"vaudevillian" poems
Smoking American Spirits
Like that name is not sickly ironic
As I watch the moon
And blow your name
Out through my teeth.
After all of it
I still can’t decide
If I’m happy that you’re happy
Or hate you for leaving me
In the cold to gape
At a barren rock.
The moon is a visceral spirit,
Pundit of creation myths,
Vaudevillian purveyor
Of heavy handed profundity,
Reflects the sun
When nothing else can,
Means so much to so many;
The moon is an entropic
Collusion of earth-chunk
That happens to orbit us,
Objectively meaningless,
Communicating with the ocean
As ants ***** chemicals
Into each others mouths to converse.
Staring together up into
The gaping gnash of space,
Humans give the moon its meaning
Just as two people falling in love
Forever inhabit midsummer nights
'Till one leaves in a haze
Of evaporating brain chemistry.
I really am happy you’re happy,
Because I really do love you
Even after everything,
And I really do hate you
Because it hurts so much
And you were so selfish,
Go **** yourself,
Why can't I feel both?
Just this silly girl,
Just two broken people,
Look at what we made Chlo,
It's hanging in the sky
Strung up with used filaments.
I love you and hate you still
Because knowing the moon
Is a barren rock
Makes what it has become
Incandescently, infinitely beautiful.
Mar 27, 2013
Mar 27, 2013 at 12:15 AM UTC
You cringeworthy, evil pismire;
Your father did surely miss-sire
This personification of flatulence,
The embodiment of self importance
Overflowing with abject peccancy
Devoid of any sign of respectability
Replete with gross odoriferousness
Horribly and infamously unscrupulous.
You have reveled in misrepresentation
And tried to elevate your calumniation
Disinformation and deception exists
As capitalistic dissembling persists.
You’ve collected an evil government
Built mostly of human excrement
And have such a lack of veracity
That you speak in constant mendacity.
Sycophantic eructations of dogmatic bile
Issue from your unsympathetic smile
And your inauthentic glad-handed gropes
As if we all of us are unbright gullible dopes
That buy your fabrications completely
While you pilfer and prevaricate indiscreetly.
You are a Vaudevillian villain miscast as star,
But most of us know exactly what you are.
Deceit, deception, dishonesty; a tragedy
But not for you, for us and our country.
Distortion, evasion and fabrication the rules;
You despair of any other kinds of tools.
Falsehoods, fictions and forgery are your tricks.
You demand we build with straw-less bricks
Your erections that are planned to be palaces
Filled with your giant golden carved phalluses.
Those monuments, inanotomically correct,
Established to celebrate and somehow protect
A mountebank on the way to an overseas bank
Claiming to eradicate the scoria he creates
That decades of privation will not quite alleviate.
But you, the Great Prevaricator, will always blame
Other players in your sick, unconstitutional game
Instead of admitting your complicity and guilt
About the disgusting, putrid swamp you built.
Jun 13, 2018
Jun 13, 2018 at 2:32 PM UTC
1.
Diaphanous dragons disgorge a deluge of diamonds
into the shadowed crevices of cumulus clouds.
Ruby-red sapphires overpopulate the glistening sky
like carbon-hardened locust: gorgeous messengers of the gods.
The Earth wears a crimson helmet, shielded from
the odious absence of ozone above the North and South poles.
Near Minneapolis, John Berryman's wizened body shatters
on the frozen riverbed below the Washington Avenue Bridge.
Angels weep to see him jump, as he waves a vaudevillian goodbye.
The sapphires blanch, then turn an angry, violent violet. Black holes ahead.
2.
Shakespeare and Mr. Bones **** on mortality's skimpy
skeleton of life. Will this broken body be resurrected?
Does it deserve such distinction? Better yet, does its daring,
drunken destroyer? Four hundred Dream Songs nod yes.
Berryman toddled ticklishly toward the last traces of transcendence.
Love & Fame broadcast how terribly his faith failed to trade
daily delirium tremens for the mysterium tremendum.
The God he prayed to demanded a syntax pure, plain.and perfect.
With jolts of jest, He jimmied paradoxes into koans. Berryman
howls for the sound of one diamond scratching the outline of his body on ice.
3.
He left a legacy broader than liquor, lechery and the love-struck ladies.
Lust seeded his fallow lacunae and lazily broke his wife's heart.
Scholarship scooted him to the squeamish, secluded top
of his Shakespearean class: Signal student turns trusted teacher.
Poetry cloned the Oklahoma clown in him. No successors,
no schools, no savvy peers, save Lowell. his fellow manic-depressive.
He dreamed songs of hilarity, humility, history, dehumanization.
Poetry proved serious business until it learned to laugh at itself.
Sapphires crackle under the weight of the creaking sun. They spin a kaleidoscopic rainbow of colors onto Berryman's obituary. Somehow, he has won:
An irreplaceable jewel of the sky.
Jul 23, 2019
Jul 23, 2019 at 4:01 PM UTC
The retired vaudevillian engraves his love's epitaph while eating caramelized clusters
The local sodomites huddle around and mourn outside the morgue
Waiting for the body of their **** to be handed over
They've given her body an overhaul
She looks more alive than when she was living
Hobnobbing with the well-to-do
The retired vaudevillian comes to collect the body of his deceased wife
He looks down at the sodomites
For their outlandish appearance and choice of employment has resulted in mistrust
"Oh my love, why couldn't you have been the driver instead of the passenger whose body was jettisoned into the air and smashed upon the asphalt?"
"She could do ten thousand breast strokes, paint masterpieces with one brush stroke"
The sodomites began to taunt the vaudevillian
Calling him washed up
He retorted back calling them toothless heathen ******
A mercenary was called to end the dispute outside of the morgue
He killed half of the sodomites and tasered the vaudevillian
The undertaker wheeled out the body bag on dolly
But he lost control, and the body went careening down the hill into a cloudy bay
The party of mourners grouped around the bay and watched the body float on to the afterlife
She left behind her has-been husband and her **** ******* cohorts
I bet she would have appreciated this little organized dime store wake
Jun 28, 2014
Jun 28, 2014 at 9:46 PM UTC
I feel like a mildly hopped up snake oil salesman,
a roadside vaudevillian whose vim and vigor stems from
the knowledge that you can't stop the flow of words,
the spell has to be smooth and unbroken,
otherwise the cracks in the truth start to snap for attention,
and when you start writing things like that down,
it's clear that not everything is the way it is supposed to be.
Jul 6, 2012
Jul 6, 2012 at 6:52 PM UTC
Life is purchased
with metaphors
you jingled those coins
loaned them to anyone
gave your students
a lift
down alliterative avenues
danced at the front
of the room
The plantation overseer
cruel as dominion allows
stirred your fears
made a ***** in your confidence
Schooled in permitted wrongs
she let the lash fall
on those on whom it is allowed
Indulged her charity
honeyed harms for some
obfuscated raw aggression to others
hooked the faithful
for the delicacy of a minnow glittered soul
because pain like tears
is a universal taste
You rallied and held on.
Recalling the poverty
of the adjunct
you feared falling
through that trap door
Oh faithful moon man
you leapt over the danger
turned fear to comedy
showed us the stairs
with howling laughter
and for a time
climbing the career steps
out of the basement
I tried a Vaudevillian
performance too
at your urging.
You cultivated adoring lines of students
your succulents
yearning for the secret
how to survive
in dry times
how to nourish the roots
when life is scorched
and fragile and taut
You imparted the gift to sustain the soul
to anyone who would listen
a verse on the tongue
is the secret wellspring
and you showed them all
how to find it.
Oct 9, 2017
Oct 9, 2017 at 1:29 AM UTC
this modern nation is a quick read,
a stolen glance at a cue card -
a political pitch to the preoccupied
and a script for the social-scene-complacent -
cues are confused for cures
but you can't fix what's damaging itself
with every mindless media post;
sound the laugh track
and drown the issues.
criticize the bare human face,
watch, revere the irreverent -
celebrities paint a new mask,
become a vaudevillian magazine ad
and we can't stand ourselves as we are;
copy plastic faces, calm the nerves.
maybe it's vanity
or maybe it's a way to ignore
the person wearing the mask
because the blank face underneath
the oil-paint faux beauty
reminds us too much of what we've become;
only the faceless need to paint one on.
spin the truth so it tastes sweet
and acquiesce, swallow it down,
take it with a dose of the relatable
and some self-medicated doubt
while the paper we crave digs our graves.
it's all fake but it's safe
so we accept our reality,
overjoyed that we hide so well together.
but the youth thrives on boundaries
like they're fences that need jumping
and they get caught up in this world
that doesn't hesitate
to spit hatred at the innocent
and dismantle plans for peace.
too young, they're painting new faces,
facing the famed like they're gods,
shaping themselves in the image they see.
classic literature is laid to rot
in the corner of a room
lit only by a computer screen
and all we do is watch,
watch the flies collect,
follow the moths and maggots,
drawn to light and the smell of decay.
Aug 21, 2016
Aug 21, 2016 at 3:14 PM UTC
Boundless
by Michael R. Burch
for Jeremy Michael Burch
Every day we whittle away at the essential solidity of him,
and every day a new sharp feature emerges:
a feature we’ll spend creative years: planing, smoothing, refining,
trying to find some new Archaic Torso of Apollo, or Thinker . . .
And if each new day a little of the boisterous air of youth is deflated
in him, if the hours of small pleasures spent chasing daffodils
in the outfield as the singles become doubles, become triples,
become unconscionable errors, become victories lost,
become lives wasted beyond all possible hope of repair . . .
if what he was becomes increasingly vague—like a white balloon careening
into clouds; like a child striding away aggressively toward manhood,
hitching an impressive rucksack over sagging, sloping shoulders,
shifting its vaudevillian burden back and forth,
then pausing to look back at us with an almost comical longing . . .
if what he wants is only to be held a little longer against a forgiving *****
to chase after daffodils in the outfield regardless of scores;
to sail away like a balloon
on a firm string, always sure to return when the line tautens,
till he looks down upon us from some removed height we cannot quite see,
bursting into tears over us:
what, then, of our aspirations for him, if he cannot breathe,
cannot rise enough to contemplate the earth with his own vision,
unencumbered, but never untethered, forsaken . . .
cannot grow brightly, steadily, into himself—flying beyond us?
Keywords/Tags: child, childhood, boy, son, growing up, maturation, puberty, adulthood, manhood, flight, flying, soaring
Apr 6, 2020
Apr 6, 2020 at 3:30 AM UTC
Rap game is a glass ceiling,
Shucky ducky quack quack,
Lame ***** reeling,
Over oldies and throwbacks.
Imitating vaudevillians,
Because originality has flattened,
Such simpletons,
More useless than pions,
Lacking the accuracy,
Of a destructo-disc thrown by Krillin.
Tacky ducks more quack than Daffy.
Quirky queens more dunce than Daphne.
The mystery is in the ink that separates,
The Shaggy’s from the prodigies.
Could stab a friend in the back,
For snacks like Scooby.
Not much of a strategy.
It’s like your trying to intentionally,
Upset a Wookie.
Maybe your just tone deaf,
Like Eminem referencing the dougie,
Or make dad jokes more horrific than Chucky.
Get it?
Because chucky is a horror movie?
Why aren’t you laughing?
Rap game is a glass ceiling,
Shucky ducky quack quack,
Lame ***** reeling,
Over oldies and throwbacks.
Ll cool j don’t call it a comeback,
Slavery of the masses,
Taking Prozac,
To combat malpractice,
Depression a felon inside and outside,
Laws becoming lawless and unbalanced,
Innocents committing suicide,
Because the powerful are careless,
These ******* should be embarrassed,
That their privileged ***
Can fake smiles enough to win Emmy’s
Minds material madness.
Gotta mind your true enemy.
Instead of being consumed by fadness.
Losing ones humanity,
To become the next Ken or Barbie.
But you too bad and boujee,
A hollow shell stuck in comatose,
Consumed by the sea,
Set up to fall like dominos,
Thinking you free,
But can’t see,
As the crows grow,
Bundled in circles,
As your drowning,
In asbestos,
For every pro there are cons that lurk in the shadows.
Jan 6, 2021
Jan 6, 2021 at 4:04 PM UTC
Vaudevillian foes
Basking in the light of deceit
You shouldn't play with peoples hearts like that
You don't know what you've done
And while most was behind closed doors
I was there when it wasn't
And I stayed blue and true
And loyalty flowed from my broken body
Like blood, as I looked at you
And now that everything is said and done
I am the bad guy
For helping a friend
Feb 11, 2017
Feb 11, 2017 at 2:05 PM UTC