Currents

Currents by Michael R. Burch How can I write and not be true to the rhythm that wells within? How can the ocean not be blue, not buck with the clapboard slap of tide, the clockwork shock of wave on rock, the motion creation stirs within? Originally published by The Lyric. Keywords/Tags: poetry, composition, meter, rhythm, rhyme, cadence, music, musicality Kin by Michael R. Burch O pale, austere moon, haughty beauty... what do we know of love, or duty? Kindred by Michael R. Burch Rise, pale disastrous moon! What is love, but a heightened effect of time, light and distance? Did you burn once, before you became so remote, so detached, so coldly, inhumanly lustrous, before you were able to assume the very pallor of love itself? What is the dawn now, to you or to me? We are as one, out of favor with the sun. We would exhume the white corpse of love for a last dance, and yet we will not. We will let her be, let her abide, for she is nothing now, to you or to me. 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? Heroin or Heroine? by Michael R. Burch for mothers battling addiction serve the Addiction; worship the Beast; feed the foul Pythons your flesh, their fair feast ... or rise up, resist the huge many-headed hydra; for the sake of your Loved Ones decapitate medusa. Loose Knit by Michael R. Burch She blesses the needle, fetches fine red stitches, criss-crossing, embroidering dreams in the delicate fabric. And if her hand jerks and twitches in puppet-like fits, she tells herself reality is not as threadbare as it seems... that a little more darning may gather loose seams. She weaves an unraveling tapestry of fatigue and remorse and pain; only the nervously pecking needle pricks her to motion, again and again. Medusa by Michael R. Burch Friends, beware of her iniquitous hair: long, ravenblack & melancholy. Many suitors drowned there: lost, unaware of the length & extent of their folly. The Octopi Jars by Michael R. Burch Long-vacant eyes now lodged in clear glass, a-swim with pale arms as delicate as angels'... you are beyond all hope of salvage now... and yet I would pause, no fear!, to once touch your arcane beaks... I, more alien than you to this imprismed world, notice, most of all, the scratches on the inside surfaces of your hermetic cells ... and I remember documentaries of albino Houdinis slipping like wraiths over the walls of shipboard aquariums, slipping down decks' brine-lubricated planks, spilling jubilantly into the dark sea, parachuting through clouds of pallid ammonia... and I know now in life you were unlike me: your imprisonment was never voluntary. Twice by Michael R. Burch Now twice she has left me and twice I have listened and taken her back, remembering days when love lay upon us and sparkled and glistened with the brightness of dew through a gathering haze. But twice she has left me to start my life over, and twice I have gathered up embers, to learn: rekindle a fire from ash, soot and cinder and softly it sputters, refusing to burn. Your e-Verse by Michael R. Burch I cannot understand a word you’ve said (and this despite an adequate IQ); it must be some exotic new haiku combined with Latin suddenly undead. It must be hieroglyphics mixed with Greek. Have Pound and T. S. Eliot been cloned? Perhaps you wrote it on the pot, so stoned you spelled it backwards, just to be oblique. I think you’re very funny—so, “Yuk! Yuk!” I know you must be kidding; didn’t we write crap like this and call it “poetry,” a form of verbal exercise, P.E., in kindergarten, when we ran “amuck?” Oh, sorry, I forgot to “make it new.” Perhaps I still can learn a thing or two from someone tres original, like you. What the Poet Sees by Michael R. Burch What the poet sees, he sees as a swimmer ~~~underwater~~~ watching the shoreline blur sees through his breath’s weightless bubbles ... Both worlds grow obscure. Published by ByLine Finally to Burn (the Fall and Resurrection of Icarus) by Michael R. Burch Athena takes me sometimes by the hand and we go levitating through strange Dreamlands where Apollo sleeps in his dark forgetting and Passion seems like a wise bloodletting and all I remember ,upon awaking, is: to Love sometimes is like forsaking one’s Being—to glide heroically beyond thought, forsaking the here for the There and the Not. * O, finally to Burn, gravity beyond escaping! To plummet is Bliss when the blisters breaking rain down red scabs on the earth’s mudpuddle ... Feathers and wax and the watchers huddle ... Flocculent sheep, O, and innocent lambs!, I will rock me to sleep on the waves’ iambs. * To sleep's sweet relief from Love’s exhausting Dream, for the Night has Wings gentler than moonbeams— they will flit me to Life like a huge-eyed Phoenix fluttering off to quarry the Sphinx. * Riddlemethis, riddlemethat, Rynosseross, throw out the Welcome Mat. Quixotic, I seek Love amid the tarnished rusted-out steel when to live is varnish. To Dream—that’s the thing! Aye, that Genie I’ll rub, soak by the candle, aflame in the tub. * Riddlemethis, riddlemethat, Rynosseross, throw out the Welcome Mat. Somewhither, somewhither aglitter and strange, we must moult off all knowledge or perish caged. * I am reconciled to Life somewhere beyond thought— I’ll Live the Elsewhere, I’ll Dream of the Naught. Methinks it no journey; to tarry’s a waste, so fatten the oxen; make a nice baste. I’m coming, Fool Tom, we have Somewhere to Go, though we injure noone, ourselves wildaglow. Published by The Lyric and The Ekphrastic Review Shattered by Vera Pavlova loose translation by Michael R. Burch I shattered your heart; now I limp through the shards barefoot.