Long Despairing Poems

When it struck 11, I sighed in relief
When it struck 11, I haven't felt grief
The time kept ticking on and it wasn't brief
And I'm so… patiently shaking like a leaf
Vigorously feeling vital everyday...
Every minute...every second...come...

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Instruction
by Michael R. Burch

Toss this poem aside
to the filigreed and the wild tide
of sunset.

Strike my name,
and still it is all the same.
The onset

of night is in the despairing skies;
each hut shuts its bright bewildered eyes.
The...

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Poems about Poems (I)



What the Poet Sees
by Michael R. Burch

What the poet sees,
he sees as a swimmer
~~~underwater~~~
watching the shoreline blur
sees through his breath’s weightless bubbles...
Both worlds grow obscure.



Muse/Goddess
by Michael R. Burch

“What will you conceive in...

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the Horror
by Michael R. Burch

the Horror lurks inside our closets
the Horror hides beneath our beds
the Horror hisses ancient curses
the Horror whispers in our heads

the Horror tells us Death is coming
the Horror tells us there’s no...

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Why does dawn dress robust morning,
while dusk undresses sight?
Each dawn incarnates another Earth Day
a lifetime of Easter mornings 
redeeming nocturnal sight's revolution,
another therapeutic day of gift-it-forward light,
some longer,
some shorter 
before naked covered night.

Why life?
To uncover...

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Three voices required,
Professor,
and two students:
Yang as Fr. Time
YinYin as Sr. Gaia

In a college classroom with Win-Win Game Theory written on whiteboard.

Professor: 
Today we are going to role play 
a Win-Win enculturation game.

We will define enculturation...

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Completing the Pattern
by Michael R. Burch

Walk with me now, among the transfixed dead
who kept life’s compact and who thus endure
harsh sentence here?among pink-petaled beds
and manicured green lawns. The sky’s azure,
pale blue once like their eyes,...

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Pellucid pachyderms wade across
the purpling River Manjees
and Tozzath watches from the bank, 
the seat of his maroon pantaloons soaked with mud,
his nostrils flaring with the fragrance of ombadalias,
whose lacey petals flutter
like the wings of long-dead...

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Says Csikszentmihalyi,
"Social scientists
(Abraham Maslow, Lawrence Kohlberg, Jane Loevinger, [Ken Wilber, Edward Podvoll, Julian Jaynes, Jack Kornfield, Richard Dawkins, Clare Graves, Carl Jung] and James Fowler)
describe a dialectical motion
between [Yang-ego-form] differentiation
and [Yin-eco-logical function] integration,
between turning attention...

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I wonder if everyone
has a most dreaded dreamed
nightmare worst way 
to conscientiously drop wrong dead.

Mine is claustrophobi-recallish buried
half alive at best is worse
in a wooden rough pine crate.

I'm feeling angry with those who raped,
then buried...

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Depression is like dying
without hope this process will end well,
without remediation
at least not for my closely held ego-identity,
and despair 
this turning inward
creates a cocoon by avoiding outward.

Focal awareness of ego mortality, 
immanent and emanant,
eminent,
turns inward,
returns...

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I live in America, as in the United States of America, and that used to mean something. At least to me it did. And it’s not so much in how I was raised but in...

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This brisk, sunny March morning, I return from delivering my son to his adult daycare van.  

Upon opening The Norwich Times, I delight to read the new Center for Safe Futures "will be taking...

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Stan was feeling somewhat glum,nay even despairing,on Monday morning.
Mary had gone to work on her new folding 6 gear bicycle with own basket and an extra basket from Wells-next -the- Sea 1995
[the wicker basket now...

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What is necessary
to sacred grace
and secular humane dignity 
of wealthy space--
To life as HealthyRights,
and not so much MonoCulturing Wrongs?

If sufficiently encultured,
embedded,
centered,
balanced--
If vulnerably innocent
RightBrain transparent
with nutritional desire,
active longing,
camouflaged RightBrain belongings,
reactings,
recreations--
We grow interior with exterior
mutual WinWin integrity

Integrity...

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George Lakoff, in The Political Mind (2008),
speaks to permacultural tension within democratic governance;
between conservative competitions for sufficiently orthodox authority
and progressive movements for more cooperatively integrative empathy.

This purpose of mind,
or human consciousness,
is to evolve further humane...

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We are nearly all macro-economic capitalists
Yet micro-economic cooperativists
with those we trust

S/he said
while burning up
and out.

Yet,
a Patriarchal Capitalist
has also fully monopolized
his LeftBrain lessons
and monotheistic idolizing faith
in micro-economic,
familial
monocultural tribalist,
nation-state exceptionalist,
straight white male privileged
zero-sum competitive 
commodified consumer relationships

S/he...

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I have heard many moms repeat
"You never stop being a parent."

Sadly, I don't see or hear that quite so much from the dads,
although I know of remarkably nurturing exceptions.

I thought of this as my impossibly...

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I have a son,
in whom I am well pleased,
with more than his share of heart
and mindbody intelligence,
to comprehend vastness of Earth's evolving history
and future demise,
to comprehend full emptiness of universes within
and without
co-arising nondual lonely/solitude
double-binary universes
de/re-generative,

Enough...

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Imagine
if you would be so kind,
join me
in striving to become 
less blind

Brilliant God says:
Give to your oppressively militarized government
weaponized suppressive
defensively repressive
straight white monotheistic privilege
paid for in tax advantages

And so
it was nationalistically done

Every fall
all co-invested residents...

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Shame on you for trying to kill my thrill
Shut the hell up and be my friend for real
Stop acting so arrogant and such a pill
You know I need your shoulder to lean on…
It’s really no...

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How much simpler
and yet vastly more complex,
diversely resonant,
past decisions to hire the credentialed professional elite
also choices not to hire a charismatic
brown-skinned
ecofeminist,

And how much more resilient
urgently cooperative
corporate win/win covenant repercussions might have been
if we stopped compartmentalizing,
and...

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When the past tears apart the courageous, leaving…
	Bloodstained bodies – trembling tears, silence,
		Nightmares, grief and no reassurance or relief,		
			In the distance, so much disbelief, where honor
				Wore its shimmering veil – stands a mirror,

Haunted by the...

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How might Earth's underground narrative
of a sacred Tree
speak most profoundly
of old growth economic
and political
environmental trauma?

A question I forgot to ask
when I was younger
and more disabled
and WhiteMale monotheistic

How might even Republican Red MotherTrees
avoid secularized Self-serving
by Capitalizing...

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Lori Gottlieb
describes mental health mediators
and dream translators
prescribing more cost-effective therapeutic questions:

Who am I?
What do I want?
What's in my natural health/spiritual wealth
bilaterally balancing way?

What do I want more:
to autonomously control
OR 
to be part of some monopolizing,
possibly...

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