Please play with closed eyes
About ships that survive waves
Flags flutter Armada!
Battles cannons roar
Shooters shoot drift ashore
Wait wait what do they mean
But one measure after another
Images sail over times
Then and then people

Eyes open and hear nothing more.

I am the one in suit made of nigh
The person with the blood behind the axe
The signs you'd see beneath the sky
The words you hear in a moment of wild
I became thoughts you never wish you had
The lips with kisses for every child
A calm you feel when in your mind
A spark of blast at leisure time
Like a love that comes through a while
I am the dancer whose clothes are rags
I sail but only at the center of your minds
My crew are made of wood and skulls full of thoughts
I creeps into the fawnest minds
I etch unto the tauntless nous
I am  lurking behind their every words
I heal but a day with me hurts
I crawl into your heart and live only in your head
I am those voices you hear when In your bed
The breeze that tilts the window head
Image flashes with shadows unclear
I am creatures in the dark whom thoughts you hear
The one that increase with your slightest fear
I am the illusion!!!.

www.firesermon.com
by Michael R. Burch

your gods have become e-vegetation;
your saints—pale thumbnail icons; to enlarge
their images, right-click; it isn’t hard
to populate your web-site; not to mention

cool sound effects are nice; Sound Blaster cards
can liven up dull sermons, [zing some fire];
your drives need added Zip; you must discard
your balky paternosters: ***!!! Desire!!!

these are the watchwords, catholic; you must
as Yahoo! did, employ a little lust :)
if you want great e-commerce; hire a bard
to spruce up ancient language, shed the dust

of centuries of sameness;
                                            lameness *****;
your gods grew blurred; go 3D; scale; adjust.

Published by Ironwood, Triplopia and Nisqually Delta Review. This poem pokes fun at several stages of "religion," all tied into Eliot's "Fire Sermon," albeit elliptically. (1) The Celts believed that the health of the land was tied to the health of its king. The Fisher King's land was in peril because he had an infirmity (lameness, infertility, it really didn't matter in those days). One bad harvest and it was the king's fault for displeasing the gods. A religious icon (the Grail) could somehow rescue him. Strange logic! (2) The next stage brings us the saints, the Catholic church, etc. Millions are slaughtered, tortured and enslaved in the name of religion. Strange logic! (3) The next stage brings us to Darwin, modernism and "The Waste Land.” Religion is dead. God is dead. Man is a glorified fungus! Long live Darwin! We'll evolve into something better adapted to life on Earth, someday (if we don’t destroy it first). But what do we have now, except a hangover? Strange logic! (4) The current stage of religion is perhaps summed up by this e-mail: the only way religion can compete today is as a form of flashy entertainment. ***** a website before it's too late!  Keywords/Tags: god, gods, religion, saints, icons, images, imagery, update, scale, adjust

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.

This poem was originally published by The Raintown Review when Harvey Stanbrough was the editor, then later by Mindful of Poetry. I wrote the poem out of dissatisfaction with the strange idea that poetry should consist entirely or primarily of concrete images. Would the “experts” who espouse this bizarre idea junk the great soliloquies of Shakespeare and Milton and the direct statement poems of A. E. Housman? It also bears noting that the twin titans of English modernism, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, did an awful lot of “telling” rather than always “showing.” Keywords/Tags: Harvest, roses, images, imagery, imagism, meter, time, beat, rhyme, shimmer, gloss, perfume, reap, reaping, gossamer