Long Cordite Poems

Ah the lovely seasdie
Ah the lovely seaside

Childhood scents
Salt air, Salty bitter memories

Jacques had turned just seven
He dreamed to walk along the seashore
He dreamed to see the seagulls sore overhead
He most of all dreamed to leave...

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Who actually is like us
The modern world you see today
Right before your eyes,
Who done this and who done that
Well you’re in for a wee surprise.

From the Bank of England to the Bank of France
Then we...

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THE LION OF JUDAH

Lightning bursts from the sky
Electricity sizzles
The smell of cordite fills the air.
A spatter of rain forms large drops on the dusty ground.
Black clouds form a backdrop to the Thornveld 
as the sun...

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The Persistence of a Memory of Apricot Shampoo
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved...
and yet I hold her close within my thought:
I feel the...

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I rose not like flower or like tree
Not like eagle's hubris in the sun
Old skin shed in the divided city
Last clone of a manhood almost done
      And so I tasted...

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Hi Skool Massakre
Goth boy dressed all in black. 
With a moody stare. 
Not giving a frig. 
As long as his subgun is loaded. 

Safety off. 

Both his and his gun's. 
Hear his New Rock boots...

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Lay me to rest in marbled halls with angels at my head,
not lying here in the mud of Ypres with khaki turning red.
Let me die a noble death, one that's worth fighting for,
not to avenge...

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(A journey into the First World War)

The trembled hand
the twitching face.
A desperate draw on cigarette
looking for courage in a cordite breath.

Huddled in mud protected by 
slime filled walls, 
these walls of Jericho shake
crumbling into my...

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In thirty five seconds
You may see eternity clear as day
Quick as a flash and passing away
Too fast for opinions
To contend for understanding. too
Fast to contend for judgment. Rue
It in flash, for we see
Eight thousand alive...

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someone once said, when your child is born,
that’s when you start dying,

generations ahead,
stand up to those left behind,

but I, in the strangeness,
of the complex and now,

pass by the calls of young voices,
wordless sounds from any...

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I was a soldier of the past 
And I know im not the last
I signed up to serve my Queen
Far off lands I have seen

As that soldier I done my best
Losing friends laying them to...

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All night the guns
Like barking dogs would not go to sleep
All night the mothers heart
Roamed weeping the sinister streets
And still the air explodes
Like fourth of July
Or even Christmas
When the heart is silent most of all
The...

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We remember them on this day
Those who fell in war
The men who came from far away 
To fight forever more
They stood for freedom duty bound
Walked together one and all 
Pride and smiles were seen all...

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He grabbed his gun today,
a telescopic rifle made for hunting.
From a sixth floor window overlooking Main 
the telescope brings the rebels on the street 
so close and focused.

He spends all day breaking down
the gun and...

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Like cordite fumes through the air unseen
                 The infamy flicks its diabolic tongue
      ...

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Turbine whistling
Wait...
Until all is green
Time to go
 
That familiar quickening
Of a heart
Trained in the art of war
To do battle
Rotors spinning
 
Left and right...
The tech calls
Clear!
Progressive collective
Rising high
In to the sunlight
 
Time to target
Five minutes
That familiar...

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O Flankers, your children far and wide
Stands at the zenith of their faith to take
Their prize, bereft of heritage and pride
Your blood stain shards making them shake

I was Hiroshima, you were the bomb
Your explosion devastated...

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stars,
above swirling dark,
in sky drained of color,
below,
sprawling Asia,
spread out in a carpet,
of billboards and humanity.
watching it all from the world's largest tower,
feeling like a king in a secondhand sky,
now walking among streets, stalls, and stooped...

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The salient drew his mind to the terrors of the day,
and the stink of the long dead buried in the mire.
The creeping barrage sought him hiding in his clay,
found him there and surrounded him in...

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A warning

National day, every country has one, when they are allowed
to wave their flags, get drunk, and indulge in latent xenophobia 
When the people (otherwise kept in the dark) are allowed
to think they are the...

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I was planning on going to Azania to die like you
No one would transport me
Away from the rhetoric, and Fidel left before 
I knew. So I wrote on walls
Endless missives of declarations for freedom.
I made...

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August Promise

Every year I say, come August and I will go to Norway
but every you’re the flight ticket goes up, when mulling this over
it is suddenly, September wonder-full is the weather 
of the sun, clouds...

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The days of our discontent

The rain had fallen sharply and heavy flooding roads
fields had become lakes, and cars looked like toys thrown
away by an unrestrained boy child.

From the inside looking out, the sea is calm...

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a strobe of flashing lights and the 
smell of smoking cordite filled the
leaden night
the brush brush brush of silent velcro 
and cocking guns and their knobbled sons (grenades)
rolled like severed heads bouncing in the rain

a...

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Rust on padlocked factory gates
from tears of broken men.
Time has stopped on the golden watch,
freeze framed memories of a better past.

Scattered faces breed sour looks
for brothers of nepotism
with handshakes that nearly broke arms.

Crouched in side...

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