Rounds

Rounds by Michael R. Burch Solitude surrounds me though nearby laughter sounds; around me mingle men who think to drink their demons down, in rounds. Now agony still hounds me though elsewhere mirth abounds; hidebound I stand and try to think, not sink still further down, spellbound. Their ecstasy astounds me, though drunkenness compounds resounding laughter into joy; alloy such glee with beer and see bliss found. Keywords/Tags: rounds, drink, drinking, drunkenness, beer, joy, bliss, drug, addiction Swiftly the years mount by T'ao Ch'ien translation by Michael R. Burch Swiftly the years mount, exceeding remembrance. Solemn the stillness of this spring morning. I will clothe myself in my spring attire then revisit the slopes of the Eastern Hill where over a mountain stream a mist hovers, hovers an instant, then scatters. Scatters with a wind blowing in from the South as it nuzzles the fields of new corn. Con Artistry by Michael R. Burch The trick of life is like the sleight of hand of gamblers holding deuces by the glow of veiled back rooms, or aces; soon we’ll know who folds, who stands... The trick of life is like the pool shark’s shot— the wild massé across green velvet felt that leaves the winner loser. No, it’s not the rack, the hand that’s dealt... The trick of life is knowing that the odds are never in one’s favor, that to win is only to delay the acts of gods who’d ante death for sin... and death for goodness, death for in-between. The rules have never changed; the artist knows the oldest con is life; the chips he blows can’t be redeemed. Late Frost by Michael R. Burch The matters of the world like sighs intrude; out of the darkness, windswept winter light too frail to solve the puzzle of night’s terror resolves the distant stars to salts: not white, but gray, dissolving in the frigid darkness. I stoke cooled flames and stand, perhaps revealed as equally as gray, a faded hardness too malleable with time to be annealed. Light sprinkles through dull flakes, devoid of color; which matters not. I did not think to find a star like Bethlehem’s. I turn my collar to trudge outside for cordwood. There, outlined within the doorway’s arch, I see the tree that holds its boughs aloft, as if to show they harbor neither love, nor enmity, but only stars: insignias I know— false ornaments that flash, overt and bright, but do not warm and do not really glow, and yet somehow bring comfort, soft delight: a rainbow glistens on new-fallen snow.