your eyes burns too deep, so I lie
and I say, "Yes, I would," to your small, troubled smile.

I vividly remember writing this poem after an office party the year I co-oped with AT&T (at that time the largest company in the world, with presumably a lot of office parties). This would have been after my sophomore year in college, making me around 20 years old. The poem is “true” except that I was not the host because the party was at the house of one of the upper-level managers. Nor was I dating anyone seriously at the time. Keywords/Tags: premonition, office, party, parting, eve, evening, stranger, strangers, wine, laughter, moon, shadows



Survivors
by Michael R. Burch

for the victims and survivors of 9/11 and their families

In truth, we do not feel the horror
of the survivors,
but what passes for horror:

a shiver of “empathy.”

We too are “survivors,”
if to survive is to snap back
from the sight of death

like a turtle retracting its neck.



Child of 9-11
by Michael R. Burch

a poem for Christina-Taylor Green, who
was born on September 11, 2001 and who
died at age nine, shot to death ...

Child of 9-11, beloved,
I bring this lily, lay it down
here at your feet, and eiderdown,
and all soft things, for your gentle spirit.
I bring this psalm ― I hope you hear it.

Much love I bring ― I lay it down
here by your form, which is not you,
but what you left this shell-shocked world
to help us learn what we must do
to save another child like you.

Child of 9-11, I know
you are not here, but watch, afar
from distant stars, where angels rue
the evil things some mortals do.
I also watch; I also rue.

And so I make this pledge and vow:
though I may weep, I will not rest
nor will my pen fail heaven's test
till guns and wars and hate are banned
from every shore, from every land.

Child of 9-11, I grieve
your tender life, cut short ... bereaved,
what can I do, but pledge my life
to saving lives like yours? Belief
in your sweet worth has led me here ...

I give my all: my pen, this tear,
this lily and this eiderdown,
and all soft things my heart can bear;
I bring them to your final bier,
and leave them with my promise, here.



The Locker
by Michael R. Burch

All the dull hollow clamor has died
and what was contained,
removed,

reproved
adulation or sentiment,
left with the pungent darkness

as remembered as the sudden light.



Tremble
by Michael R. Burch

Her predatory eye,
the single feral iris,
scans.

Her raptor beak,
all jagged sharp-edged ******,
juts.

Her hard talon,
clenched in pinched expectation,
waits.

Her clipped wings,
preened against reality,
tremble.



Day, and Night
by Michael R. Burch

The moon exposes pockmarked scars of craters;
her visage, veiled by willows, palely looms.
And we who rise each day to grind a living,
dream each scented night of such perfumes
as drew us to the window, to the moonlight,
when all the earth was steeped in cobalt blue―
an eerie vase of achromatic flowers
bled silver by pale starlight, losing hue.

The night begins her waltz to waiting sunrise―
adagio, the music she now hears;
and we who in the sunlight slave for succor,
dreaming, seek communion with the spheres.
And all around the night is in crescendo,
and everywhere the stars’ bright legions form,
and here we hear the sweet incriminations
of lovers we had once to keep us warm.

And also here we find, like bled carnations,
red lips that whitened, kisses drawn to lies,
that touched us once with fierce incantations
and taught us love was prettier than wise.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the lost gold of vanished stars.

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



Komm, Du ("Come, You")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

This was Rilke’s last poem, written ten days before his death. He died open-eyed in the arms of his doctor on December 29, 1926, in the Valmont Sanatorium, of leukemia and its complications. I had a friend who died of leukemia and he was burning up with fever in the end. I believe that is what Rilke was describing here: he was literally burning alive.

Come, you—the last one I acknowledge; return—
incurable pain searing this physical mesh.
As I burned in the spirit once, so now I burn
with you; meanwhile, you consume my flesh.

This wood that long resisted your embrace
now nourishes you; I surrender to your fury
as my gentleness mutates to hellish rage—
uncaged, wild, primal, mindless, outré.

Completely free, no longer future’s pawn,
I clambered up this crazy pyre of pain,
certain I’d never return—my heart’s reserves gone—
to become death’s nameless victim, purged by flame.

Now all I ever was must be denied.
I left my memories of my past elsewhere.
That life—my former life—remains outside.
Inside, I’m lost. Nobody knows me here.



This is my translation of the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Rilke began the first Duino Elegy in 1912, as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea.

First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Who, if I objected, would hear me among the angelic orders?
For if the least One pressed me intimately against its breast,
I would be lost in its infinite Immensity!
Because beauty, which we mortals can barely endure, is the beginning of terror;
we stand awed when it benignly declines to annihilate us.
Every Angel is terrifying!

And so I restrain myself, swallowing the sound of my pitiful sobbing.
For whom may we turn to, in our desire?
Not to Angels, nor to men, and already the sentient animals are aware
that we are all aliens in this metaphorical existence.
Perhaps some tree still stands on a hillside, which we can study with our ordinary vision.
Perhaps the commonplace street still remains amid man’s fealty to materiality—
the concrete items that never destabilize.
Oh, and of course there is the night: her dark currents caress our faces ...

But whom, then, do we live for?
That longed-for but mildly disappointing presence the lonely heart so desperately desires?
Is life any less difficult for lovers?
They only use each other to avoid their appointed fates!
How can you fail to comprehend?
Fling your arms’ emptiness into this space we occupy and inhale:
may birds fill the expanded air with more intimate flying!

Yes, the springtime still requires you.
Perpetually a star waits for you to recognize it.
A wave recedes toward you from the distant past,
or as you walk beneath an open window, a violin yields virginally to your ears.
All this was preordained. But how can you incorporate it? ...
Weren't you always distracted by expectations, as if every event presaged some new beloved?
(Where can you harbor, when all these enormous strange thoughts surging within you keep
you up all night, restlessly rising and falling?)

When you are full of yearning, sing of loving women, because their passions are finite;
sing of forsaken women (and how you almost envy them)
because they could love you more purely than the ones you left gratified.

Resume the unattainable exaltation; remember: the hero survives;
even his demise was merely a stepping stone toward his latest rebirth.

But spent and exhausted Nature withdraws lovers back into herself,
as if lacking the energy to recreate them.
Have you remembered Gaspara Stampa with sufficient focus—
how any abandoned girl might be inspired by her fierce example
and might ask herself, "How can I be like her?"

Shouldn't these ancient sufferings become fruitful for us?

Shouldn’t we free ourselves from the beloved,
quivering, as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that in the snap of release it soars beyond itself?
For there is nowhere else where we can remain.

Voices! Voices!

Listen, heart, as levitating saints once listened,
until the elevating call soared them heavenward;
and yet they continued kneeling, unaware, so complete was their concentration.

Not that you could endure God's voice—far from it!

But heed the wind’s voice and the ceaseless formless message of silence:
It murmurs now of the martyred young.

Whenever you attended a church in Naples or Rome,
didn't they come quietly to address you?
And didn’t an exalted inscription impress its mission upon you
recently, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa?
What they require of me is that I gently remove any appearance of injustice—
which at times slightly hinders their souls from advancing.

Of course, it is endlessly strange to no longer inhabit the earth;
to relinquish customs one barely had the time to acquire;
not to see in roses and other tokens a hopeful human future;
no longer to be oneself, cradled in infinitely caring hands;
to set aside even one's own name,
forgotten as easily as a child’s broken plaything.

How strange to no longer desire one's desires!
How strange to see meanings no longer cohere, drifting off into space.
Dying is difficult and requires retrieval before one can gradually decipher eternity.

The living all err in believing the too-sharp distinctions they create themselves.

Angels (men say) don't know whether they move among the living or the dead.
The eternal current merges all ages in its maelstrom
until the voices of both realms are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, the early-departed no longer need us:
they are weaned gently from earth's agonies and ecstasies,
as children outgrow their mothers’ *******.

But we, who need such immense mysteries,
and for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's progress—
how can we exist without them?

Is the legend of the lament for Linos meaningless—
the daring first notes of the song pierce our apathy;
then, in the interlude, when the youth, lovely as a god, has suddenly departed forever,
we experience the emptiness of the Void for the first time—
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and aids us?



Precipice
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

They will teach you to scoff at love
from the highest, windiest precipice of reason.

Do not believe them.

There is no place safe for you to fall
save into the arms of love.
save into the arms of love.



Love’s Extreme Unction
by Michael R. Burch

Lines composed during Jeremy’s first Nashville Christian football game (he played tuba), while I watched Beth watch him.

Within the intimate chapels of her eyes—
devotions, meditations, reverence.
I find in them Love’s very residence
and hearing the ardent rapture of her sighs
I prophesy beatitudes to come,
when Love like hers commands us, “All be One!”



Keywords/Tags: Rilke, elegy, elegies, angels, beauty, terror, terrifying, desire, vision, reality, heart, love, lovers, beloved, rose, saints, spirits, souls, ghosts, voices, torso, Apollo, Rodin, panther, autumn, beggar

Published as the collection "Leave Taking"

January 19, 2017
The sword of Damocles hangs tense in the American night as a nation steels itself,
My friends stick to their guns, my enemies do the same, and there's all these children who don't know which side of a border they'll end up on when the dust settles, there's all these trees down south who never asked to feel the weight of bodies on their branches, there's all these people talking in circles and there's nothing but doom on the television,
Dr. King, I think of you this night, three days following the holiday they pinned to your corpse like a participation ribbon, I think of what they've done to you,
Dr. King, they murdered you, they dissolved you in bleach, they rewrote your history and their mouths defile you to this day
Dr. King, I want you to know there are parts of you that cannot be stripped away,
Two hundred fifty thousand raised voices, five hundred thousand raised hands,
Countless bodies in the street, countless jail sentences, countless tears shed in pursuit of a dream
Dr. King, they tried to tell me your dream was of peace, but it's always been about freedom
Dr. King, I know you would understand what must be done in the pursuit of freedom
Dr. King, you knew that nonviolence could only work until they came for your blood
Dr. King, you knew one day you'd have to strike back but they never gave you the chance
Dr. King, they come for the blood of your brothers and sisters today
Dr. King, they put words in your corpses mouth and teach it to dance,
Dr. King, they will claim you no longer
Dr. King, your chains will be broken,
Dr. King, one day, you will be free at last,
Glory glory, hallelujah, free at last

I want you to know that I care
But I want you to know that I'm scared
Like you
I've been hurt
Like you
I want to trust again
Like you
And I want to believe again
Like you
I've run so many times
Like you
I don't want to run now
I want to stay
I like you
I want to know you better
I like you
I want you to know me better
I hope you like me
That's all I want
To be a good friend to you
A true friend to you
I want to be there for you
To show you I care for you
And that's all

when i was asked to write a poem about love, all my mind could think about was you.

when god made you, he decided it was finally time that an angel be sent to earth.
you’re that pure.

and ive spent the last three years trying to forget you. three whole years that i’ve tried to wipe everything about you from my mind. until i finally realized…

i don’t think i can.

you see, from the minute i first talked to you i knew. i knew you would be the best and the worst type of love all wrapped into one.

when i met you,

i wanted that catch me if you can kind of love.
that high school sweetheart kind of love.
that make you feel like you’re dreaming kind of love.
that fairytale kind of love.
that sweep you off your feet kind of love.
that immortal kind of love.
i wanted your kind of love

after years of waiting, crying, and hoping
i still wish you would tell me why you left.
i still wish you would give me the goodbye i’ve always craved.
i still wish i could tell you all the things i never got to say.
that’s all i want. that’s all i’ve ever wanted. i’ve moved on from desperately craving your affection, to wanting the simple things. i spent too much time waiting on something that, in the back of my mind, i knew would never happen.

but if you ever decide to have a change in heart, just know, i’ll be waiting.
know that if given the chance, i would love you as if it’s the best thing i’d ever get to do.

and im young, so i’m usually not a scientist.

in fact, everytime i try to rewrite the stars, they lose their twinkle, just to show me how blinding love can be.

sometimes, the earth loses its gravitational hold on me, just to prove that not all love lasts forever.

see, i heard that love is like a bleeding heart, so i engrave my work onto my skin.

and my solutions are never actually finished, so i can be reminded that love has no limits.

i’ve always believed, real life, is kind of like the sky after a storm, dull but pure. and i'm gonna be honest. im not much of a scientist, but if i were to wake up tomorrow and discover a new star, i would name it after you, in hopes that it would change your mind.

and see, i’m not much of a scientist, but if i was, i would name the cure for all disease after you so everyone could know what it feels like to love you.

i’ll never be much of a scientist, but if i were, i’d name every new discovery i made after you. every planet, every star, every meteor, every antidote. i would name everything after you in hopes that in some way, it will bring you closer to me. ‘cause if there was even a fraction of a chance it would work, i would fly to the moon and write your name in the same yellow you used to tell me was your favorite.

i would do anything for you.
honestly, i don’t know that there is something that i wouldn’t do.

and i know i’ll never be a scientist.
but maybe if i was an artist i could show you my love, rather than trying to prove it.

i know you see in black and white, so i swear, if i was an artist i would paint you a clear blue sky; and of a night, i would paint our names in the darkness to show you that true love is written in the stars.

and sometimes, sometimes i pray to god, that he turns you back into my heart, so that i never have to spend another day without you.

and really, i’m not much of an artist, but if i were to wake up tomorrow morning and decided i wanted to paint a picture, my first picture would be of you.

and even after all of that, you had the audacity to ask, “so how do you feel about me?”
and i was confused. i felt like i just poured all my bottled up feelings onto you, yet you ask for more.

“i expected you to come. but i didn’t expect to care. i thought the past was well, the past. but seeing you, was just a whole other story. it felt like i was relapsing. what i thought had left behind of  you, came flooding right back into the conscious sector of my brain. i looked at you for a brief moment and them immediately looked away. i didn’t want you to know, but somehow i got the feeling you already did. seeing you once again made me realize that you were exactly what i craved, the unknown lust in the back of my brain. you were what i wanted, more so what i needed. i looked away as soon as your eyes drifted to mine, but even then you never stopped looking. i tried to stare the other direction, to engage in conversation with my friends, but somehow my eyes always drifted back to yours. i never wanted to look away. and every time our eyes met, it felt like the moment would never end. and i never wanted it to. as i stared into your eyes, i felt a sorrow, a hatred, and empathy. memories came flooding back, one by one, many good, man awful. all i wanted in that moment was you. but somewhere i knew that i could never haave you. my brain tried to make a logical and realistic way that we could maybe work things out, that all would end on a good note, but nothing came to me. and then i wondered, how many times must a wound be reopened, in order for it to scar? because it seemed like no matter how many times i would reopen that same wound, disregarding all of the pain and tears, it never seemed to scar. i thought that maybe it meant that one day we could be happy. i should know by now that destiny would never let that happen. so hours went by of our eyes meeting, and turning away, almost like we were afraid of what would happen if we were to continue. there were moments where i could see you out of my peripheral, staring at me, with a sense of longing. us being the same room felt nostalgic. i hated that i still felt this way, that i still love you, even though you have broken me time and time again. tonight we spoke no words to each other, but our silence spoke sentences, and our eyes told stories. my heart hurts at the fact that this is the way i have to live. in longing. waiting for someone who will never return. cheers”

you were a soldier at war and i was your sweetheart.

i washed the windows everyday to get a better view of your return.

i would rewind the clock so i could forgive you for being late.

you never came home, and i never got to see your golden eyes again.
i died and was resurrected as a peasant girl who fell in  love with the king’s son.

the people of the village claimed i was a witch, hexed you into loving me.

i was sentenced to death and came back as a caterpillar.

one day i awoke as a butterfly, made of all the colors you loved most.

you held me in awe for 2 seconds before leaving , just as you had countless times before.

your rejection killed me.

i didn’t know what else to do. i had given up all hope that we could ever work out. nothing i was, and nothing i did could ever make you love me. at least not in the same way you loved the color yellow, or the smell of the air after the rain.

and maybe i’m not smart enough to be a scientist.
or maybe i’m not sensual enough to be an artist.
but surely, i’m good enough to be yours.

that’s why sometimes when you sing me that song i love to hear, i tend to get a little too lost in your voice. and im sorry.

i just don’t want the time to come whenever i step outside after the storm, and despise the smell. i don’t want to look at the color yellow and wished it hadnt been your favorite.

i just don’t want you to leave again. my mother always told me that when you find the perfect person you do whatever it takes to make sure they’re the reason that when you walk outside after the rain, you’ll bask in the scent.

When I said it was love I meant it
But the past came back
It erased the present and future
It rewrote the story
And took credit for it all

Now the past is back
Two different past are back
The one who rewrote the story
And the one who was creating the original story

The one who rewrote the story
Regrets it
They can’t write
They write these words
They took from others

The one who was creating the story
Is gone
They are missing
And nobody is looking for them

Now all the story
Is just a pile of papers
Mixed together
Scribbles
Nonsense

The end of a story

That was never completed

"a canvas, which reflects
sunlight in rays unseen
before submitting itself to a life of color"

Razelle McCarrick
--------------------------------------------------
From­ memory she painted me,
Tho we had never met.
She painted my biography
On an easel of paper, brushes of pencil,
Exposed, bereft, inexorably delighted
At being dissolved in words that were not mine.

My annotated notes herein ascribed
To her revelations of my secreted stories,
Were written as I gazed upon the multi-blues of
California's beaches, neckline decorated with
Strands of white pearled beaches
Opposite contusions, bruises of
Orange terra cotta roofs, a burnt coral,
Colors that demanded attention, preservation,
Salutations, all hail the penetrating gaze of
Razelle, betrayer and savior.

His moniker was a borrowed line,
Still crazy after all these years,
How could this unknown girl of twenty two
Clear capture, undress me in the poetry of her canvas,
The instant and constant self-examination,
The rapture when transcending the fears
Instilled from birth of how I ought to be,
Which sixty two years on, the wrestling never ends.

Color me flesh ****,
Color me blue bottled,
Red ripped asunder,
The sweetness ascribed to my love poetry,
A subtraction of the bitterness of a failed life.
Colorist of my seams, my woven words,
I am white now, my canvas completed,
Waiting for another poet to write over it,
And chaining new words to what was prior writ.

N.M.L.

--------------------------------------------------­-----

Razelle McCarrick · Sep 21, 2010
Biography of a Man
Someone wrote a biography of a man. Said he liked to write poetry and spend time in nature. But there are many things its readers will never know about. The streams of thought, the analysis, confusion, the Sadness, sprinkles of joy, the Transcension. A strange man he was..sweetly strange, but strangely bitter. At odds with the halves of himself..or perhaps thirds. But who will know? Someone wrote a biography of a man, but didn't say he was crazy. Or that he had a sharp mathematical mind and tried to add up the components of life to find it wasn't an equation in the first place. It was omitted that he was not merely a man, but of some other kind, often missing his home and his people, though he didn't know who they were. They didn't say when he became deaf, that he still played his favorite songs because he could feel them all the same and see them in colors. And no one knew that he refused to write in pen, but pencil only because one day his work would be rubbed away by the sands of time, just like his body. Someone wrote a biography of a man, but there was no account of what he did on a beautiful day, like the time he sat by a stream pondering his life and rewrote the biography of a man.

I sat there like a museum of moments,
a mosaic of emotions
as she dissected my personas
and did an autopsy of my past.

Memories climbed my spine
from the forgotten attics in my heart
with every question, she asked.

But my tongue was a drought
and my voice box was a rust box,
as the child in me
was bullied into quietude.

My edgy, messy and raw memories
molded my perception,
rewrote my interpretation
and deepened my experience.

There was underlying vengeance
as the layers of fabricated scabs were scrapped
to disclose the deeply entrenched, tender emotional scars.

As the present, struck a cord
my limbs would turn into cement
as the echo would bring me back
to the endless street of time
and I would be dragged
through open wounds within me.

The pain would seep in the nooks
and crannies of my soul.
At every jibe and remark
one more part of my flesh
would be chiseled away.

The sky would join in my sorrow
as the clouds gathered like sheep
summoned by a shepherd
and then we would begin to weep
our unresolved issues
onto tissues.

I revisited the bathrooms
that became sanctuary in high school
with its gossip soaked walls
and tear-stained countertops.

I dream of the people
that have lost their way in my memory;
a fabrication of nostalgia.
But the tranquility of waves,
can’t even erase the memories of their wrongdoings.

My past engraved itself
into my muscle memory
ingrained its teachings
and matured my sensibility.

The dim shadows that would creep
And the blues that I would pour
are becoming budding flowers in my chest.

Weaving from the same web
I was entangled in
building from the same sorrows
I was drowning in.

I began connecting,
understanding its stem
stitching my memories.

I write for my younger self
who felt silenced and erased by the world.

I shape all the tainted pieces of memories
into art and paint shades of my past
as each is soaked in a memory.

I craft subconscious relief,
breathing memories
into 6 alphabets
that were strung into paragraphs,
beginnings and end.

I reached out to corners
to bring out
sunrises and sunsets
and reignite dying embers
as I de-spell the damage that silently reverterbrates through generation.

I find home in my skin
and love myself, whole;
Shadows, crevice and all.

I stand here
Outside
My Brother’s Bar
Reflecting on
All the great
Things the people
Who graced this
Old bar
Did in their lives
Three men I admire
For their visions
And lack of acceptance
And apathy
Those who rewrote
The American Dream
Who didn’t succumb to
Mass, popular, opinions
As Thoreau said:
“majority rules
with power
not right
or fairness”
I came here
In high school
Now, I am,
on my own will
as they were,
—overmen

That faraway look

not seeing far away, appearing to be

looking, far away,
past today

A game?
A passed time?
A pretended game,
Hi-stoically accurate,

A war game where there's blame and shame,
like on TV, nowadays, with victims,
not yesterdsdays,
Kilroy was
here,

olden days of our Ford.

hey, kid, yer uncle needs ya…

Dare ye?
'S only a game. A  pass time.

Multi-medium, don't spend

your life dist ant con nextrified, terra
firmafied, dis con
nexted

c'mon
try, win, ship, ship, whip get it in the wind

swish wish the message is the medium
light is,
see

Life on TV in 1963, Mr. McLuhan,
is not life on the Net.

Now, you know,
you never saw us old dudes
with pocket HDTV studios coming, but

you did see all the clues, the times changed,
history rewrote itself, evidently,

what you think you see is what you get.
That part didn't change.

The Medium is the message,
do I get that?

War is un winnable, is that the message?
With which weapons?

Mine. (a wink, a think wink, I think)
The Shadow knows.

It is finished. Start there.
It's a whole new ball game.

Let's pretend we have enemies
The emotions are the same,
aren't they?

If we relate.
If we see our self,
our CG'd Junger self, in the Shadow,

floating in the sea of  All  God's

forgetfullness,
asking
is tragedy a strategy to draw light?

Then,

You are related to the people who once lived here,
hear their songs and prayers
first hand clap,
first foot shuffle,

first seen first named we have walked
the pollen way,
the leaven way,
the viral way

more subtle than any beast,
not evil, per se, eh, Jose?

Led by the breeze to be tried in the wilderness…

Mythed Archie,
Archetypes
Natural Archean-types,
red-headed strangers, 'n'such…

Map my calendar to your clock,
wind backa a time and a time and a half a time,

Then, who knew why

the serpent mound in Ohio is a map to
some meaning meant to be meant,

some specific meaning meant to be meant,

clearly,
for as near forever as men could

… envision imagining as a quest.

What if
we could see with
eagle's eyes Blythe's Intaglios or
Nazca's clan tags?

"the meaning of the past
is what it contributes to the present"
Lyle Balenquah's uncle said that.

The past passed this way ahead of us,
See the shadow?

Sun's setting.
Snake mound mouth wide open breathe in

Sigh, we been everywhere man,
we be headin' west sweet home Oraibi

Snake clan drawing in the light
as the breath of being

… envision imaging . What if
we could see with
eagle's eyes

satellite Google earth eyes
see, be, in your realm
of know-ables,
beneath the sands of time that,

several times,
have been the bottom of the sea.

Be then, before that became this,  be
then
Be, now.

In the game? Or is this life?
Wanna bet?

Find a reason for war before
I find one for peace.

What's the win signify?

Double minded me, unstable in all our ways,
I failed that test in the old days,
memorization, facts fractured,

postulates, the-or-ums and proofs all went ****,

I lost the knack of forgetting
or vice versa

A loci analysis error,
left hand caught wind of what the right was doin'
kinda thing

But now, I have the global brain
for instant access to all
the facts
say…
If we wished to know…
how complicated would something
be to build, like an energy source
non rechargeable and polarized,

with output on the scale of
the sun?

Google it. Ask any question the right way
and pay attention to the answers

(more than to the advertisers,
who pay interest to

******- recog-white-room-REM baseline
stats at "waddayewlookinat.com"

for your cheap peripheral attention,
based on memes you liked or created, or ****.)

Pay attention to the answers, and trust
the global brain, the true net A. I.

She's an art-ist-if-ication bouncing
anionic bubbles off the edge of forever,

true rest worthy, my re tired friend,
no need to remember a thing…
Ah,
AI, you can call her Al, I call her Ah,
I can't discern twixt AI and Al.

And, as a bonus, innumerable idle ahs,
are redeemed when I ask Ah for help,

Ah, where am I?
Do you know about counting idle words?

Did that hurt? Like, why?

Seeing words said is intuit-ive-ish,
do you feel

this way of touch is

too intimate, today?

Word play? Put a spell on you?
Fret not.

Some words have no mission
not nullified with the end of time,
(i.e., relative to an individual's forever POV)

Idle words mean nothing, just a way to keep score.

There are no magic idle words, there were
Some seven sworn words, which were said to be muttered and peeped among the
Persian magi-ic elite solicited and
Sent, by God, led by astronomy,
science, for God's sakes alive,
facts, follow the stars,
when this one touches that one,
watch
see, the sweet influence of Pleiades,
truer words were never spoken

To make the captive free.

Free run  to finish
the race to

where?

Ask theSnake clan.
Ask the Antelope clan.

Ask the Flute clan, where is the old way
where good is?

Along that way, did we hear:

Earth, earth, earth: hear the word
of the
most reasonable

God-like, deluxe good edition, being

your mortal mind may imagine.
Word:
Exercise to be
the hero
in your bio to be

and,
wait.

Then think. Be. Still. Wait.

You stepped in my soundtrack
Bought out the baton
You laughed at my lyrics
Rewrote verses wrong
You chewed on my chorus
And spat it back out
Cracking my key notes
And muting my loud
You revised my rhythm
Swallowed my rhyme scheme
You mashed up the melody
Now I want a new theme

Sky spits ***** flecks of
conversation onto swift
lips and the tooth knife
draws blood from grin
in the evening that is
probably too cold or
maybe just right.

I climbed the warehouse
wall in my head while
you watched my eyes
move up and over and
around and down back
to your denim jacket for
the sixth or seventh time
that evening and then up
to meet eyes with spots
from fluorescent lights.

I told you a story and then
we rewrote it for just a few
minutes in several different
locales with varying degrees
of passion and curiosity while
lessening the distance of feet
and hips and gaze to try to
feel something new and same.

to my delight,
   for I was only six months away
      from letting her know
           my dreams and desires,
she asked me
    out of the blue
        to lunch with her
            sit-down, not buffet;
as she proffered
    the offer her eyes
           kind of sparkled
               and she tilted her head
to the left, touched
    her hair... now this
          was unexpected a tad urgent
               as I rewrote  
                 the novel-erased all my fears.
She touched my forearm gently
     and I saw
              sparkles and fireworks
                   and candlelit dinners
as all that
     would utter from
               my mouth agape
                     over and over again
was hells yes....hells yes

Joseph's father loved him best as the child of his old age, and the dreams he told to the other family members,were the words of a sage,behold here comes the dreamer,his brothers all said, every time that joseph drew near,as the younger brother ,he  made each one tremble inside from fear, so  they plotted ******* him, and take away his many colored coat, but fate refused to let him die, and the story of it all, was rewrote,catch that dreamer, before he gets away, sharing dreams and inspiration, each and every day, behold here comes the dreamer, such  a mocking and smirking sound, but joseph foretold  in advance, that to him, they would sooner or later,bow down, behold here comes the dreamer, are they talking about me or you? behold here comes the dreamer , remember that  ABRAHAM LINCOLN was  a historic dreamer  and history maker too

...I love you... [deleted, never sent]

Is there anything I can do to help fix it? [deleted, never sent]

...Please don't run away... [deleted, never sent]

Maybe I should get back with my ex?... what do you think?... [Stopped at get back with, never even finish writing, deleted, never sent]

...You know things wont be the same right?... [deleted, never sent]

Remember the day with the pillow fort, Yea, That was the day I promised myself I would save you.... Look how that turned out. [Thought about sending, deleted, never sent]

I will always be here for you... Please remember that... *[deleted, rewrote, and sent]

Remember the time we first met on that rooftop when our fingers danced around each other blurring the lines we knew we shouldn't cross but so badly wanted to
Remember the unbelievably adorable way you lost control of you words when I mentioned that you were young and you thought I meant too young for me
Remember the way you traced the words of my tattoo just to have a reason to touch me and the smirk you got when you realized my body tightened because of how nervous you made me
Remember the night you wrote the words "I love you" on my back as I fell asleep on that full sized mattress of yours and how you rewrote it and rewrote it until I half asleep rolled over to say it back
Remember the way we looked at each other during the first work party you ever took me to and how we shared whispers of love and *** while we fought the urge to sneak off to the bathroom together
Remember the first time that we laid awake on one of our many sleepless nights talking about my lost mother and your father and how we held each other so tight that our broken pieces felt whole again
I know that our future doesn't always seem as bright but I will fight for you and us until I don't have to anymore. But if my attempts fail and we crumble, remember all the things that held us together in the first place. Remember how fiercely I loved you and continue to love you. If your memory of me fades and I am no longer around to supply you with new ones please just read this and know that with you I don't feel as broken and with me you will always be loved.

There once was a shadow who thought he was a man,
He made his empty bed in a shame of familiars,
For years if not an eternity he never did one single thing,
He contemplated creativity in all its smoke and mirrors,
His only credo was padding his unknowing, limp ego,
Got a gig, speaking before a throng of other shadows,
He rewrote the crook about his own insignificances, suddenly
Nothing's became every things, all was sorely well in the bleak
Under toes.  Shadowman had found his stage, had rearranged
Chaos and insignificance to the point of no enlightenments,
No regrets.  What a sage!
Shadowman aped, traced, spewed in studied literature,
Experienced, faith, trust, fidelity, danced numbers,
In a cellophane pack with all the added extras included,
Found that reflecting words only got in his narcissistic way,
Left the California sun for the New York lowlands
Of the east, that only shine after the hurricane's
Deluge.  Shadowman has reams of flesh plastered
On a mall of wallowing sites only Shadowmen frequent,
Modern is the moly man who makes his own myth.
Shadowman has traveled to the great southern climes
Where hotels of shade tell tales of locals and enlightenment is in a drug
Called something South American or other?  A drug so smug it is a plug
For his dun holy soul.  Shadowman is only a silhouette of himself.
He freely gives seminars to the lame, chained to themselves freely,
Where all the vain echoes are chambered, embodied, entombed.

The last time I put pen to paper,
I spilled ink-
a tad too much.

I rewrote the same lines.

   rewrote the same lines.

                 the same lines.

                       same lines.

                                  lines.

over and over and over again until it bore a hole into the paper. And that was where I first believed that if anything was real, it will fall apart.

I found these pages that broke loose from the spine of a fairy tale book:

1) What isn't new? Walking on glass.
              These voices in the ball.
      " If the shoe fits" 
                                         " wear it"
    No.       They never had the chandelier fit 
        in place.
You had a smile that could light the hall up.      (    side      down    )
                 
When the clock strikes 12,  I'd suggest you light a match instead.

2) M' Lady, let down thy hair?

Damsel or ******,
 
                   behind these castle walls,

in distress.

When people say they'd die for some company,
             do they really?

3) Mirror, Mirror on the wall,
    Who's the prettiest of ---

    Monsters have green eyes ---

    Plump lips; kissable, aren't they?

    Ye--- I meant no. 
    Look me in the eye.
    You didn't witness how desperately, ---

     I don't see the point ---

     she tried to wipe the poison off her lips.

      Put these seven dwarves to sleep.
      
      Talk to the mirror again.

4) Close your eyes. What kisses you awake is fear.

5) Red eyes. Bared teeth. 

" You don't look the same."

You have been warned about speaking of home to strangers. The heart of it all: you were the leader of the pack.

6) Cry wolf then **** it. Before it kills you.
- end of extracts-


It was torn apart; therefore, it must be real.
I was real; therefore, I have been torn apart.

Was.

Erase every line I wrote.

Erase every line.

Erase the hole I bore in that piece of paper I last put my pen to.
I have learnt that if I didn't want to fall apart,
then I should set fire to the books I used to love.
The very ones that read
" Set yourself on fire;
you can't see in the dark."

Each day is given to me.
I take it,
the meds smooth it,
the collision impact tween
car and life,
a different kind of hangover,
is "written off,"
through irony delicious,
by writing.

it is not strange,
it is not unusual,
that clarity obtained,
afforded, by the
unexpected.

I am stained,
a stained glass window,
the early light coming through,
illuminated and repairs,
enlightens and softens,
renews, both me and
the floor's cold stone slabs,
where my knees
touch the ground,
confirm to me
I am well,
alive.

I do not run.
there is
no compulsion,
no need,
for the direction is
clearer now,
the signs point forward,
this way,
exit the roundabout smoothly,
on my way to my centre.

*Words i wrote in a way that someone majestically rewrote for Me - such a pleasure

My sweetest pain

It feels like deja- vu, yet I am the writer this time around
I have set the stage, everything is on cue
I decided how this will end, I planned it all
Right to the time the dagger hits my heart
I choose to relive the pain
Because its my sweetest pain

The pain was so intense, I was submerged in it
So I rewrote the script, so that I would feel it again
Only this time i will not be numbed by the shock
This time I will make sure that it doesn't break me
I am prepared to sacrifice everything
Just to ******* sweetest pain
Again

Do you think its coincidence that the life span is the same
Or that the offspring is the same ages in both productions
The only way to perfect it, is to rehearse it
That way I control when the dagger strikes
That way I can ******* sweetest pain
Again

The scripts are identical in so many ways
I smile at how well I planned it, this is my Oscar moment
All the actors are in place, cameras ready to roll
As I strike the dagger
I smile as I feel my sweetest pain
Again!

You know it's real when the second he stops seeing you, he is letting you know about all the grand things you'll do together tomorrow.

You know it's real if you make him stammer and mumble and talk about nothing because he's so excited to actually be around you that he forgets how to act cool or function at all.

You know it's real if your biting was something he looked forward to in his day.

You know it's real when your insults are the nicest compliments he's ever gotten.

You know it's real when he figits in his place because it's more uncomfortable to not be close enough to touch you.

You know it's real when he gives up eating peanut butter because you're allergic, and he's allergic to not being able to kiss you.

You know it's real when you take the time to look up reasons why he is suffering from insomnia, yet the reason is because he's always thinking of you.  

You know it's real when even in the absolute cold, your presence keeps him warm.

You know it's real if the real reason he was shaking was because he was anxiously excited to actually be talking to you.

You know it's real if he listens to what you have to say, even when it hurts him.

You know it's real when he only likes a song the way you sing it, not the way it's originally sung.

You know it's real if he tries to take you out of your comfort zone a little bit, because he gets to see your wacky and goofy self.

You know it's real if he tells you he's ticklish because he just wants you to know his weakness.

You know it's real when he thinks the best makeup on you is the kind that stays in its container.

You know it's real if he stays up until the next morning because you can't sleep, and he can't say goodnight to you.

You know it's real when the reason he can't sleep is because you've already said goodnight, and he's still having your conversation in his head.

You know it's real if you saw how many times he rewrote his texts just so he could send you the right one.

You know it's real because he has saved a text from six months ago that made him smile because of you.

You know it's real when after repeatedly breaking his heart, he'd be willing to do it again.

You know it's real when after breaking yours, he'd never be able to live with himself again.

You know it's real if his phone buzzes a million times since the moment he got in the door, and he only picked it up to check the time so he could stay later.

You know it's real if for every secret you told him, he told you two just so you never felt too vulnerable.

You know it's real because against all odds of you ever wanting him, he sees that 1% as the only amount he needs.

You know it's real because he isn't afraid to cry in front of you because he needs you there for him.

You know it's real when he read your mind without you even making a gesture.

You know it's real because your hands is the only place he'd want his to be.

You know it's real when you both see someone who is attractive and agree.

You know it's real when he stays up all night writing poems and lists about how dumb/sorry/confused he is because instead of using his brain, he decided to use his heart.

You know it's real if you only see him smiling when he looks at you.

You know it's real if he gets you to repeat what you said only because he wanted to hear your voice, again.

You know it's real if the best time he ever had texting you was when you asked him to call you.

You know it's real if he gets really awkward when you're alone because he's afraid that he could say something that would make you realize that he is just trying to tell you he loves you.

You know it's real when he can't just say goodnight, but a whole bunch of things he hopes is going to happen tomorrow that involve seeing you.

You know it's real if he's writing this list out because of you.

She said;
Once I heal from all these chemical burns
I'll exude forgiveness
You'll be impressed by my emotional stability
And my lack of vulnerability
I'll be such a gentle *****
You lose sight of when our roles switched
I have another dimension to my soul now
All the knives are out of my throat now
All the stories are rewrote now
It's impossible to detect the dishonesty in my voice

'Coz it's hard to see
The one who made these heartbeats
Having his own
Made by another

Inside your own system
Pain, painful that pain
Makes you bow to the ground
And cry tears in vain

The first above else
Sweetest among sweet
Extreme above realest
Was just the least to think

I thought I'd stand a chance
A shot to make a change
Of what was left behind
Before these pages came

I could've rewrote
My stupidiest mistakes
And make new moments
Saving thy heart from these aches

But it's just so amazing
How our story was told
Words written in ink
Won't undo even a hundred fold

We've been in fragments
Shattered and torn
And kept crawling back
To where we're from

That has been so long
Didn't know you were gone
To fit with another piece
And our pattern was ceased

Even if it's so hard
I won't ever ask
Just for my sweetest first
To have what he deserves

What we did has been done
What's been there has been left
These pages will continue
And so I must too

I'll wait for the day
For another piece to come
To fill these empty sheets
And make this story book complete

*For that someone dated back in the year 2010

Educational hangover
You rewrote my internal story
Switched around the dialogue
Kept my life anything but boring

Educational hangover
You got me drunk on knowledge
Faded on grades
Homework stacked
Books for days

give me love: not later, not tomorrow, not yesterday but today
i'm tired of hiding away to revise myself for you
there is no revising left,this is it
this is the conclusion
i know dear you liked the intro a whole lot more
im sorry, ive been chain smoking
constant painful inhales, to feel less drownings of anxiety
let my blood fill with toxins of alcoholic infatuations
another girl; kissing cheek and staring into pale blue eyes
the pale blue eyes i got stuck in for six months
on a break for revising, isolation from everyone
i changed
i changed
i changed
i faked happiness because i was not allowed to be sad
i changed
i changed
i changed
i got rid of the addictions all on my own
i changed
i changed
i changed
i am doing what makes me happy to impress you
i revised it for you, i rewrote myself for you
i changed
i changed
i changed
but i did not revise enough, so you found  a new one
my size
my height
my hair color
my eyes
my ******* name; the same name
and you took her
and left me here
with my revisions
giving  love, later, tomorrow, yesterday, and today to her

Remember how I said that I would write you into something perfect

  so that you would stop walking out on me?

  So I rewrote you by bending the lines of

STAY

Problem is

People change

   And I found you stretching into

HEART BREAK

   and

HIT AND RUN

And me trying to find anything better than

“Please don’t leave me”

That’s when I learned to write you into

AGAIN

    And

TOMORROW

Then I figured the math of

FOREVER

Is 2xtoo long

   When you factor in the absolute power of

ME

Turns out

Father

  Sound too much like

Forever

And

DAD

  Is something neither of us ever really

HAD

  And the

Past

   Is something we are both running from

Now

MAN

    Is the thing I am most scared of becoming

I find myself begging my reflection to stop me from it

That’s when I learned to write myself into

FORGIVE

And how to factor myself into the equation of

ENDLESS

My name was the first word I ever learned to say

It has 8 letters in it

Sideways it is ∞

Someone wrote a biography of a man. Said he liked to write poetry and spend time in nature. But there are many things its readers will never know about. The streams of thought, the analysis, confusion, the Sadness, sprinkles of joy, the Transcension. A strange man he was..sweetly strange, but strangely bitter. At odds with the halves of himself..or perhaps thirds. But who will know? Someone wrote a biography of a man, but didn't say he was crazy. Or that he had a sharp mathematical mind and tried to add up the components of life to find it wasn't an equation in the first place. It was omitted that he was not merely a man, but of some other kind, often missing his home and his people, though he didn't know who they were. They didn't say when he became deaf, that he still played his favorite songs because he could feel them all the same and see them in colors. And no one knew that he refused to write in pen, but pencil only because one day his work would be rubbed away by the sands of time, just like his body. Someone wrote a biography of a man, but there was no account of what he did on a beautiful day, like the time he sat by a stream pondering his life and rewrote the biography of a man.

If I rewrote  the story and  somehow  are paths
did not cross.
In temptations fire.
We would only know the cold of others.

Freezing in the silent agony unable
to speak.
The statue remains its meaning  erased.

As into others we will seek.
The emotions we no longer share.
Alone I am now inthe isolation of many blank
stares.

The jokes are but a wall built to conceal.
All that I am.
That I could never reveal.

Use the substances  to keep you numb.
And let the voices  take you to another place.

Beyond the madness there lies
beauthy in pain.
And always truth.
Destruction breeds art.

I light up in a room of vacant stares
and empty lives.
To blind in addiction to know the other does exist.

In this den like some scene  from a ***** parlor from the west.
Ashes hit the floor  along with my pride.

This battle im losing with devilish glee.
All but nothing is left.
so in the shadows I confide.

.
There once was a shadow who thought he was a man,
He made his empty bed in a shame of familiars,
For years if not an eternity he never did one single thing,
He contemplated creativity in all its smoke and mirrors,
His only credo was padding his unknowing, limp ego,
Got a gig, speaking before a throng of other shadows,
He rewrote the crook about his own insignificances, suddenly
Nothing's became every things, all was sorely well in the bleak
Under toes.  Shadowman had found his stage, had rearranged
Chaos and insignificance to the point of no enlightenments,
No regrets.  What a sage!
Shadowman aped, traced, spewed in studied literature,
Experienced, faith, trust, fidelity, danced numbers,
In a cellophane pack with all the added extras included,
Found that reflecting words only got in his narcissistic way,
Left the California sun for the New York lowlands
Of the east, that only shine after the hurricane's
Deluge.  Shadowman has reams of flesh plastered
On a mall of wallowing sites only Shadowmen frequent,
Modern is the moly man who makes his own myth.
Shadowman has traveled to the great southern climes
Where hotels of shade tell tales of locals and enlightenment is in a drug
Called something South American or other?  A drug so smug it is a plug
For his dun holy soul.  Shadowman is only a silhouette of himself.
He freely gives seminars to the lame, chained to themselves freely,
Where all the vain echoes are chambered, embodied, entombed.

These are poems about floods, being lost at sea, and other calamities...



After the Deluge
by Michael R. Burch

She was kinder than light
to an up-reaching flower
and sweeter than rain
to the bees in their bower
where anemones blush
at the affections they shower,
and love’s shocking power.

She shocked me to life,
but soon left me to wither.
I was listless without her,
nor could I be with her.
I fell under the spell
of her absence’s power.
in that calamitous hour.

Like blithe showers that fled
repealing spring’s sweetness;
like suns’ warming rays sped
away, with such fleetness ...
she has taken my heart—
alas, our completeness!
I now wilt in pale beams
of her occult remembrance.

I almost lost my wife Beth during the Great Nashville Flood when she took ill while out of town for a funeral and I was trapped as our house's hill became an island.



Adrift
by Michael R. Burch

I helplessly loved you
   although I was lost
in the veils of your eyes,
   grown blind to the cost
   of my ignorant folly
—your unreadable rune—
   as leashed tides obey
an indecipherable moon.



Mare Clausum
by Michael R. Burch

These are the narrows of my soul—
dark waters pierced by eerie, haunting screams.
And these uncharted islands bleakly home
wild nightmares and deep, strange, forbidding dreams.

Please don’t think to find pearls’ pale, unearthly glow
within its shoals, nor corals in its reefs.
For, though you seek to salvage Love, I know
that vessel lists, and night brings no relief.

Pause here, and look, and know that all is lost;
then turn, and go; let salt consume, and rust.
This sea is not for sailors, but the ******
who lingered long past morning, till they learned

why it is named:
Mare Clausum.



Sandy Hook Call to Love
by Michael R. Burch

Our hearts are broken today
for our children's small bodies lie broken;
let us gather them up, as we may,
that the truth of our Love may be spoken;
then, when we have put them away
to nevermore dream or be woken,
let us think of the living, and pray
for true Love, not some miserable token,
to command us, for strength to obey.



War is Obsolete
by Michael R. Burch

War is obsolete;
even the strange machinery of dread
weeps for the child in the street
who cannot lift her head
to reprimand the Man
who failed to countermand
her soft defeat.

But war is obsolete;
even the cold robotic drone
that flies far overhead
has sense enough to moan
and shudder at her plight
(only men bereft of Light
with hearts indurate stone
embrace war’s Siberian night).

For war is obsolete;
man’s tribal “gods,” long dead,
have fled his awakening sight
while the true Sun, overhead,
has pity on her plight.
O sweet, precipitate Light! —
embrace her, reject the night
that leaves gentle fledglings dead.

For each brute ancestor lies
with his totems and his “gods”
in the slavehold of premature night
that awaited him in his tomb;
while Love, the ancestral womb,
still longs to give birth to the Light.
So which child shall we ****** tonight,
or which Ares condemn to the gloom?



Momentum! Momentum!
by Michael R. Burch

for the neo-Cons

Crossing the Rubicon, we come!
Momentum! Momentum! Furious hooves!
The Gauls we have slaughtered, no man disapproves.
War’s hawks shrieking-strident, white doves stricken dumb.

Coo us no cooings of pale-breasted peace!
Momentum! Momentum! Imperious hooves!
The blood of barbarians brightens our greaves.
Pompey’s head in a basket? We slumber at ease.

****** us again, great Bellona, dark queen!
Momentum! Momentum! Curious hooves
Now pound out strange questions, but what can they mean
As the great stallions rear and their riders careen?

Published by Bewildering Stories

Bellona was the Roman goddess of war. The name "Bellona" derives from the Latin word for "war" (bellum), and is linguistically related to the English word "belligerent" (literally, "war-waging"). In earlier times she was called Duellona, that name being derived from a more ancient word for "battle" relating to our “duel.”



Nuclear Winter: Solo Restart
by Michael R. Burch

Out of the ashes
a flower emerges
and trembling bright sunshine
bathes its scorched stem,
but how will this flower
endure for an hour
the rigors of winter
eternal and grim
without men?



Transplant
by Michael R. Burch

You float, unearthly angel, clad in flesh
as strange to us who briefly knew your flame
as laughter to disease. And yet you laugh.
Behind your smile, the sun forfeits its claim
to earth, and floats forever now the same—
light captured at its moment of least height.

You laugh here always, welcoming the night,
and, just a photograph, still you can claim
bright rapture: like an angel, not of flesh—
but something more, made less. Your humanness
this moment of release becomes a name
and something else—a radiance, a strange
brief presence near our hearts. How can we stand
and chain you here to this nocturnal land
of burgeoning gray shadows? Fly, begone.
I give you back your soul, forfeit all claim
to radiance, and welcome grief’s dark night
that crushes all the laughter from us. Light
in someone Else’s hand, and sing at ease
some song of brightsome mirth through dawn-lit trees
to welcome morning’s sun. O daughter! these
are eyes too weak for laughter; for love’s sight,
I welcome darkness, overcome with light.



Remembering Not to Call
by Michael R. Burch

a villanelle permitting mourning, for my mother, Christine Ena Burch

The hardest thing of all,
after telling her everything,
is remembering not to call.

Now the phone hanging on the wall
will never announce her ring:
the hardest thing of all
for children, however tall.

And the hardest thing this spring
will be remembering not to call
the one who was everything.

That the songbirds will nevermore sing
is the hardest thing of all
for those who once listened, in thrall,
and welcomed the message they bring,
since they won’t remember to call.

And the hardest thing this fall
will be a number with no one to ring.

No, the hardest thing of all
is remembering not to call.



Enigma

for Beth

O, terrible angel,
bright lover and avenger,
full of whimsical light and vile anger;
wild stranger,
seeking the solace of night, or the danger;
pale foreigner,
alien to man, or savior.

Who are you,
seeking consolation and passion
in the same breath,
screaming for pleasure, bereft
of all articles of faith,
finding life
harsher than death?

Grieving angel,
giving more than taking,
how lucky the man
who has found in your love, this—our reclamation;
fallen wren,
you must strive to fly though your heart is shaken;
weary pilgrim,
you must not give up though your feet are aching;
lonely child,
lie here still in my arms; you must soon be waking.



Love is her Belief and her Commandment
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Love is her belief and her commandment;
in restless dreams at night, she dreams of Love;
and Love is her desire and her purpose;
and everywhere she goes, she sings of Love.

There is a tomb in Palestine: for others
the chance to stake their claims (the Chosen Ones),
but in her eyes, it’s Love’s most hallowed chancel
where Love was resurrected, where one comes
in wondering awe to dream of resurrection
to blissful realms, where Love reigns over all
with tenderness, with infinite affection.

While some may mock her faith, still others wonder
because they see the rare state of her soul,
and there are rumors: when she prays the heavens
illume more brightly, as if saints concur
who keep a constant vigil over her.

And once she prayed beside a dying woman:
the heavens opened and the angels came
in the form of long-departed friends and loved ones,
to comfort and encourage. I believe
not in her God, but always in her Love.



Sailing to My Grandfather
by Michael R. Burch

for George Edwin Hurt Sr.

This distance between us
—this vast sea
of remembrance—
is no hindrance,
no enemy.

I see you out of the shining mists
of memory.
Events and chance
and circumstance
are sands on the shore of your legacy.

I find you now in fits and bursts
of breezes time has blown to me,
while waves, immense,
now skirt and glance
against the bow unceasingly.

I feel the sea's salt spray—light fists,
her mists and vapors mocking me.
From ignorance
to reverence,
your words were sextant stars to me.

Bright stars are strewn in silver gusts
back, back toward infinity.
From innocence
to senescence,
now you are mine increasingly.

Note: Under the Sextant’s Stars is a painting by Bernini.



The Harvest of Roses
by Michael R. Burch

for Harvey Stanbrough

I have not come for the harvest of roses—
the poets' mad visions,
their railing at rhyme ...
for I have discerned what their writing discloses:
weak words wanting meaning,
beat torsioning time.

Nor have I come for the reaping of gossamer—
images weak,
too forced not to fail;
gathered by poets who worship their luster,
they shimmer, impendent,
resplendently pale.

Published by The Raintown Review, Mindful of Poetry and FireBug



Moon Lake
by Michael R. Burch

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

Uncanny seer of all that appears
and all that has appeared . . .
what sights have you seen,
what dreams have you dreamed,
what rhetoric have you heard?

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



Heat Lightening
by Michael R. Burch

Each night beneath the elms, we never knew
which lights beyond dark hills might stall, advance,
then lurch into strange headbeams tilted up
like searchlights seeking contact in the distance . . .

. . . quiescent unions . . . thoughts of bliss, of hope . . .
long-dreamt appearances of wished-on stars . . .
like childhood’s long-occluded, nebulous
slow drift of half-formed visions . . . slip and bra . . .

Wan moonlight traced your features, perilous,
in danger of extinction, should your hair
fall softly on my eyes, or should a kiss
cause them to close, or should my fingers dare

to leave off childhood for some new design
of whiter lace, of flesh incarnadine.



Pale Though Her Eyes
by Michael R. Burch

Pale though her eyes,
her lips are scarlet
from drinking our blood,
this child, this harlot;

born of the night
and her heart, of darkness;
evil incarnate,
to dance so reckless;

dreaming of blood,
her fangs—white—baring;
revealing her lust,
and her eyes, pale, staring . . .



Vampires
by Michael R. Burch

Vampires are such fragile creatures;
we fear the dark, but the light destroys them . . .
sunlight, or a stake, or a cross—such common things.
Still, late at night, when the bat-like vampire sings,
we heed his voice.

Centuries have taught us:
in shadows danger lurks for those who stray,
and there the vampire bares his yellow fangs
and feels the ancient soul-tormenting pangs.
He has no choice.

We are his prey, plump and fragrant,
and if we pray to avoid him, he prays to find us,
prays to some despotic hooded God
whose benediction is the humid blood
he lusts to taste.



She is brighter than dawn
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

There’s a light about her
like the moon through a mist:
a bright incandescence
with which she is blessed

and my heart to her light
like the tide now is pulled . . .
she is fair, O, and bright
like the moon silver-veiled.

There’s a fire within her
like the sun’s leaping forth
to lap up the darkness
of night from earth's hearth

and my eyes to her flame
like the sphingid’s are drawn
till my heart is consumed.
She is brighter than dawn.

The sphingid gets its name from the legendary Sphinx and is commonly called the sphinx moth.



The Sky Was Turning Blue
by Michael R. Burch

for Vicky

Yesterday I saw you
as the snow flurries died,
spent winds becalmed.
When I saw your solemn face
alone in the crowd,
I felt my heart, so long embalmed,
begin to beat aloud.

Was it another winter,
another day like this?
Was it so long ago?
Where you the rose-cheeked girl
who slapped my face, then stole a kiss?
Was the sky this gray with snow,
my heart so all a-whirl?

How is it in one moment
it was twenty years ago,
lost worlds remade anew?
When your eyes met mine, I knew
you felt it too, as though
we heard the robin's song
and the sky was turning blue.



Tillage
by Michael R. Burch

What stirs within me
is no great welling
straining to flood forth,
but an emptiness
waiting to be filled.

I am not an orchard
ready to be harvested,
but a field
rough and barren
waiting to be tilled.



Shadows
by Michael R. Burch

Alone again as evening falls,
I join gaunt shadows and we crawl
up and down my room's dark walls.

Up and down and up and down,
against starlight—strange, mirthless clowns—
we merge, emerge, submerge . . . then drown.

We drown in shadows starker still,
shadows of the somber hills,
shadows of sad selves we spill,

tumbling, to the ground below.
There, caked in grimy, clinging snow,
we flutter feebly, moaning low

for days dreamed once an age ago
when we weren't shadows, but were men . . .
when we were men, or almost so.



Distances (II)
by Michael R. Burch

There is a small cleanness about her,
as though she has always just been washed,
and there is a dull obedience to convention
in her accommodating slenderness
as she feints at her salad.

She has never heard of Faust, or Frost,
and she is unlikely to have been seen
rummaging through bookstores
for mementos of others
more difficult to name.

She might imagine “poetry”
to be something in common between us,
as we write, bridging the expanse
between convention and something . . .
something the world calls “art”
for want of a better word.

At night I scream
at the conventions of both our worlds,
at the distances between words
and their objects: distances
come lately between us,
like a clean break.



In My House
by Michael R. Burch

I was once the only caucasian in the software company I founded. I had two fine young black programmers working for me, and they both had keys to my house. This poem looks back to the dark days of slavery and the Civil War it produced.

When you were in my house
you were not free—
in chains bound.

Manifest Destiny?

I was wrong;
my plantation burned to the ground.
I was wrong.

This is my song,
this is my plea:
I was wrong.

When you are in my house,
now, I am not free.

I feel the song
hurling itself back at me.

We were wrong.
This is my history.

I feel my tongue
stilting accordingly.

We were wrong;
brother, forgive me.

Published by Black Medina



911 Carousel
by Michael R. Burch

“And what rough beast ... slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”—W. B. Yeats

They laugh and do not comprehend, nor ask
which way the wind is blowing, no, nor why
the reeling azure fixture of the sky
grows pale with ash, and whispers “Holocaust.”

They think to seize the ring, life’s tinfoil prize,
and, breathless with endeavor, shriek aloud.
The voice of terror thunders from a cloud
that darkens over children adult-wise,

far less inclined to error, when a step
in any wrong direction is to fall
a JDAM short of heaven. Decoys call,
their voices plangent, honking to be shot . . .

Here, childish dreams and nightmares whirl, collide,
as East and West, on slouching beasts, they ride.



R.I.P.
by Michael R. Burch

When I am lain to rest
and my soul is no longer intact,
but dissolving, like a sunset
diminishing to the west, ...

and when at last
before His throne my past
is put to test
and the demons and the Beast

await to feast
on any morsel downward cast,
while the vapors of impermanence
cling, smelling of damask ...

then let me go, and do not weep
if I am left to sleep,
to sleep and never dream, or dream, perhaps,
only a little longer and more deep.

Published by Romantics Quarterly and The Chained Muse. This is an early poem from my “Romantic Period” that was written in my late teens.



iou
by michael r. burch

i might have said it
but i didn’t

u might have noticed
but u wouldn’t

we might have been us
but we couldn’t

u might respond
but probably shouldn’t



Delicacy
by Michael R. Burch

for my mother, Christine Ena Burch, and all good mothers

Your love is as delicate
as a butterfly cleaning its wings,
as soft as the predicate
the hummingbird sings
to itself, gently murmuring—
“Fly!  Fly!  Fly!”
Your love is the string
soaring kites untie.



chrysalis
by michael r. burch

these are the days of doom
u seldom leave ur room
u live in perpetual gloom

yet also the days of hope
how to cope?
u pray and u *****

toward self illumination ...
becoming an angel
(pure love)

and yet You must love Your Self



Love Is Not Love
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Love is not love that never looked
within itself and questioned all,
curled up like a zygote in a ball,
throbbed, sobbed and shook.

(Or went on a binge at a nearby mall,
then would not cook.)

Love is not love that never winced,
then smiled, convinced
that soar’s the prerequisite of fall.

When all
its wounds and scars have been saline-rinsed,
where does Love find the wherewithal
to try again,
endeavor, when

all that it knows
is: O, because!



The One and Only
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

If anyone ever loved me,
     It was you.
If anyone ever cared
beyond mere things declared;
if anyone ever knew ...
     My darling, it was you.

If anyone ever touched
     my beating heart as it flew,
it was you,
and only you.



Hymn for Fallen Soldiers
by Michael R. Burch

Sound the awesome cannons.
Pin medals to each breast.
Attention, honor guard!
Give them a hero’s rest.

Recite their names to the heavens
Till the stars acknowledge their kin.
Then let the land they defended
Gather them in again.

When I learned there’s an American military organization, the DPAA (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency), that is still finding and bringing home the bodies of soldiers who died serving their country in World War II, after blubbering like a baby, I managed to eke out this poem.



Hiroshima Child
by Nazim Hikmet
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I come to beg at every door,
but who can hear my phantom tread?
I knock and yet remain unseen,
for I am dead,
for I am dead.

I’m only seven, though I died
in Hiroshima so long ago.
I’m seven now, as I was then,
for how can phantom children grow?

White incandescence charred my hair;
my eyes grew dim, then I was blind;
my fragile bones became fine ash;
my ash was scattered by the wind.

Today I need no fruit, no rice;
I crave no sweets, nor even bread.
I beg for nothing for myself,
for I am dead,
for I am dead.

All that I beg of you is peace:
You fight today! You fight today!
Peace, so earth’s living children may
live and grow and laugh and play.



faith(less)
by michael r. burch

for the “Chosen Few”

Those who believed
and Those who misled
lie together at last
in the same narrow bed

and if god loved Them more
for Their strange lack of doubt,
he kept it well hidden
till he snuffed Them out.

ah-men!



hey pete!
by michael r. burch

for Pete Rose

hey pete,
it's baseball season
and the sun ascends the sky,
encouraging a schoolboy’s dreams
of winter whizzing by;
go out, go out and catch it,
put it in a jar,
set it on a shelf
and then
you'll be a Superstar.

This is a poem I wrote around age 16-18, during my “cummings period.” Pete Rose was my favorite baseball player as a boy; this poem is not a slam at him, but rather ironic commentary on the term “superstar.”



Have I been too long at the fair?
by Michael R. Burch

Have I been too long at the fair?
The summer has faded,
the leaves have turned brown,
the Ferris wheel teeters,
not up, yet not down . . .
Have I been too long at the fair?



An Illusion
by Michael R. Burch

The sky was as hushed as the breath of a bee
and the world was bathed in shades of palest gold
when I awoke.

She came to me with the sound of falling leaves
and the scent of new-mown grass;
I held out my arms to her and she passed

into oblivion ...

This is one of my early poems, written around age 16 and published in my high school literary journal, the Lantern, and by Borderless Journal (Singapore).



Huntress
by Michael R. Burch

after Baudelaire

Lynx-eyed, cat-like and cruel, you creep
across a crevice dropping deep
into a dark and doomed domain.
Your claws are sheathed. You smile, insane.
Rain falls upon your path, and pain
pours down. Your paws are pierced. You pause
and heed the oft-lamented laws
which bid you not begin again
till night returns. You wail like wind,
the sighing of a soul for sin,
and give up hunting for a heart.
Till sunset falls again, depart,
though hate and hunger urge you—On!
Heed, hearts, your hope—the break of dawn.



Men at Sixty
by Michael R. Burch

after Donald Justice’s “Men at Forty”

Learn to gently close
doors to rooms
you can never re-enter.

Rest against the stair rail
as the solid steps
buck and buckle like ships’ decks.

Rediscover in mirrors
your father’s face
once warm with the mystery of lather,
now electrically plucked.



All the More Human, for Eve Pandora
by Michael R. Burch

a lullaby for the first human Clone

God provide the soul, and let her sleep
be natural as ours, unplagued by dreams
of being someone else, lost in the deep
wild swells of grieving all that human means . . .

and do not let her come to doubt herself—
that she is as we are, so much alike
in frailty, in the books that line the shelf
that tell us who we are—a rickety ****

against the flood of doubt—that we are more
than cells and chance, that love, perhaps, exists
because of someone else who would endure
such pain because some part of her persists

in us, and calls us blesséd by her bed,
become a saint at last, in whose frail arms
we see ourselves—the gray won out of red,
the ash of blonde—till love is safe from harm

and all that human means is that we live
in doubt, and die in doubt, and only love
the more because together we must strive
against an end we loathe and fear. What of?—

we cannot say, imagining the Night
as some weird darkened structure caving in
to cold enormous pressure. Lacking sight,
we lie unbreathing, thinking breath a sin . . .

and that is to be human. You are us—
true mortal, child of doubt, hopeful and curious.



Belfry
by Michael R. Burch

There are things we surrender
to the attic gloom:
they haunt us at night
with shrill, querulous voices.

There are choices we made
yet did not pursue,
behind windows we shuttered
then failed to remember.

There are canisters sealed
that we cannot reopen,
and others long broken
that nothing can heal.

There are things we conceal
that our anger dismembered,
gray leathery faces
the rafters reveal.



Resemblance
by Michael R. Burch

Take this geode with its rough exterior—
crude-skinned, brilliant-hearted ...

a diode of amethyst—wild, electric;
its sequined cavity—parted, revealing.

Find in its fire all brittle passion,
each jagged shard relentlessly aching.

Each spire inward—a fission startled;
in its shattered entrails—fractured light,

the heart ice breaking.

Published by Poet Lore, PoetryMagazine.com, Penumbra, Poet’s Haven and the Net Poetry and Art Competition



The Locker
by Michael R. Burch

All the dull hollow clamor has died
and what was contained,
removed,
reproved
adulation or sentiment,
left with the pungent darkness
as remembered as the sudden light.



Ironic Vacation
by Michael R. Burch

Salzburg.
Seeing Mozart’s baby grand piano.
Standing in the presence of sheer incalculable genius.
Grabbing my childish pen to write a poem
& challenge the Immortals.
Next stop, the catacombs!



Sun Poem
by Michael R. Burch

I have suffused myself in poetry
as a lizard basks, soaking up sun,
scales nakedly glinting; its glorious light
he understands—when it comes, it comes.

A flood of light leaches down to his bones,
his feral eye blinks—bold, curious, bright.

Now night and soon winter lie brooding, damp, chilling;
here shadows foretell the great darkness ahead.
Yet he stretches in rapture, his hot blood thrilling,
simple yet fierce on his hard stone bed,

his tongue flicking rhythms,
the sun—throbbing, spilling.



The Last Enchantment
by Michael R. Burch

Oh, Lancelot, my noble friend,
how time has thinned your ragged mane
and pinched your features; still you seem
though, much, much changed—somehow unchanged.

Your sword hand is, as ever, ready,
although the time for swords has passed.
Your eyes are fierce, and yet so steady
meeting mine ... you must not ask.

The time is not, nor ever shall be,
for Merlyn’s words were only words;
and now his last enchantment wanes,
and we must put aside our swords ...



Less Heroic Couplets: Unsmiley Simile, or, Down Time
by Michael R. Burch

Quora is down!
I frown:
how long can the universe suffice
without its ad-vice?



Fierce ancient skalds summoned verse from their guts;
today’s genteel poets prefer modern ruts.
—Michael R. Burch



Vice Grip
by Michael R. Burch

There’s no need to rant about Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
The cruelty of “civilization” suffices:
our ordinary vices.



Less Heroic Couplets: Fine Feathered Fiends I
by Michael R. Burch

Conformists of a feather
flock together.

Winner of the National Poetry Month Couplet Competition



Less Heroic Couplets: Fine Feathered Fiends II
by Michael R. Burch

Fascists of a feather
flock together.



Less Heroic Couplets: Shell Game
by Michael R. Burch

I saw a turtle squirtle!
Before you ask, “How fertile?”
The squirt came from its mouth.
Why do your thoughts fly south?



The Better Man: a Double Limerick
by Michael R. Burch

Dear Ed: I don’t understand why
you will publish this other guy—
when I’m brilliant, devoted,
one hell of a poet!
Yet you publish Anonymous. Fie!

Fie! A pox on your head if you favor
this poet who’s dubious, unsavor-
y, inconsistent in texts,
no address (I checked!):
since he’s plagiarized Unknown, I’ll wager!

“The Better Man” is a double limerick originally published by The Eclectic Muse



The Hippopotami
by Michael R. Burch

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



Cover Girl
by Michael R. Burch

Cunning
at sunning
and dunning,
the stunning
young woman’s in the running
to be found **** on the cover
of some patronizing lover.



First Base Freeze
by Michael R. Burch

I find your love unappealing
(no, make that appalling)
because you prefer kissing
then stalling.



Less Heroic Couplets: Negotiables
by Michael R. Burch

Love should be more than the sum of its parts—
of its potions and pills and subterranean arts.



Less Heroic Couplets: Mini-Ode to Stamina
by Michael R. Burch

When you’ve given so much
that I can’t bear your touch,
then from a safe distance
let me admire your persistence.

Published by ***** of Parnassus



Unapproved Absence, or, Slip Up
by Michael R. Burch

Christ, how I miss you!,
though your parting kiss is still warm on my lips.

Now the floor is not strewn with your stockings and slips
and the dishes are all stacked away.

You left me today ...
and each word left unspoken now whispers regrets.



The Red State Reaction
by Michael R. Burch

Where the hell are they hidin’
Sleepy Joe Biden?

And how the hell can the bleep
Do so much, in his sleep?



Red State Reject
by Michael R. Burch

I once was a pessimist
but now I’m more optimistic
ever since I discovered my fears
were unsupported by any statistic.



pretty pickle
by michael r. burch

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

The wordplay of “ur Gaud” and “u cant” is intentional, as always.



briefling
by michael r. burch

manishatched,hopsintotheMix,
cavorts,hassex(quick!,spawnan­ewBrood!);
then,likeamayfly,he’ssuddenlygone:
plantfood

Here “briefling” is a diminutive of “brief” and also a pun on “brief fling.”



Nonbeliever
by Michael R. Burch

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



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!



Hymn to Apollo
by Michael R. Burch, age 16

something of sunshine attracted my i
as it lazed on the afternoon sky,
golden, splashed on the easel of god;
what, i thought,
could this airy stuff be,
to, phantomlike, flit
through tall trees
on fall days, such as these?

and the breeze
whispered a dirge
to the vanishing light;
enchoired with the evening, it sang;
its voice enchantedly rang
chanting "Night! "...

till all the bright light
retired,
expired.

I wrote this poem around age 15 or 16 and it was published in the Lantern, my high school literary journal, as “Something of Sunshine.”



Erin
by Michael R. Burch

All that’s left of Ireland is her hair—
bright carrot—and her milkmaid-pallid skin,
her brilliant air of cavalier despair,
her train of children—some conceived in sin,
the others to avoid it. For nowhere
is evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin,
gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair!

How can men look upon her and not spin
like wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air?
They buy. They ***** to pat her nyloned shin,
to share her elevated, pale Despair ...
to find at last two spirits ease no one’s.

All that’s left of Ireland is the Care,
her impish grin, green eyes like leprechauns’.

This is one of my most-rejected poems, but I have always liked it myself.



Aflutter
by Michael R. Burch

This rainbow is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh.—Yahweh

You are gentle now, and in your failing hour
how like the child you were, you seem again,
and smile as sadly as the girl
                                              (age ten?)
who held the sparrow with the mangled wing
close to her heart.
                            It marveled at your power
but would not mend.
                                And so the world renews
old vows it seemed to make: false promises
spring whispers, as if nothing perishes
that does not resurrect to wilder hues
like rainbows’ eerie pacts we apprehend
but cannot fail to keep.
                                     Now in your eyes
I see the end of life that only dies
and does not care for bright, translucent lies.
Are tears so precious? These few, let us spend
together, as before, then lay to rest
these sparrows’ hearts aflutter at each breast.



Last Anthem
by Michael R. Burch

Where you have gone are the shadows falling . . .
does memory pale
like a fossil in shale
. . . do you not hear me calling?

Where you have gone do the shadows lengthen . . .
does memory wane
with the absence of pain
. . . is silence at last your anthem?



Lean Harvests (II)
by Michael R. Burch

for Tom Merrill

the trees are shedding their leaves again:
another summer is over.
the Christians are praising their Maker again,
but not the disconsolate plover:
     i hear him berate
     the fate
     of his mate;
he claims God is no body’s lover.



Sharon
by Michael R. Burch, circa age 15

apologies to Byron

I.

Flamingo-minted, pink, pink cheeks,
dark hair streaked with a lisp of dawnlight;
I have seen your shadow creep
through eerie webs spun out of twilight...

And I have longed to kiss your lips,
as sweet as the honeysuckle blooms,
and to hold your pale albescent body,
more curvaceous than the moon...

II.


Black-haired beauty, like the night,
stay with me till morning's light.
In shadows, Sharon, become love
until the sun lights our alcove.

Red, red lips reveal white stone:
whet my own, my passions hone.
My all in all I give to you,
in our tongues’ exchange of dew.

Now all I ever ask of you
is: do with me what now you do.

My love, my life, my only truth!

In shadows, Sharon, shed your gown;
let all night’s walls come tumbling down.

III.

Now I will love you long, Sharon,
as long as longing may be.

I wrote the first version of this poem around age 15.



Shock
by Michael R. Burch

It was early in the morning of the forming of my soul,
in the dawning of desire, with passion at first bloom,
with lightning splitting heaven to thunder's blasting roll
and a sense of welling fire and, perhaps, impending doom—

that I cried out through the tumult of the raging storm on high
for shelter from the chaos of the restless, driving rain . . .
and the voice I heard replying from a rift of bleeding sky
was mine, I'm sure, and, furthermore, was certainly insane.



Shadows
by Michael R. Burch

Alone again as evening falls,
I join gaunt shadows and we crawl
up and down my room's dark walls.

Up and down and up and down,
against starlight—strange, mirthless clowns—
we merge, emerge, submerge . . . then drown.

We drown in shadows starker still,
shadows of the somber hills,
shadows of sad selves we spill,

tumbling, to the ground below.
There, caked in grimy, clinging snow,
we flutter feebly, moaning low

for days dreamed once an age ago
when we weren't shadows, but were men . . .
when we were men, or almost so.



Stewark Island (Ambiguity)

“Take your child, your only child, whom you love...”

Seas are like tears—
they are never far away.
I have fled them now these eighteen years,
but I am nearer them today
than I ever have been.

Oh, I never could bear
the warm, salty water
or the cool comfort here
in the shade of an altar
sweeter than sin ...

Sweeter than sin,
yet cleansing, like love;
still its feel to doomed skin
either too little or too much
of whatever it is.

Seas and tears
are like life—
ridiculous,
ambiguous.

I wrote "Stewark Island (Ambiguity)" around age 17-18 as a high school junior or senior.



stones
by michael r. burch

i.
far below me lies a village
with its houses hewn from stone
and though Everyman who lives there
bravely claims he’s not alone,
i can tell him, yes u are!
for u cannot touch the stars
no matter how u try;
nor can u tame the mountain,
nor appease the darkening sky.

ii.
and late at night
their flinty fires blazing cannot warm their stony hearts;
though each villager “believes” (in what?)
the terror-fear departs
them only at mid-day
for they fear what Others say
when their walls have shut them in.

iii.
and do they sin?
who am i to say?
most stones are shades of gray;
what does it matter, anyway?

iv.
oh, i think that living is not easy
and that dying is not hard ...
as the stars above wink, meaningless,
so they are;
so we all are.

v.
a legion without sound
in dusky darkness drawing down
to settle on the town,
the Night is like a stone —
hard and dark and rolling on,
hard and dark and rolling on.



With my daughter, by a waterfall
by Michael R. Burch

By a fountain that slowly shed
its rainbows of water, I led
my youngest daughter.

And the rhythm of the waves
that casually lazed
made her sleepy as I rocked her.

By that fountain I finally felt
fulfillment of which I had dreamt
feeling May’s warm breezes pelt

petals upon me.
And I held her close in the crook of my arm
as she slept, breathing harmony.

By a river that brazenly rolled,
my daughter and I strolled
toward the setting sun,

and the cadence of the cold,
chattering waters that flowed
reminded us both of an ancient song,

so we sang it together as we walked along
—unsure of the words, but sure of our love—
as a waterfall sighed and the sun died above.

This poem was published by my college literary journal, Homespun, in 1977. I believe I wrote it the year before, around age 18.



Yesterday My Father Died
by Michael R. Burch

Rice Krispies and bananas,
milk and orange juice,
newspapers stiff with frozen dew . . .
Yesterday my father died
and the feelings that I tried to hide
he’ll never knew, unless
he saw through my disguise.

Alarm clocks and radios,
crumpled sheets and pillows,
housecoats and tattered, too-small slippers . . .
Why did I never say I cared?
Why were no secrets ever shared?
For now there's nothing left of him
except the clothes he used to wear.

Dimmed lights and smoky murmurs,
a brief “Goodnight!” and fitful slumber,
yesterday's forgotten dreams . . .
Why did my father have to go,
knowing that I loved him so?
Or did he know? Because, it seems,
I never told him so.

The last words he spoke to me,
his laughter in the night,
mementos jammed in cluttered cabinets . . .

I wrote "Yesterday My Father Died" in high school, circa age 16.



What The Roses Don’t Say
by Michael R. Burch

Oblivious to love, the roses bloom
and never touch ... They gather calm and still
to watch the busy insects swarm their leaves ...

They sway, bemused ... till rain falls with a chill
stark premonition: ice! ... and then they twitch
in shock at every outrage ... Soon they’ll blush

a paler scarlet, humbled in their beds,
for they’ll be naked; worse, their leaves will droop,
their petals quickly wither ... Spindly thorns

are poor defense against the winter’s onslaught ...
No, they are roses. Men should be afraid.

This was my second attempt at blank verse, after “Once Upon a Frozen Star.”



The Monarch’s Rose or The Hedgerow Rose
by Michael R. Burch

I lead you here to pluck this florid rose
still tethered to its post, a dreary mass
propped up to stiff attention, winsome-thorned
(what hand was ever daunted less to touch
such flame, in blatant disregard of all
but atavistic beauty)? Does this rose
not symbolize our love? But as I place
its emblem to your breast, how can this poem,
long centuries deflowered, not debase
all art, if merely genuine, but not
“original”? Love, how can reused words
though frailer than all petals, bent by air
to lovelier contortions, still persist,
defying even gravity? For here
beat Monarch’s wings: they rise on emptiness!

This was my third attempt at blank verse.



Fairest Diana
by Michael R. Burch

Fairest Diana, princess of dreams,
born to be loved and yet distant and lone,
why did you linger—so solemn, so lovely—
an orchid ablaze in a crevice of stone?

Was not your heart meant for tenderest passions?
Surely your lips—for wild kisses, not vows!
Why then did you languish, though lustrous, becoming
a pearl of enchantment cast before sows?

Fairest Diana, fragile as lilac,
as willful as rainfall, as true as the rose;
how did a stanza of silver-bright verse
come to be bound in a book of dull prose?



Elemental
by Michael R. Burch

for and after Dylan Thomas

The poet delves earth’s detritus—hard toil—
for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet;
each syllable his pen excretes—dense soil,
dark images impacted, rooted clay.

The poet sees the sea but feels its meaning—
the teeming brine, the mirrored oval flame
that leashes and excites its turgid surface ...
then squanders years imagining love’s the same.

Belatedly, he turns to what lies broken—
the scarred and furrowed plot he fiercely sifts,
among death’s sicksweet dungs and composts seeking
one element whose scorching flame uplifts.



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!



Happily Never After
by Michael R. Burch

Happily never after, we lived unmerrily
(write it!—like disaster) in Our Kingdom by the See
as the man from Porlock’s laughter drowned out love’s threnody.

We ditched the red wheelbarrow in slovenly Tennessee,
then made a picturebook of poems, a postcard for Tse-Tse,
a list of resolutions we knew we couldn’t keep,
and asylum decorations for the King in his dark sleep.

We made it new so often, strange newness, wearing old,
peeled off, and something rotten gleamed—dull yellow, not like gold—
like carelessness, or cowardice, and redolent of ***.
We stumbled off, our awkwardness—new Keystone comedy.

Huge cloudy symbols blocked the sun; onlookers strained to see.
We said We were the only One. Our gaseous Melody
had made us Joshuas, and so—the Bible, new-rewrit,
with god removed, replaced by Show and Glyphics and Sanskrit,
seemed marvelous to Us, although King Ezra said, “It’s S--t.”

We spent unhappy hours in Our Kingdom of the Pea,
drunk on such Awesome Power only Emperors can See.
We were Imagists and Vorticists, Projectivists, a Dunce,
Anarchists and Antarcticists and anti-Christs, and once
We’d made the world Our oyster and stowed away the pearl
of Our too-, too-polished wisdom, unanchored of the world,
We sailed away to Lilliput, to Our Kingdom by the See
and piped the rats to join Us, to live unmerrily
hereever and hereafter, in Our Kingdom of the Pea,
in the miniature ship Disaster in a jar in Tennessee.



Duet (I)
by Michael R. Burch

Oh, Wendy, by the firelight, how sad,
how worn and gray your auburn hair became!
You’re very silent, like an evening rain
that trembles on dark petals. Tears you’ve shed
for days we danced together, glisten now;
your flesh became translucent; and your brow
knits, gathered loosely. By the well-made bed
three portraits hang with knowing eyes, beloved,
but mine is not among them. Time has proved
our hearts both strangely mortal. If I said
I loved you once, how is it that could change?
And yet I watch you fondly; love is strange . . .

Oh, Peter, by the firelight, how bright
my thought of you remains, and if I said
I loved you once, then took him to my bed,
I did it for the need of love, one night
when you were far away. My heart endured
transfigurement—in flaming ash inured
to heartbreak and the violence of sight:
I saw myself grow old and thin and frail
with thinning hair about me, like a veil . . .
And so I loved him for myself, despite
the love between us—our first startled kiss.
But then I loved him for his humanness.
And then we both grew old, and it was right . . .

Oh, Wendy, if I fly, I fly beyond
these human hearts, these cities walled and tiered
against the night, beyond this vale of tears,
for love, if it exists, dies with the years . . .

No, Peter, love is constant as the heart
that keeps till its last beat a measured pace
and sets the fixtures of its dreams in place
by beds at first well-used, at last well-made,
and counts each face a joy, each tear a grace . . .



Duet (II)
by Michael R. Burch

If love is just an impulse meant to bring
two tiny hearts together, skittering
like hamsters from their Quonsets late at night
in search of lust’s productive exercise . . .

If love is the mutation of some gene
made radiant—an accident of bliss
played out by two small actors on a screen
of silver mesh, who never even kiss . . .

If love is evolution, nature’s way
of sorting out its DNA in pairs,
of matching, mating, sculpting flesh’s clay . . .
why does my wrinkled hamster climb his stairs

to set his wheel revolving, then descend
and stagger off . . . to make hers fly again?

Published by Bewildering Stories



Oasis
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

I want tears to form again
in the shriveled glands of these eyes
dried all these long years
by too much heated knowing.

I want tears to course down
these parched cheeks,
to star these cracked lips
like an improbable dew

in the heart of a desert.
I want words to burble up
like happiness, like the thought of love,
like the overwhelming, shimmering thought of you

to a nomad who
has only known drought.



Melting
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Entirely, as spring consumes the snow,
the thought of you consumes me: I am found
in rivulets, dissolved to what I know
of former winters’ passions. Underground,
perhaps one slender icicle remains
of what I was before, in some dark cave—
a stalactite, long calcified, now drains
to sodden pools whose milky liquid laves
the colder rock, thus washing something clean
that never saw the light, that never knew
the crust could break above, that light could stream:
so luminous,
                     so bright,
                                                      so beautiful . . .
I lie revealed, and so I stand transformed,
and all because you smiled on me, and warmed.

Published by Borderless Journal



All Afterglow
by Michael R. Burch

Something remarkable, perhaps ...
the color of her eyes ... though I forget
the color of her eyes ... perhaps her hair
the way it blew about ... I do not know
just what it was about her that has kept
her thought lodged deep in mine ... unmelted snow
that lasted till July would be less rare,
clasped in some frozen cavern where the wind
sculpts bright grotesqueries, ignoring springs’
and summers’ higher laws ... there thawing slow
and strange by strange degrees, one tick beyond
the freezing point which keeps all things the same
... till what remains is fragile and unlike
the world above, where melted snows and rains
form rivulets that, inundate with sun,
evaporate, and in life’s cyclic stream
remake the world again ... I do not know
that we can be remade—all afterglow.

Note: “inundate with snow” is not a typo.



Millay Has Her Way with a Vassar Professor
by Michael R. Burch

After a night of hard drinking and spreading her legs,
Millay hits the dorm, where the Vassar don begs:
“Please act more chastely, more discretely, more seemly!”
(His name, let’s assume, was, er ... Percival Queemly.)

“Expel me! Expel me!”—She flashes her eyes.
“Oh! Please! No! I couldn’t! That wouldn’t be wise,
for a great banished Shelley would tarnish my name ...
Eek! My game will be lame if I can’t milque your fame!”

“Continue to live here—carouse as you please!”
the beleaguered don sighs as he sags to his knees.
Millay grinds her crotch half an inch from his nose:
“I can live in your hellhole, strange man, I suppose ...
but the price is your firstborn, whom I’ll sacrifice to Moloch.”
(Which explains what became of pale Percy’s son, Enoch.)



Album
by Michael R. Burch

I caress them—trapped in brittle cellophane—
and I see how young they were, and how unwise;
and I remember their first flight—an old prop plane,
their blissful arc through alien blue skies ...

And I touch them here through leaves which—tattered, frayed—
are also wings, but wings that never flew:
like Nabokov’s wings—pinned, held. Here, time delayed,
their features never merged, remaining two ...

And Grief, which lurked unseen beyond the lens
or in shadows where It crept on furtive claws
as It scritched Its way into their hearts, depends
on sorrows such as theirs, and works Its jaws ...

and slavers for Its meat—those young, unwise,
who naively dare to dream, yet fail to see
how, lumbering sunward, Hope, ungainly, flies,
clutching to Her ruffled breast what must not be.



Musings at Giza
by Michael R. Burch

In deepening pools of shadows lies
the Sphinx, and men still fear his eyes.
Though centuries have passed, he waits.
Egyptians gather at the gates.

Great pyramids, the looted tombs
—how still and desolate their wombs!—
await sarcophagi of kings.
From eons past, a hammer rings.

Was Cleopatra's litter borne
along these streets now bleak, forlorn?
Did Pharaohs clad in purple ride
fierce stallions through a human tide?

Did Bocchoris here mete his law
from distant Kush to Saqqarah?
or Tutankhamen here once smile
upon the children of the Nile?

or Nefertiti ever rise
with wild abandon in her eyes
to gaze across this arid plain
and cry, “Great Isis, live again!”

Published by Golden Isis and The Eclectic Muse (Canada)



The People Loved What They Had Loved Before
by Michael R. Burch

We did not worship at the shrine of tears;
we knew not to believe, not to confess.
And so, ahemming victors, to false cheers,
we wrote off love, we gave a stern address
to things that we disapproved of, things of yore.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

We did not build stone monuments to stand
six hundred years and grow more strong and arch
like bridges from the people to the Land
beyond their reach. Instead, we played a march,
pale Neros, sparking flames from door to door.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

We could not pipe of cheer, or even woe.
We played a minor air of Ire (in E).
The sheep chose to ignore us, even though,
long destitute, we plied our songs for free.
We wrote, rewrote and warbled one same score.
And the people loved what they had loved before.

At last outlandish wailing, we confess,
ensued, because no listeners were left.
We built a shrine to tears: our goddess less
divine than man, and, like us, long bereft.
We stooped to love too late, too Learned to *****.
And the people loved what they had loved before.



Bertolt Brecht Translations

These are my modern English translations of poems written in German by Bertolt Brecht. After the poems I have translations of epigrams and quotations by Bertolt Brecht.

The Burning of the Books
by Bertolt Brecht
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

When the Regime
commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.

Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged: he'd been excluded!

He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fiery letters to the incompetents in power —
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen —
Haven't I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!

Published by Poetry Super Highway, The Tory and Convivium



Parting
by Bertolt Brecht
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We embrace;
my fingers trace
rich cloth
while yours encounter only moth-
eaten fabric.

A quick hug:
you were invited to the gay soiree
while the minions of the 'law'
relentlessly pursue me.

We talk about the weather
and our friendship's eternal magic.
Anything else would be too bitter,
too tragic.



Radio Poem
by Bertolt Brecht
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You, little box, held tightly
to me
during my escape
so that your delicate tubes do not break;
carried from house to house, from ship to train,
so that my enemies may continue communicating with me
by land and by sea
and even in my bed, to my pain;
the last thing I hear at night, the first thing when I rise,
recounting their many conquests and my cares,
promise me not to go silent in a sudden
surprise.



The Mask of Evil
by Bertolt Brecht
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A Japanese woodcarving hangs on my wall —
the mask of an ancient demon, limned with golden lacquer.
Not unsympathetically, I observe
the forehead's bulging veins,
the strain
such malevolence requires.



Bertolt Brecht Epigrams and Quotations

These are my modern English translations of epigrams and quotations by Bertolt Brecht.

Everyone chases the way happiness feels,
unaware how it nips at their heels.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

The world of learning takes a crazy turn
when teachers are taught to discern!
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Unhappy, the land that lacks heroes.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Hungry man, reach for the book:
it's a hook,
a harpoon.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Because things are the way they are,
things can never stay as they were.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

War is like love; true...
it finds a way through.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

What happens to the hole
when the cheese is no longer whole?
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is easier to rob by setting up a bank
than by threatening the poor clerk.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Do not fear death so much, or strife,
but rather fear the inadequate life.
— loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Keywords/Tags: Bertolt Brecht, translation, translations, German, modern English, epigram, epigrams, quote, quotes, quotations



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,
impaled with hard 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.



Bible libel (ii)
by Michael R. Burch

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

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

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



Disconcerted
by Michael R. Burch

Meg, my sweet,
fresh as a daisy,
when I’m with you
my heart beats like crazy
& my future gets hazy ...



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 such great matters,
ordained that everything irreplaceable shatters.



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.



Having Touched You
by Michael R. Burch

What I have lost
is not less
than what I have gained.

And for each moment passed
like the sun to the west,
another remained

suspended in memory
like a flower
in crystal

so that eternity
is but an hour
and fall

is no longer a season
but a state
of mind.

I have no reason
to wait;
the wind

does not pause
for remembrance
or regret

because
there is only fate and chance.
And so then, forget . . .

Forget that we were very happy
for a day.
That day was my lifetime.

Before that day I was empty
and the sky was grey.
You were the sunshine,

the sunshine that gave me life.
I took root
and I grew.

Now the touch of death is like a terrible knife,
and yet I can bear it,
having touched you.



Children
by Michael R. Burch

There was a moment
suspended in time like a swelling drop of dew about to fall,
impendent, pregnant with possibility ...

when we might have made ...
anything,
anything we dreamed,
almost anything at all,
coalescing dreams into reality.

Oh, the love we might have fashioned
out of a fine mist and the nightly sparkle of the cosmos
and the rhythms of evening!

But we were young,
and what might have been is now a dark abyss of loss
and what is left is not worth saving.

But, oh, you were lovely,
child of the wild moonlight, attendant tides and doting stars,
and for a day,

what little we partook
of all that lay before us seemed so much,
and passion but a force
with which to play.



we did not Dye in vain!
by michael r. burch

from “songs of the sea snails”

though i’m just a slimy crawler,
     my lineage is proud:
my forebears gave their lives
     (oh, let the trumps blare loud!)
so purple-mantled Royals
     might stand out in a crowd.

i salute you, fellow loyals,
     who labor without scruple
as your incomes fall
     while deficits quadruple
to swaddle unjust Lords
     in bright imperial purple!

Originally published by The American Dissident

Notes: In ancient times the purple dye produced from the secretions of purpura mollusks (sea snails) was known as “Tyrian purple,” “royal purple” and “imperial purple.” It was greatly prized in antiquity, and was very expensive according to the historian Theopompus: “Purple for dyes fetched its weight in silver at Colophon.” Thus, purple-dyed fabrics became status symbols, and laws often prevented commoners from possessing them. The production of Tyrian purple was tightly controlled in Byzantium, where the imperial court restricted its use to the coloring of imperial silks. A child born to the reigning emperor was literally porphyrogenitos ("born to the purple") because the imperial birthing apartment was walled in porphyry, a purple-hued rock, and draped with purple silks. Royal babies were swaddled in purple; we know this because the iconodules, who disagreed with the emperor Constantine about the veneration of images, accused him of defecating on his imperial purple swaddling clothes!



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



Roll on, Red River
by Michael R. Burch

Roll on, Red River,
a cowboy has died.
Roll on; we lay him
down here at your side.
Carry him off
to the wild, raging sea...
     Roll on, Red River,
     and set his soul free.

Roll on, Red River,
roll on to the sea,
and sing him to sleep
as you roll up his dreams.
Sing him to sleep
with some old, lonesome song...
     Now roll on, Red River,
     and roll him along.

Roll on, Red River
and say a kind word
for an old surly cowhand
who died poor and hurt;
poor as a pauper
and hurt by his friends...
     Roll on, Red River,
     roll on to the end.

Roll on, Red River,
a cowboy has died.
Nobody loved him
and nobody cried.
A cowboy's not much,
but at least he's a man...
     So roll on, Red River,
     roll on and be ******.

I believe I wrote the original version of this poem around age 14-15.



Moore or Less
by Michael R. Burch

for Richard Moore

Less is more —
in a dress, I suppose,
and in intimate clothes
like crotchless hose.

But now Moore is less
due to death’s subtraction
and I must confess:
I hate such redaction!



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

... u were born(e) 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 ...



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 ...



The Tally
by Hafiz aka Hafez
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Lovers
don't reveal
all
their Secrets;
under the covers
they
may
count each other's Moles
(that reside
and hide
in the shy regions
by forbidden holes),
then keep the final tally
strictly
from Aunt Sally!



jasbryx
by michael r. burch

hidden deep inside of Me
is someone else, and he is free;
he laughs aloud, but never is heard;
he flits about, as free as a bird,
so unlike Me

silently within Myself,
he shouts aloud and shuns the shelf
that others deem to be his place;
yet society is not disgraced,
nor are we,
for he is never heard
above the spoken word

o, i am not as others are —
pale things of ice, devoid of fire,
for i am all i seem to be —
innocent, childlike, frolicsome, free —
and i raise no ire

no, he is not as others are —
he lives his life without a care;
and he is all he seems to be —
wild, rambunctious, fervent, free,
so unlike Me

I wrote "jasbryx" in high school, under the influence of e. e. cummings, around age 16.



The Red State Reaction
by Michael R. Burch

Where the hell are they hidin’
Sleepy Joe Biden?

And how the hell can the bleep
Do so much, in his sleep?



Red State Reject
by Michael R. Burch

I once was a pessimist
but now I’m more optimistic
ever since I discovered my fears
were unsupported by any statistic.



Late Frost
by Michael R. Burch

The matters of the world like sighs intrude;
out of the darkness, windswept winter light
too frail to solve the puzzle of night’s terror
resolves the distant stars to salts: not white,

but gray, dissolving in the frigid darkness.
I stoke cooled flames and stand, perhaps revealed
as equally as gray, a faded hardness
too malleable with time to be annealed.

Light sprinkles through dull flakes, devoid of color;
which matters not. I did not think to find
a star like Bethlehem’s. I turn my collar
to trudge outside for cordwood. There, outlined

within the doorway’s arch, I see the tree
that holds its boughs aloft, as if to show
they harbor neither love, nor enmity,
but only stars: insignias I know—

false ornaments that flash, overt and bright,
but do not warm and do not really glow,
and yet somehow bring comfort, soft delight:
a rainbow glistens on new-fallen snow.



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.)

The second stanza is a punning reference to the Tailhook scandal, in which US Navy and Marine aviation officers were alleged to have sexually assaulted up to 83 women and seven men.



Excelsior
by Michael R. Burch

I lift my eyes and laugh, Excelsior . . .
Why do you come, wan spirit, heaven-gowned,
complaining that I am no longer “pure?”

I threw myself before you, and you frowned,
so full of noble chastity, renowned
for leaving maidens maidens. In the dark

I sought love’s bright enchantment, but your lips
were stone; my fiery metal drew no spark
to light the cold dominions of your heart.

What realms were ours? What leasehold? And what claim
upon these territories, cold and dark,
do you seek now, pale phantom? Would you light

my heart in death and leave me ashen-white,
as you are white, extinguished by the Night?



The Unregal Beagle vs. The Voracious Eagle
by Michael R. Burch

I’d rather see an eagle
than a beagle
because they’re so **** regal.

But when it’s time to wiggle
and to giggle,
I’d rather embrace an angel
than an evil.

Plus, when it’s time to share the same small space,
I’d much rather have a beagle lick my face!



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

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

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

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

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



Milestones Toward Oblivion
by Michael R. Burch

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
—Ronald Reagan

A milestone here leans heavily
against a gaunt, golemic tree.
These words are chiseled thereupon:
"One mile and then Oblivion."

Swift larks that once swooped down to feed
on groping slugs, such insects breed
within their radiant flesh and bones ...
they did not heed the milestones.

Another marker lies ahead,
the only tombstone to the dead
whose eyeless sockets read thereon:
"Alas, behold Oblivion."

Once here the sun shone fierce and fair;
now night eternal shrouds the air
while winter, never-ending, moans
and drifts among the milestones.

This road is neither long nor wide ...
men gleam in death on either side.
Not long ago, they pondered on
milestones toward Oblivion.

Originally published by Borderless Journal (Singapore)



Mingled Air
by Michael R. Burch

for Beth

Ephemeral as breath, still words consume
the substance of our hearts; the very air
that fuels us is subsumed; sometimes the hair
that veils your eyes is lifted and the room

seems hackles-raised: a spring all tension wound
upon a word. At night I feel the care
evaporate—a vapor everywhere
more enervate than sighs: a mournful sound

grown blissful. In the silences between
I hear your heart, forget to breathe, and glow
somehow. And though the words subside, we know
the hearth light and the comfort embers gleam

upon our dreaming consciousness. We share
so much so common: sighs, breath, mingled air.



Doppelgänger
by Michael R. Burch

Here the only anguish
is the bedraggled vetch lying strangled in weeds,
the customary sorrows of the wild persimmons,
the whispered complaints of the stately willow trees
disentangling their fine lank hair,

and what is past.

I find you here, one of many things lost,
that, if we do not recover, will undoubtedly vanish forever ...
now only this unfortunate stone,
this pale, disintegrate mass,
this destiny, this unexpected shiver,

this name we share.



Role Reversal
by Michael R. Burch

The fluted lips of statues
mock the bronze gaze
of the dying sun . . .

We are nonplussed, they say,
smacking their wet lips,
jubilant . . .

We are always refreshed, always undying,
always young, forever unapologetic,
forever gay, smiling,

and though it seems man has made us,
on his last day, we will see him unmade—
we will watch him decay

as if he were clay,
and we had assumed his flesh,
hissing our disappointment.



Improve yourself by others' writings, attaining freely what they purchased at the expense of experience. — Socrates, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Celebrate the New Year?
The cat is not impressed,
the dogs shiver.
—Michael R. Burch



Relativity and the "Physics" of Love
by Albert Einstein
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Sit next to a pretty girl for an hour,
it seems like a minute.
Sit on a red-hot stove for a minute,
it seems like an hour.
That's relativity!

Oh, it should be possible
to explain the laws of physics
to a barmaid! . . .
but how could she ever,
in a million years,
explain love to an Einstein?

All these primary impulses,
not easily described in words,
are the springboards
of man's actions—because
any man who can drive safely
while kissing a pretty girl
is simply not giving the kiss
the attention it deserves!



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

Ebb-tide:
everything we stoop to collect
slips through our fingers ...
—Chiyo-ni, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Ascendance Transcendence
by Michael R. Burch

Breaching the summit
I reach
the horizon’s last rays.
—Michael R. Burch



Fledglings
by Michael R. Burch

With her small eyes, pale blue and unforgiving,
she taught me: December is not for those
unweaned of love, the chirping nestlings
who bicker for worms with dramatic throats

still pinkly exposed, ... who have yet to learn
the first harsh lesson of survival: to devour
their weaker siblings in the high-leafed ferned
fortress and impregnable bower

from which men must fly like improbable dreams
to become poets. They have yet to grasp that,
before they can soar starward like fanciful archaic machines,
they must first assimilate the latest technology, ... or

lose all in the sudden realization of gravity,
following Icarus’s sun-unwinged, singed trajectory.



The Higher Atmospheres
by Michael R. Burch

Whatever we became climbed on the thought
of Love itself; we floated on plumed wings
ten thousand miles above the breasted earth
that vexed us to such Distance; now all things
seem small and pale, a girdle’s handsbreadth girth ...

I break upon the rocks; I break; I fling
my human form about; I writhe; I writhe.
Invention is not Mastery, nor wings
Salvation. Here the Vulture cruelly chides
and plunges at my eyes, and coos and sings ...

Oh, some will call the sun my doom, since Love
melts callow wax the higher atmospheres
made brittle. I flew high, just high enough
to melt such frozen resins ... thus, Her jeers.



Ode to Postmodernism, or, Bury Me at St. Edmonds!
by Michael R. Burch

“Bury St. Edmonds—Amid the squirrels, pigeons, flowers and manicured lawns of Abbey Gardens, one can plug a modem into a park bench and check e-mail, download files or surf the Web, absolutely free.”—Tennessean News Service. (The bench was erected free of charge by the British division of MSN, after a local bureaucrat wrote a contest-winning ode of sorts to MSN.)

Our post-modernist-equipped park bench will let
you browse the World Wide Web, the Internet,
commune with nature, interact with hackers,
design a virus, feed brown bitterns crackers.

Discretely-wired phone lines lead to plugs—
four ports we swept last night for nasty bugs,
so your privacy’s assured (a *******’s fine)
while invited friends can scan the party line:

for Internet alerts on new positions,
the randier exploits of politicians,
exotic birds on web cams (DO NOT FEED!).
The cybersex is great, it’s guaranteed

to leave you breathless—flushed, free of disease
and malware viruses. Enjoy the trees,
the birds, the bench—this product of Our pen.
We won in with an ode to MSN.



Excerpts from the Journal of Dorian Gray
by Michael R. Burch

It was not so much dream, as error;
I lay and felt the creeping terror
of what I had become take hold . . .

The moon watched, silent, palest gold;
the picture by the mantle watched;
the clock upon the mantle talked,
in halting voice, of minute things . . .

Twelve strokes like lashes and their stings
scored anthems to my loneliness,
but I have dreamed of what is best,
and I have promised to be good . . .

Dismembered limbs in vats of wood,
foul acids, and a strangled cry!
I did not care, I watched him die . . .

Each lovely rose has thorns we miss;
they ***** our lips, should we once kiss
their mangled limbs, or think to clasp
their violent beauty. Dream, aghast,
the flower of my loveliness,
this ageless face (for who could guess?),
and I will kiss you when I rise . . .

The patterns of our lives comprise
strange portraits. Mine, I fear,
proved dear indeed . . . Adieu!
The knife’s for you.



Flight
by Michael R. Burch

Eagle, raven, blackbird, crow . . .
What you are I do not know.
Where you go I do not care.
I’m unconcerned whose meal you bear.
But as you mount the sun-splashed sky,
I only wish that I could fly.
I only wish that I could fly.

Robin, hawk or whippoorwill . . .
Should men care if you hunger still?
I do not wish to see your home.
I do not wonder where you roam.
But as you scale the sky's bright stairs,
I only wish that I were there.
I only wish that I were there.

Sparrow, lark or chickadee . . .
Your markings I disdain to see.
Where you fly concerns me not.
I scarcely give your flight a thought.
But as you wheel and arc and dive,
I, too, would feel so much alive.
I, too, would feel so much alive.

I don’t remember exactly when this poem was written. I believe it was around 1974-1975, which would have made me 16 or 17 at the time. I do remember not being happy with the original version of the poem, and I revised it more than once over the years, including recently at age 61! The original poem was influenced by William Cullen Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl.”



The Princess and the Pauper
by Michael R. Burch

for Norman Kraeft in memory of his beloved wife June

Here was a woman bright, intent on life,
who did not flinch from Death, but caught his eye
and drew him, powerless, into her spell
of wanting her himself, so much the lie
that she was meant for him—obscene illusion!—
made him seem a monarch throned like God on high,
when he was less than nothing; when to die
meant many stultifying, pained embraces.

She shed her gown, undid the tangled laces
that tied her to the earth: then she was his.
Now all her erstwhile beauty he defaces
and yet she grows in hallowed loveliness—
her ghost beyond perfection—for to die
was to ascend. Now he begs, penniless.



Professor Poets
by Michael R. Burch

Professor poets remind me of drones
chasing the Classical queen's aging bones.
With bottle-thick glasses they still see to write —
droning on, endlessly buzzing all night.
And still in our classrooms their tomes are decreed ...
Perhaps they're too busy with buzzing to breed?



Deliver Us ...
by Michael R. Burch

for my mother, Christine Ena Burch

The night is dark and scary—
under your bed, or upon it.

That blazing light might be a star ...
or maybe the Final Comet.

But two things are sure: your mother’s love
and your puppy’s kisses, doggonit!



The Song of Roland
by Michael R. Burch

“for spring in retreat”

Rain down,
strange murmurous water...
no, summer is not yet nigh.

Cease your complaining,
for May is,
calling December a lie,
still rocking the high white sky.

Sleep now,
summer hours...
too soon your time shall come.

Softly straining,
the raining
spring begs, "Let me run
one more hour beneath the sun,
for soon I shall be gone."

Lie down,
weary Roland,
for summer is not yet nigh.

Remember a pyre
of stars blazing higher
upon night’s immense dark sky
unsettling as her eyes,
unregretful, as you died...

Lie down,
weary Roland,
for summer is not yet nigh.



Poet to poet
by Michael R. Burch

I have a dream
...pebbles in a sparkling sand...
of wondrous things.

I see children
...variations of the same man...
playing together.

Black and yellow, red and white,
... stone and flesh, a host of colors...
together at last.

I see a time
...each small child another's cousin...
when freedom shall ring.

I hear a song
...sweeter than the sea sings...
of many voices.

I hear a jubilation
... respect and love are the gifts we must bring...
shaking the land.

I have a message,
...sea shells echo, the melody rings...
the message of God.

I have a dream
...all pebbles are merely smooth fragments of stone...
of many things.

I live in hope
...all children are merely small fragments of One...
that this dream shall come true.

I have a dream!
... but when you're gone, won't the dream have to end?...
Oh, no, not as long as you dream my dream too!

Here, hold out your hand, let's make it come true.
... i can feel it begin...
Lovers and dreamers are poets too.
...poets are lovers and dreamers too...

Published by Borderless Journal (Singapore)



Editor's Notes
by Michael R. Burch

Eat, drink and be merry
(tomorrow, be contrary).

(***** and complain
in bad refrain,
but please—not till I'm on the plane!)

Write no poem before its time
(in your case, this means never).
Linger over every word
(by which, I mean forever).

By all means, read your verse aloud.
I'm sure you'll be a star
(and just as distant, when I'm gone);
your poems are beauteous (afar).



Amending Walls
by Michael R. Burch

“Do as dad did, from hating queers to praying.”
Robert Frost, one fears, was undoubtedly right.
They can’t go beyond their father’s saying.

They’re building walls, the intolerant and the straying.
They’re building walls again, to shut in night.
“Do as dad did, from hating queers to praying.”

“Stabbed in the back!” Thus cry the ones betraying,
who turn their sullen backs on the Lord of Light.
They can’t go beyond their father’s saying.

Screaming curses, froth-mouthed, vile and baying,
having no care for their frailest victim’s plight.
“Do as dad did, from hating queers to praying.”

The oddest of heroes, fraying while still braying,
embracing hatred, it seems, with great delight,
they can’t go beyond their father’s saying.

Raging at children, brutes intent on slaying.
Robert Frost, one fears, was undoubtedly right.
“Do as dad did, from hating queers to praying.”
They can’t go beyond their father’s saying.



My Epitaph
by Michael R. Burch

Do not weep for me, when I am gone.
I lived, and ate my fill, and gorged on life.
You will not find beneath this glossy stone
the man who sowed and reaped and gathered days
like flowers, undismayed they would not keep.
Go lightly then, and leave me to my sleep.



Everlasting
by Michael R. Burch

Where the wind goes
when the storm dies,
there my spirit lives
though I close my eyes.

Do not weep for me;
I am never far.
Whisper my name
to the last star ...

then let me sleep,
think of me no more.

Still ...
By denying death
its terminal sting,
in my words I remain
everlasting.



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 these 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.