Long Disciplined Poems

If God
is good
half the Bible
is libel.
-Michael R. Burch

*

Willy Nilly
Michael R. Burch

Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
You made the stallion,
you made the filly
and now they sleep
in the dark earth, stilly.
Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?

Isn’t it silly, Willy...

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Willy Nilly
by Michael R. Burch

for the Demiurge aka Yahweh and Jehovah 

Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
You made the stallion,
you made the filly,
and now they sleep
in the dark earth, stilly.
Isn’t it silly, Willy Nilly?
 
Isn’t it...

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Enough!
by Michael R. Burch

It’s not that I don’t want to die;
I shall be glad to go.
Enough of diabetes pie,
and eating sickly crow!
Enough of win and place and show.
Enough of endless woe!

Enough of suffering and vice!
I’ve...

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"Sick Art"



I walk the streets
still and quiet
I do not lie
I do not betray
what the heart belies
pickled kidneys 

I am a ghost
of my former self

ears lent to hear 
the sweet music
of the sounds so fraught
caught up...

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Future selves recycle past dynamic imaginations,
Greek Gods as muscular Yang athlete images
evolve from older internal messianic bodhisattva Yin,
double-edged incarnations of power.

It is in this coincidentia oppositorum,
claims Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
that the peaks,
the Taoist Tipping Points
of wu wei...

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  MAGDALENE : JEWEL OF JESUS 


She was the Chosen
a beckoned one
to ignite His speeches 
smooth it with her own
illustrious strength
‘Courage against Odds’
marked her inner Jewel 
 soft it lay cradled  
rhapsodic rubicon...

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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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May 29, 1957: …have to think about getting a thesis director…know no professor yet in the department…someone suggested i get hold of Derek Fogg for an intro to the big guns in the philosophisches Seminar…can't...

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Thank God, for people of order 
That disciplined, hold in people like myself.

We men, who enjoy strange living so…

In such outrageous outposts
Tempting a varied life… 

As well as early imprintings so…
Weren’t we told to be...

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In our Physics Departments
our most salient awareness
grows
of those nature-spirit entities
most easily seen
and heard
and smelled
as animated and animating,
sometimes more,
sometimes less,
in our daily ritualistic lives
of solids
and liquids
and gases
and plasma
and bilateral neural pathways
of interdependent communication.

In our MetaPhysics Department,
still...

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My heart failed a few times again today, but each time it came back to life.
This is no time for poets and philosophers.
***
It is strange that in such a short time a person can come...

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4/8/24

Aww shucks
Still at the crux
In a state of flux
With reality still out of touch
I've been puzzled much
So I smoke a couple blunts
That's a double dutch
From dawn to dusk
I turned myself into a husk
Just so I...

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Pittsburgh, hammertown, Chuck Knoll and his boys
established the best Superbowl Era dynasty
with the "Steel Curtain" defense and the "Blonde Bomber" Bradshaw,
a defense disciplined on shrapnel and elite ego,
"Mean Joe Greene" and Jack Lambert, a compulsive...

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The burial ground,  groomed to greet
the gatherers of their love apocalypse
with garlands grown and sown
from the rose fire of Athena's throne,
on this day they come to mourn
the Poet who perished for the passion of...

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"Who can bear to lose a tie
With a dog that is man’s best ally? .......by poet


"Here lies my dog, motionless in his kennel
unable to wag his tail as he always did.
yesterday when I saw him,...

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Nothing much though will the heathen's heart accept from the duties of the eye,

Dated back to some years,this man was seen in a very dirty cloth and a slipper, 

No one bothered to speak to...

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THE PEANUT BUTTER STRIKE

In my last year at school I was made a prefect,	
Why I don’t know for I was no model scholar
But thinking back and taking the time to reflect,
I’m happy to have fond...

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"Madame Bovary", a novel by French novelist Gustave Flaubert, in 1856. Flaubert reconstructed a conventional story of adultery into a lasting work of heartfelt humanity. Madame Bovary is considered Flaubert’s masterpiece, and, according to some,...

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I am not a sanctuary
do not come to me for sanctuary, 
I am a supernova,  the Saturn V rocket
prepared to penetrate the highest blue sky
with a 6.5 million pound payload ride,
my rocket shell steams...

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You were primarily a spiritualist, 
But circumstances made you a noble warrior:
Your father, Guru Teg Bahadur,  
was treacherously beheaded.
You had to contend invaders from the Western frontier
And ward off repeated imperialist incursions from the...

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I went around the boarder of Canada and London
I found groups of dogs like they were my own

I’ll start with my mother’s pet at home
No other than Jumbo, the finest of all, now alone

Jumbo was...

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I am a descendant of Greece and the
Greeks,
We say hello and goodbye by kissing
Both cheeks,
But I also descend from the British,
For my father was very, very English!
I am a true mix of English
And  Greek,
And...

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One of my several disabilities
of personal knowledge
through experience
and, therefore, empathic intelligence,
is to know what estrogen-driven "horniness"
might feel like,
look and sound like,
taste and smell like.

Gay men require alternative
deviant paths
toward green/blue/red
ultra-nonviolent 
cooperatively owned
and perpetually self/other-managed
multiculturally mediated 
open...

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Trump started it,
with his arguments against transgender people
in the military violence business
of nationalism.

He seems to think trans-thinking
could not be sufficiently focused,
disciplined,
willing to accept ego-sacrifices
as necessary for successful long-term peaceful outcomes.

While this does seem to be...

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TIS thine bottled tat's tasked whence be thine edge
Be naught in wallows dew supine vogue cast
Youth triumphed hour as a young promised fledge
Barkeeper, be thoust days numbered--till asked
All stand 'tis proper thine talents measure
Skills they'd...

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