I want you to hold my hand
While we sit in the corner booth—
letting the world pass us by.

I hope you will be my safe place to land,
The shining light of my youth
The other wing that helps me fly.

I want to touch your skin—all warm and tanned
While we sip martinis of gin and vermouth
My head on your chest and your hand on my thigh.

I'm up your mind flocking, like a bird
Menancing, dropping disses like a **** when you look up boy you better be concerned
Compared to your rhymes, it would be the flyest **** you ever heard

Don't have to mope about you,
I got prettier lips to kiss
No need to keep all the pictures I drew
All you deserve is a meaner diss

Vibrational  hues eclipse
         my exterior ,
reverberating upon
                           my senses.

Parallel bars synchronize
around me, am I  a prisoner
as the resonation keeps
            me within this spot.

I can feel within a perfect
           storm of repetition.
Like chambers bouncing off
each other, trying to find a
                             synchronization.

I look at myself,
                      breaches spring forth,
this shell is to weak to keep me in.
        Shattering forth, I'm pure volume.

The bars start to spike, As I break free.
         We become harmonized,
what tried to bind is now part of my reality.

Hearthside
by Michael R. Burch

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep...” ― W. B. Yeats

For all that we professed of love, we knew
this night would come, that we would bend alone
to tend wan fires’ dimming bars―the moan
of wind cruel as the Trumpet, gelid dew
an eerie presence on encrusted logs
we hoard like jewels, embrittled so ourselves.

The books that line these close, familiar shelves
loom down like dreary chaperones. Wild dogs,
too old for mates, cringe furtive in the park,
as, toothless now, I frame this parchment kiss.

I do not know the words for easy bliss
and so my shriveled fingers clutch this stark,
long-unenamored pen and will it: Move.
I loved you more than words, so let words prove.

This sonnet is written from the perspective of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his loose translation or interpretation of the Pierre de Ronsard sonnet “When You Are Old.” The aging Yeats thinks of his Muse and the love of his life, the fiery Irish revolutionary Maude Gonne. As he seeks to warm himself by a fire conjured from ice-encrusted logs, he imagines her doing the same. Although Yeats had insisted that he wasn’t happy without Gonne, she said otherwise: “Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you!” Keywords/Tags: Yeats, Gonne, sonnet, Irish, Ireland, mature, love, night, fire, bars, books, shelves, chaperones, dogs, mates, parchment, kiss, bliss, fingers, pen, will, move, words, prove

Der Panther ("The Panther")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

His weary vision's so overwhelmed by iron bars,
his exhausted eyes see only blank Oblivion.
His world is not our world. It has no stars.
No light. Ten thousand bars. Nothing beyond.
Lithe, swinging with a rhythmic easy stride,
he circles, his small orbit tightening,
an electron losing power. Paralyzed,
soon regal Will stands stunned, an abject thing.
Only at times the pupils' curtains rise
silently, and then an image enters,
descends through arrested shoulders, plunges, centers
somewhere within his empty heart, and dies.

Keywords/Tags: Rainer Maria Rilke, German, translation, sonnet, panther, cat, animal, nature, extended metaphor, analogy, allegory, freedom, eyes, vision, iron, bar, bars, cage, prison, world, star, light, starlight, stride, orbit, electron, atom, particle, power, will, paralyzed, impotent, abject, pupils, curtain, curtains, image, shoulder, shoulders, heart, emptiness, loneliness, alienation, death, void

Spanish moss hangs from the Live Oak,
a slow, beautiful murderer in the big city,
redolent of memories, blue music and smokey rooms,
drag queens crooning, a fight or two
late in the night while you sipped bourbon,
content in the corner,
listening less to the music than an internal dialogue,
devils and angels in your head
dancing a tattoo, making sultry peace with each other
as you scanned the crowd, seeking a distraction
as you courted oblivion at the stroke of midnight.

You sigh,
there is no glory in the memories. Life lived
and long ago discarded, without regrets
and without longing, happier to be in the light,
but parts of you were shaped by dark nights,
bluesy music and the grind of tinder before tinder,
a fire that never took in you,
a dead man in a plaid shirt in the corner of the bar
who somehow left more alive than he arrived.