Free Verse I

Lozenge by Michael R. Burch When I was closest to love, it did not seem real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness it might dissolve in my mouth like a lozenge of sugar. When I held you in my arms, I did not feel our lack of completeness, knowing how easy it was for us to cling to each other. And there were nights when the clouds sped across the moon’s face, exposing such rarified brightness we did not witness so much as embrace love’s human appearance. East Devon Beacon by Michael R. Burch Evening darkens upon the moors, Forgiveness—a hairless thing skirting the headlamps, fugitive. Why have we come, traversing the long miles and extremities of solitude, worriedly crisscrossing the wrong maps with directions obtained from passing strangers? Why do we sit, frantically retracing love’s long-forgotten signal points with cramping, ink-stained fingers? Why the preemptive frowns, the litigious silences, when only yesterday we watched as, out of an autumn sky this vast, over an orchard or an onion field, wild Vs of distressed geese sped across the moon’s face, the sound of their panicked wings like our alarmed hearts pounding in unison? Kindred (II) 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. i o u 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 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 grope toward self illumination ... becoming an angel (pure love) and yet You must love Your Self If you know someone who is very caring and loving, but struggles with self worth, this may be a poem to consider. Dancer by Michael R. Burch You will never change; you range, investing passion in the night, waltzing through a blinding blue, immaculate and fabled light. Do not despair or wonder where the others of your race have fled. They left you here to gin and beer and won't return till you are bled of fantasy and piety, of brewing passion like champagne, of storming through without a clue, but finding answers fall like rain. They left. You laughed, but now you sigh for ages, stages slipping by. You pause; applause is all you hear. You dance, askance, as drunkards cheer. The Evolution of Love by Michael R. Burch Love among the infinitesimal flotillas of amoebas is a dance of transient appendages, wild sails that gather in warm brine and then express one headstream as two small, divergent wakes. Minuscule voyage—love! Upon false feet, the pseudopods of uprightness, we creep toward self-immolation: two nee one. We cannot photosynthesize the sun, and so we love in darkness, till we come at last to understand: man’s spineless heart is alien to any land. We part to single cells; we rise on buoyant tears, amoeba-light, to breathe new atmospheres ... and still we sink. The night is full of stars we cannot grasp, though all the World is ours. Have we such cells within us, bent on love to ever-changingness, so that to part is not to be the same, or even one? Is love our evolution, or a scream against the thought of separateness—a cry of strangled recognition? Love, or die, or love and die a little. Hopeful death! Come scale these cliffs, lie changing, share this breath. Longing by Michael R. Burch We stare out at the cold gray sea, overcome with such sudden and intense longing . . . our eyes meet, inviolate, and we are not of this earth, this strange, inert mass. Before we crept out of the shoals of the inchoate sea, before we grew the quaint appendages and orifices of love . . . before our jellylike nuclei, struggling to be hearts, leapt at the sight of that first bright, oracular sun, then watched it plummet, the birth and death of our illumination . . . before we wept . . . before we knew . . . before our unformed hearts grew numb, again, in the depths of the sea’s indecipherable darkness . . . When we were only a swirling profusion of recombinant things wafting loose silt from the sea’s soft floor, writhing and sucking in convulsive beds of mucousy foliage, flowering, flowering, flowering . . . what jolted us to life? Memento Mori by Michael R. Burch I found among the elms something like the sound of your voice, something like the aftermath of love itself after the lightning strikes, when the startled wind shrieks . . . a gored-out wound in wood, love’s pale memento mori— that white scar in that first heart, forever unhealed . . . and a burled, thick knot incised with six initials pledged against all possible futures, and penknife-notched below, six edged, chipped words that once cut deep and said . . . WILL U B MINE 4 EVER? . . . which now, so disconsolately answer . . . —————-N- —EVER. Annual by Michael R. Burch Silence steals upon a house where one sits alone in the shadow of the itinerant letterbox, watching the disconnected telephone collecting dust... hearing the desiccate whispers of voices' dry flutters, — moths' wings brittle as cellophane... Curled here, reading the yellowing volumes of loss by the front porch light in the groaning swing... through thin adhesive gloss I caress your face. Keywords/Tags: free verse, human, human condition, humanity, love, heart, hearts, forgiveness, relationships, solitude, distance, stranger, strangers, kin, kindred, kindness