Rejection Slips 1

Rejection Slips With over 5,700 publications if I count poems that have gone viral, I suppose I shouldn’t complain … but I do have some poems that have never been accepted for publication. Here are a few of them … Less Heroic Couplets: Rejection Slip by Michael R. Burch pour Melissa Balmain Whenever my writing gets rejected, I always wonder how the rejecter got elected. Are we exchanging at the same Bourse? (Excepting present company, of course!) I consider the term “rejection slip” to be a double entendre. When editors reject my poems, did I slip up, or did they? Is their slip showing, or is mine? Distances by Michael R. Burch Moonbeams on water? the reflected light of a halcyon star now drowning in night ... So your memories are. Footprints on beaches now flooding with water; the small, broken ribcage of some primitive slaughter ... So near, yet so far. This is probably my favorite of my unpublished poems. The next poem has the same title but is very different. Distances by Michael R. Burch There is a small cleanness about her, as though she has always just been washed, and there is a dull obedience to convention in her accommodating slenderness as she feints at her salad. She has never heard of Faust, or Frost, and she is unlikely to have been seen rummaging through bookstores for mementos of others more difficult to name. She might imagine “poetry” to be something in common between us, as we write, bridging the expanse between convention and something . . . something the world calls “art” for want of a better word. At night I scream at the conventions of both our worlds, at the distances between words and their objects: distances come lately between us, like a clean break. Well, actually after rechecking the second “Distances” has been published by Verse Libre, Triplopia and Lone Stars! Winter by Michael R. Burch The rose of love's bright promise lies torn by her own thorn; her scent was sweet but at her feet the pallid aphids mourn. The lilac of devotion has felt the winter hoar and shed her dress; companionless, she shivers?nude, forlorn. Southern Icarus by Michael R. Burch Windborne, lover of heights, unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching embrace, you climb, skittish kite . . . What do you know of the world’s despair, gliding in vast solitariness there, so that all that remains is to fall? Only a little longer the wind invests its sighs; you stall, spread-eagled, as the canvas snaps and flaps its white rebellious wings, and all the houses watch with baffled eyes. The Sky Was Turning Blue by Michael R. Burch Yesterday I saw you as the snow flurries died, spent winds becalmed. When I saw your solemn face alone in the crowd, I felt my heart, so long embalmed, begin to beat aloud. Was it another winter, another day like this? Was it so long ago? Where you the rose-cheeked girl who slapped my face, then stole a kiss? Was the sky this gray with snow, my heart so all a-whirl? How is it in one moment it was twenty years ago, lost worlds remade anew? When your eyes met mine, I knew you felt it too, as though we heard the robin's song and the sky was turning blue. Love’s Extreme Unction by Michael R. Burch Lines composed during Jeremy’s first Nashville Christian football game (he played tuba), while I watched Beth watch him. Within the intimate chapels of her eyes? devotions, meditations, reverence. I find in them Love’s very residence and hearing the ardent rapture of her sighs I prophesy beatitudes to come, when Love like hers commands us, “All be One!” 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. 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. Dust by Michael R. Burch Flame within flame, we burned and burned relentlessly till there was nothing left to be consumed. Only ash remained, the smoke plumed like a spirit leaving its corpse, and we were left with only a name ever common between us. We had thought to love “eternally,” but the wick sputtered, the candle swooned, the flame subsided, the smoke ballooned, and our commonest thought was: flee, flee, flee the choking dust. Consequence by Michael R. Burch They are fresh-faced, not innocent, but perhaps not yet jaded, oblivious to time and death, of each counted breath in the pendulum’s sway falling unheeded. They are bright, undissuaded by foreign tongues, by sepulchers empty and waiting, by sarcophagi of ancient kings, by proclamations, by rituals of scalpels and rings. They are sworn, they are fated to misadventure and grief; but they revel in life till the sun falls, receding into silent halls to torrents of inconsequential tears . . . . . . to brief tragedies of tears when they consider this: No one else sees. But I know. We all know. We all know the consequence of being so young. Keywords/Tags: rejection, distance, distances, near, far, night, day, memory, love, rose, seasons, winter, young, youth, life, death