Long Consonants Poems

State of the Art (III)

These are my "ars poetica" poems: the ones about the art and craft of writing poetry in a modern world that doesn't always recognize the artists or their work. 



Come Down
by...

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Sonnets LXI-LXX

Erin
by Michael R. Burch

All that’s left of Ireland is her hair?
bright carrot?and her milkmaid-pallid skin,

her brilliant air of cavalier despair,
her train of children?some conceived in sin,

the others to avoid it. For nowhere
is evidence of...

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It had been a hellish week.

On Monday
my lonely and tired AfricanAmerican husband
told me, as gently as possible,
that what I had hoped was a temporary separation
is to be extended into perpetuity.

This separation had been scheduled to...

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Wounded Sacred Dementia: Part Two

Dementia's derelict WinLose SocialWorker
suboptimizingly hesitates
when I tell her
I have not changed my mind
about not adopting Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
into my vulnerable home
with a seven-year-old AfricanAmerican boy
blind
and unable to defend himself,
or even run...

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Poems about Poems III

Radiance
by Michael R. Burch

for Dylan Thomas

The poet delves earth’s detritus?hard toil?
for raw-edged nouns, barbed verbs, vowels’ lush bouquet;
each syllable his pen excretes?dense soil,
dark images impacted, rooted clay.

The poet sees the sea but...

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Wounded Sacred Dementia

My last foster care-provider
and -receiver story
is also a sad story
of my last special needs adoption
of bipolar born,
and oppositionally reared,
alcoholism.

My BiPolar Wounded Child
turned an auspicious five
on the day I first saw her,
and promptly rejected...

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My Mother taught me
how to see through language, 
paper was rare, iron ink wasn't free
so she sold some jewelry for porcelain lettering, 
and we clapped and sang the alphabet into life
our life, our joy, our...

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"All the Pretty Words"



All the pretty words
blooming like summer jonquils
fade from the velvet fresh green tongues
and rich fecund tussled beds 
of poets and minstrels
strumming hearts with 
fingers that waltz over keys
plucking tangos from dreams of
sensitive...

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TO SPEECH PATHOLOGY

A voice is something to treasure.
An expression is nothing without this.
You can feel the deep suppression when possessed by another human being.
Speaking out and it becomes dubbed.
No, you are not a mute.
You do...

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Am I the Assassin 
        or the Undertaker

                   For Palani...

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Se7ven
 Se7ven believed to be insightful, intuitive, truthful, introspective, intellectual, and wise.
 “fullness” “fullness” “fullness” “fullness” “fullness” “fullness” “fullness” se7ven 
such “completeness”  “completeness” “completeness” “completeness”  “completeness”  “completeness”  “completeness”   
...

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The past is made of ashes stoked by the warm fires from what was once the present. They lay before me in the fireplace—heaped together, delicate and formless—with a bittersweet taste, soft color, and caustic...

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(alternate title – A bona 
er fide dog day afternoon delight).

A mere half dozen vowels 
constitute the English language 
    Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay
Consonants comprise majority
  
(sans remaining twenty) 
   ...

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I've spent so much time trying to write a good poem, that I've ignored the possibility of
BAD POETRY.

Bad poetry,
the soul speaks in cat-whispers,
I meow one back,
The garden bleeds living colour,
I sprout something too, words,
and if...

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Twenty-six letters in the alphabet:
Vowels and consonants be soldiers to defend my message

I'm like a twenty-five cent coin rolling on a parking lot;
destined for the machine or the storm drain?

Twenty-fours in a day, but all...

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It’s frustrating, isn’t it? 
Creating meta hypotheses based on observations and data, 
but not knowing whether they really fit or not? 
Quantum particles change behavior when you are looking at them versus when you are...

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Call of the wild

We talkspeak and nothing much is 
said until a bright spore spot spawns
and gets a seed for sale—compliant
of brotherly love passions filler like dirty
socks in a hamper  forgotten   we...

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Speak to me in iambic pentameter
and weave Shakespeare sonnets with Milton anecdotes.
Read me riddles and rhymes divulged 
over uneaten dinners and swing-sets with broken chains.
Allow me to lip-synch to your ballad of broken piano-fingers
and I...

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In the backdrop where the sun had regally retreated, like a knight of the dusk,
The pipe of time smokes memories onto the face of the sky, lamenting in a sigh.
The clouds, scholars of the azure,...

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Hovering beside a group of words,
Strategically aligned to make them meaningful,
Primitive noises and symbols are constructed,
Passed down from elders who are wise with knowledge,
Taught to use them for powerful communication,
Emotions stirred into structured but stiff...

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Eating alphabet soup with a straw so you can play Scrabble with the leftovers
Lyrics from an obscure band is music to your ears
Shaving off the November scruff that was plastered on your face
Nightmares are less...

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Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day. Why can't we have any one quality of poetry we...

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Image of Black Sand & Sand provided by Pixabay.

The Hawaiianism of Ho'oponopono

A word, astir, in undulating waves surges and awash a clear open black shoreline of Hawaii nei, as it recedes in cycles dashing back...

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We sit in a loose circle,  always ready to shift, 
or offer our place for a late-arriver;
just another soul who's been left adrift
in this sea of turmoil, just another survivor.

We talk, well, some do,...

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When tuscan tunes of twilight,
cascade as clementine confetti, 
She searches for secret silhouettes,
swirling to the symphony 
of sunflower serenades.

In the midst of faded fields,
marigold memories crawl back,
refraining yesterday’s
tangerine dreams.
Swans glide in
sullen grace,
illustrating a saffron 
backdrop...

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