Long Western Poems

The Amistad Mutiny

Slavery, a dirty word no matter how it’s pronounced:
Abducted and herded to the slave fortress of Lomboko1 for trade.
To be tossed in chains below deck on the Portuguese ship Tecora,2
Sailing the Atlantic Middle...

Read More

This is the story of mad Molly Shaw
She might be mad now but she wasn’t before
she came home to find her man dead on the floor
She lay down her bible and let out a roar...

Read More

Medieval Poems



Wulf and Eadwacer
(Old English circa 990 AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My people pursue him like crippled prey.
They'll rip him apart if he approaches their pack.
We are so different!

Wulf's on one island; I'm on...

Read More

Transparently robust private/public healers,
servants,
ego/ecotherapists,
investigate, with appreciation,
cooperative health insurance
for people,
healthy homes,
resilient transportation,
and cooperative tree and plant and children and elderly nursing
preserved through winter kitchens
and solar-fueled composting centers.

Health insurance assurance,
transubstantiating health/wealth reassurance,
investing in cooperatively-owned and eco-managing
therapeutic non-violent...

Read More

Systems,
ecosystems,
and ego body-systems,
patriotic systems
and feminist systems
mutually improve,
grow more robust,
resilient,
resonant when WinWin relationships
between diversely paradigmatic elements
within said system
and between unsaid systems
improve,
grow more healthy wealth together
well-greased co-operative channels
and web-structures
WinWin overwhelming WinLose
competing smaller self-centered investments.

Capital small-self promotion tends...

Read More

There is nothing weaker than water
But none is superior to it in overcoming the hard,
For which there is no substitute.
(Laotse, "Nothing Weaker Than Water", Lin Yutang, trans.)

That weakness of mind and body overcomes strength
And uniting...

Read More

Let me speak clearly with you
dear religious and atheist Trumpians,

A fool in executive office
is a leader
only in foolish directions.

A rich thief
is the worst thief
as survival motives
are absent,
so self-thrival motives
remain piratically rampant.

An intellectual prostitute
to feel-good AmericaFirst...

Read More

Yosa Buson haiku translations

On the temple’s great bronze gong
a butterfly
snoozes.
?Yosa Buson, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Hard to describe:
this light sensation of being pinched
by a butterfly!
?Yosa Buson, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Not to worry...

Read More

I Have Labored Sore
anonymous medieval lyric (circa the fifteenth century)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I have labored sore / and suffered death, 
so now I rest / and catch my breath.
But I shall come /...

Read More

The title of this talk today,
"Win-Win Politics of New Feminist Economics"
suggests questions,
more than emasculating 
definitively deductive
reductive
answers.

Would you imagine
a minority-identified Buddhist,
more likely as a feminist
or culturally comfortable
with political and economic Left-brain domination,
monopolistic competing toward total self-consuming
reiteratively...

Read More

Stepped inside Bucky's Universal Credit Union today
to ask what could I invest in
with least risk
and greatest potential for self-optimizing return?

He invited me to sit down
to consider cooperative transactions
as our intentional understory
camouflaged within our ecotherapeutic relationships,
like...

Read More

I think he's talking about a cooperative bicameral political system,
with "How to talk to the other side".

And what could that possibly mean, dear Yang?

Well,
I was watching this Ted-talk from Marin,
by Robb Willer, as I anciently...

Read More

Hello,
you've reached the EcoTherapist Cooperative.
How can we help you
without bringing harm to Others?

That's a question I've never thought about.
I'm calling for the National Republican Party.
We would like to hire an EcoTherapist
for a consultation
during the 2020...

Read More

I have travelled through the cluttered corridors of my tired mind countless times. 
I have reached deep into the dark abyss of my captive soul and in that profoundly disturbing darkness, I went searching to...

Read More

Not to play any blame game,
in this our new co-evolutionary capacity
for LeftBrained Language Enculturation
long become YangDominant associated
with 'civilization',
co-arising anthro-centrism,
including Earth's newer history
of revolution by Empirical Elitism.

Processes of empirical empire supremacy,
kill or be killed,
became not really...

Read More

Compassion co-arises nondually 
internal-external.

Today I want to talk about possibilities
for integral polycultural dynamics,
which are systemic relationships,
correlations,
between LeftBrain deductive ego-mind,
RightBrain inductive eco-body,
and a boundary between these bicameral landscapes,
which we call unconsciousness.

The feasibility
and health value
of recognizing this...

Read More

If God is EggWhite
then Tao is His embryonic EarthYolk.

Why would you say such a confusing and silly thing?

What is the difference between a Paradise Tree of Life and Death
and a Great Chain of Being?

Is this...

Read More

“It is the custom of scholars when addressing behavior and culture to speak variously of anthropological explanations, psychological explanations, biological explanations, and other explanations appropriate to the perspectives of individual disciplines. I have argued that...

Read More

~ Seek  The  Lord  ~
( Star Of  David )




God
For sure
Knows  sees  all
Wants best  for  you
He  sure loves  us  all
Lord wants us to have Love...

Read More

If ever a moment in real life deserved a romantic, melancholy
backing track, it would have been that one ... we'd spent the
entire afternoon at Ferry Beach, sunning and playing frisbee, I
playing guitar, she practicing her...

Read More

The ugly head of the Original Intent issue
co-arises with what were our ForeFather Patriarchal Patriots
thinking and feeling to leave out prohibitions against antiChristian degeneracy,
and to put in permissions for antiChristian degeneracy.

No.
Wait.
That's not right.
We could not...

Read More

The Story
by Kamal Nasser
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I will tell you a story ...
a story that lived in the dreams of my people,
a story that comes from the world of tents.
It is a story...

Read More

Key CapitalistYang/CreolistYin EcoHistoric Concepts

I find a fuzzy irony in this morning’s early search for a new journal notebook, having filled my last from what had been, five years ago, an inconceivably high pile of empty...

Read More

I take a four-fold spin
through Bill Plotkin's wheel
of bilateral identities,
iconic developmental faces,
ironic personalities.


FIRST comes Eastern-born
dawn of human infancy,
Innocent Sage infants
so WiseElder
in our LeftBrain emergent
wrinkling unfolding 
sacred RightBrain ways.

Searching for care giving eyes
to be sure we...

Read More

Here's the deal, folks...
   This is, as indicated, the 2nd HALF of this fairly lengthy poem. Due to Poetry Soup's file-size limitations, this piece had to be posted in 2 parts. 
 ...

Read More