Long Asylum Poems

The emotional, mental and spiritual fallout courtesy Colt Gray

Apalachee High School,
located in Winder, Georgia
witnessed an active shooter,
whereby the alleged lone gunman
(actually just a teenager of fourteen years)
killed four people and injured nine more
the latter hospitalized with...

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With my Uyghur poetry translations I am trying to build awareness of the plight of Uyghur poets who are being sent to Chinese "reeducation" concentration camps.

Elegy
by Perhat Tursun
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Asylum seekers, will...

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Doggerel II: Doggerel about Doggerel, or, More Nonsense Verse

The Board
by Michael R. Burch

Accessible rhyme is never good.
The penalty is understood:
soft titters from dark board rooms where
the businessmen paste on their hair
and, Walter Mitties, woo the...

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 TUAN TATA : Song of Uda - I
by T. Wignesan

(Patrick Noone, a British anthropologist, discovered the Ple-Temiar tribe living isolated in the jungle highlands in the State of Perak on the west coast of...

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My eyes stare straight,
fixated on something in the distance, 
humming a song that would send chills,
if you ever got the chance to listen.

A padded cell and a straitjacket,
the doctor giving one of his ‘visits,’
his moans...

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Perhat Tursun

Perhat Tursun (1969-) is one of the foremost living Uyghur language poets, if he is still alive. Born and raised in Atush, a city in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tursun began writing poetry...

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(based on Aldous Huxley's book "Brave New World")

Human hatchery

Clink clink clink clink...
Test tubes prattling past
along the chrome plated production line.
Glistening under fake fluorescence
humming in harmony
with the magnetic motors
of conveyors, centrifuges and camshafts.
Biological blobs of gamete...

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Old Glory has Something He Wants to Say  
By – Roger White
The dawn’s first sunlight crests over the eastern horizon.  A midnight dark sky leisurely changes tinctures: blue becomes purple, bright azure and...

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Gloriously luxuriating in eternal sleep...

versus being alive 
predicated victory videre licet lunatic
if Trump trumped Kamala Harris
and stole 2024 presidential election,  
(whereat Musk bribed 
significant number of voters
handing out wads of cash)
courtesy underhanded modus operandi
and...

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Once a pawn a time within castellated bishopric

We purchased 2020 Hyundai Elantra
at Enterprise Car Rental
1207 West Ridge Pike
Conshohocken, Pennsylvania 19428
April thirteenth two thousand twenty three
witnessed greatest amount of money
I spent at one time.

The following day...

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Imagine with me that A regenerates Adenine,
B reproduces  ConVex-Yang Uracil or Thymine,
depending on whether you are a plant or a person,
C bilaterally represents EchoConCave-Yin(Yin) Cytosine,
and D is for full-interelational fractal-view Guanine,
which acts strangely Dopamine...

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I feel rather empty…
Flushed, confused, free me?
I’m feeling kinda dirty
To be honest, I’m fake happy

Wearing a smile like the rest of us
But, there’s a million rivers and fires between us
So, don’t throw me under the...

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thermometer reads zero, a chilly breeze blows
  apple cores thrown, the blackbirds feed
  my multi-layered partner dons her wooly hat
  impatiently, she waits for me
  securing covid masks amidst my overcoat
...

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Winnie, wild-eyed, went insane
and sang “Happy Birthday” in the rain, 
while she washed away her bloody pain.

Now all day long she sings that song,
she sings it loud, she sings it strong,
walled in where she does...

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The views and opinions herewith extemporized to spur discourse with me, or to be mindful when exercising the right to vote in the country of your existence, which expressed intimation predicated upon read reliable publications...

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foisted upon her was the merry go round crystal chandelier

it stuck in her beautiful mind like a beacon of flaming desire

of clouds fried by a cuckoo with an indestructible socket

her eyes wide upon pupils dilated...

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Spirit and sponsor sane sexagenarian scribe (and his spouse) to a Utopian country

He seeks (in tandem with the missus) 
legal asylum in Canada...
New Brunswick, Newfoundland, 
Nova Scotia, et cetera,
or any other socially 
progressive European country,
and...

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* Examples for the contest

Jack and Jill (the real story)

"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after..."

Of course, neither...

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Emancipation proclamation from Samson fixation

Otherwise titled deep into my fiftieth year of passive aggressive rebellious puberty.

Yes, I chickened out getting a haircut yesterday August twenty seventh two thousand and twenty four as stated in a...

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Dear global leaders - keep on rockin' in the free world
after implementing long overdue criminal justice reforms,
especially affecting marginalized groups of people.

I vote for more lenient, progressive and tolerant treatment
towards undocumented immigrants, plus implementing
a humane...

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Take me to the tombstone 
let me touch the gray stone that stands
where life could not
I will put my face to that touchstone of deaf thunder,
What happened  to your breath baby brother,
what happened in...

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"Angel Eyes" 

that dark angel
standing in the corner
observing the shadows of man 
pass him by -

he has angel eyes

that shine high beam
bright bushfires that light 
the entire transparent 
padded room parade

dance cards lit 
he’s biding...

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Translation of Mathieu POKORA’s « Je suis tombé, tombé, tombé » by T Wignesan

(NOTE : I just thought I’d translate the lyrics (see the French original herebelow) of this lilting catchy tune not just because...

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Wretched emasculated celibate anchorite

(any relationship between the following poem and living persons -
namely the writer of these words ranks as purely coincidental and fictitious).

nevertheless he suffers existential blight
covered head to toe
in black and blue bruises
linkedin...

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Gloriously luxuriating in eternal sleep

Forlorn; bereft of golden
(slippered) opportunities I weep;
Three score and four years
replete with mailer daemons,
hence mindset adrip
with self denouncing expletive filled bleep
unwritten expressed recriminations
wielded upon figurative head of wimpy blip;
decades elapsed at...

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