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Juvenilia: Early Poems IX These are early poems of mine, written in my teens as a high school student and during my first two years of college. Shock by Michael R. Burch It was early in the morning of the forming of my soul, in the dawning of desire, with passion at first bloom, with lightning splitting heaven to thunder's blasting roll and a sense of welling fire and, perhaps, impending doom— that I cried out through the tumult of the raging storm on high for shelter from the chaos of the restless, driving rain . . . and the voice I heard replying from a rift of bleeding sky was mine, I'm sure, and, furthermore, was certainly insane. I wrote "Shock" around age 19. It's Halloween! by Michael R. Burch If evening falls on graveyard walls far softer than a sigh; if shadows fly moon-sickled skies, while children toss their heads uneasy in their beds, beware the witch's eye! If goblins loom within the gloom till playful pups grow terse; if birds give up their verse to comfort chicks they nurse, while children dream weird dreams of ugly, wiggly things, beware the serpent's curse! If spirits scream in haunted dreams while ancient sibyls rise to plague nightmarish skies one night without disguise, while children toss about uneasy, full of doubt, beware the Devil's lies . . . it's Halloween! I wrote “It’s Halloween!” circa age 20. Premonition by Michael R. Burch Now the evening has come to a close and the party is over ... we stand in the doorway and watch as they go— each stranger, each acquaintance, each casual lover. They walk to their cars and they laugh as they go, though we know their forced laughter’s the wine ... then they pause at the road where the dark asphalt flows endlessly on toward Zion ... and they kiss one another as though they were friends, and they promise to meet again “soon” ... but the rivers of Jordan roll on without end, and the mockingbird calls to the moon ... and the katydids climb up the cropped hanging vines, and the crickets chirp on out of tune ... and their shadows, defined by the cryptic starlight, seem spirits torn loose from their tombs. And I know their brief lives are just eddies in time, that their hearts are unreadable runes to be wiped clean, like slate, by inscrutable Fate when their corpses lie ravaged and ruined ... You take my clenched fist and you give it a kiss as though it were something you loved, and the tears fill your eyes, brimming with the soft light of the stars winking sagely above ... Then you whisper, "It's time that we went back inside; if you'd like, we can sit and just talk for a while." And the hope in your eyes burns too deep, so I lie and I say, "Yes, I would," to your small, troubled smile. I vividly remember writing this poem after my first office party, circa age 20. Say You Love Me by Michael R. Burch Joy and anguish surge within my soul; contesting there, they cannot be controlled, for grinding yearnings grip me like a vise. Stars are burning; it's almost morning. Dreams of dreams of dreams that I have dreamed dance before me, forming formless scenes; and now, at last, the feeling grows as stars, declining, bow to morning. And you are music echoing through dreams, rising from some far-off lyric spring; oh, somewhere in the night I hear you sing. Stars on fire form a choir. Now dawn's fierce brightness burns within your eyes; you laugh at me as dancing embers die. You touch me so and still I don't know why . . . But say you love me. Say you love me. I wrote this poem around age 25. Burn, Ovid by Michael R. Burch “Burn Ovid”—Austin Clarke Sunday School, Faith Free Will Baptist, 1973: I sat imagining watery folds of pale silk encircling her waist. Explicit sex was the day’s “hot” topic (how breathlessly I imagined hers) as she taught us the perils of lust fraught with inhibition. I found her unaccountably beautiful, rolling implausible nouns off the edge of her tongue: adultery, fornication, masturbation, sodomy. Acts made suddenly plausible by the faint blush of her unrouged cheeks, by her pale lips accented only by a slight quiver, a trepidation. What did those lustrous folds foretell of our uncommon desire? Why did she cross and uncross her legs lovely and long in their taupe sheaths? Why did her breasts rise pointedly, as if indicating a direction? “Come unto me, (unto me),” together, we sang, cheek to breast, lips on lips, devout, afire, my hands up her skirt, her pants at her knees: all night long, all night long, in the heavenly choir. “Sex 101” and “Burn, Ovid” were written about my experiences during ninth grade at Faith Christian Academy, circa age 14-15. However, these poems were not completed until much later and are in a more mature voice and style than most of my other early poems. Sex 101 by Michael R. Burch That day the late spring heat steamed through the windows of a Crayola-yellow schoolbus crawling its way up the backwards slopes of Nowheresville, North Carolina ... Where we sat exhausted from the day’s skulldrudgery and the unexpected waves of muggy, summer-like humidity ... Giggly first graders sat two abreast behind senior high students sprouting their first sparse beards, their implausible bosoms, their stranger affections ... The most unlikely coupling— Lambert, 18, the only college prospect on the varsity basketball team, the proverbial talldarkhandsome swashbuckling cocksman, grinning ... Beside him, Wanda, 13, bespectacled, in her primproper attire and pigtails, staring up at him, fawneyed, disbelieving ... And as the bus filled with the improbable musk of her, as she twitched impaled on his finger like a dead frog jarred to life by electrodes, I knew ... that love is a forlorn enterprise, that I would never understand it. Keywords/Tags: early, early poems, juvenilia, child, childhood, boy, boyhood, student, high school, college, teen, teenage, teenager, youth, young, young adult
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