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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This is probably my favorite of my unpublished poems.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
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