Long Disembodied Poems

Poems about Poems VI

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 Muse
with reprimands of Dr. Seuss.

The...

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Rejection Slips 2

The Shape of Mourning
by Michael R. Burch
 
The shape of mourning
is an oiled creel
shining with unuse,
 
the bolt of cold steel
on a locker
shielding memory,

the monthly penance
of flowers,
the annual wake,
 
the face in the...

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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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Chinese Poets: English Translations II

These are modern English translations of poems by the Chinese poets Tzu Yeh, Lin Huiyin, Xu Zhimo and Huang E. These are poems about love, passion and beauty. 


Tzu Yeh (circa...

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Nucleotidings
by Michael R. Burch

“We will walk taller!” said Gupta,
sorta abrupta,
hand-in-hand with his mom,
eyeing the A-bomb.

“Who needs a mahatma
in the aftermath of NAFTA?
Now, that was a disaster,”
cried glib Punjab.

“After Y2k,
time will spin out of control anyway,”
flamed...

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Part 1: FORE SIBERIAN FATE

silk wings wet -
angel on the lake.
starlight glitter
separates from

the golden wheat.
her docile hair,
prophecy of ice.

winter pink,
pinched cheeks.
ice skate scrapes -
flecks of flakes.

the snow queen
before her relentless
reign, a pretty thing.

her smile warms
the...

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I have an outside RightBrain dominant thalamus
to watch and listen to,
to feel confluent and resonant with,
to love,
as parent with child,
yet this is more of a mutual-mentoring of
notsad-notsad sustainable bliss
within our normally limited nutritional sensory environment.

My...

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Compassion co-arises nondually 
internal-external.

Today I want to talk about possibilities
for integral polycultural dynamics,
which are systemic relationships,
correlations,
between LeftBrain deductive ego-mind,
RightBrain inductive eco-body,
and a boundary between these bicameral landscapes,
which we call unconsciousness.

The feasibility
and health value
of recognizing this...

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Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We cannot know the beheaded god
nor his eyes' forfeited visions. But still
the figure's trunk glows with the strange vitality
of a lamp lit from within,...

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Salve
by Michael R. Burch

for the victims and survivors of 9-11

The world is unsalvageable ...
but as we lie here
in bed
stricken to the heart by love
despite war’s
flickering images,

sometimes we still touch,

laughing, amazed,
that our flesh
does not despair
of love
as...

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The Old Dark House

This tale of “The Old Dark House” is one that’s replete with a
most horrid sense of pure evil and macabre, and is worth being
retold each year during the deep-dark hours of All...

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This tale of “The Old Dark House” is one that’s replete with a
most horrid sense of pure evil and macabre, and is worth being
retold each year during the deep-dark hours of All Hallows’ Eve
before the...

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This tale of “The Old Dark House” is one that’s replete with a
most horrid sense of pure evil and macabre, and is worth being
retold each year during the deep-dark hours of All Hallows’ Eve
before the...

Read More

Sonnets XC-XCVII

Artificial Smile
by Michael R. Burch

I’m waiting for my artificial teeth
to stretch belief, to hollow out the cob
of zealous righteousness, to grasp life’s stub
between clenched molars, and yank out the grief.

Mine must be art-official?zenlike Art?
a...

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Imagine,
said Yin to distraught Yang,
never able to get quite enough of himself,
never enough time to fully become his ego-potentiality,
imagine this day opens a new rhetorical event,
a new day of conversation between you,
as Ego,
and those you...

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"Wonder
or radical [polypathic, polycultural] amazement
is a prerequisite for an authentic [ecopolitical] awareness
of that which is;
[regenerative love-rooted v degenerative fear-rooted
messages,
actions,
choices,
decisions regarding democratically cooperative
egalitarian
health and security for all];

it [polypathic open-systemic (0)-sum Wonder]
refers not only to what we...

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There is a world of difference
between schism and jism,
but they both end up the same.

Just as patriarchal Roman Catholicism
overpowers living and breathing Christianity,
so too does Capitalism
overpower cooperative capital co-investment,
so too does autocratic rationalism
overpower syncretic enculturing...

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Icons are funny things,
she thought.

Heaven feels like a warm light circle
when we are thriving
and more like a cold dark triangle
of weaponed tipping points
against me
and mine
competitively not communicating
when we are barely surviving
above the mortally terrifying bottom
of...

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Please help yarn hexed door neighbor...

Yours truly pinned down by invisible 
vestiges of coronavirus and
getting attacked from angry plague 
of buttons, plus huge spools of yarn
grossly mistook me for human sock 
to seal and line...

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Radical conservatives are cooperatively embracing a culture war.
Our battlefield is our ecologically evolving brain.

At stake is what Earth and Earth's hosted tribes become.
Our cooperative vocation is to radically co-arise nondual human development
to fit conservationist moral...

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When I was an undergraduate
in Michigan
I became fascinated with my bilaterally transubstantiating internal conversation
about sufficient v necessary evidence
for thought v feeling experience

That communication's principles of co-empathic persuasion
were also healthy-positive psychology's research
on how to best regenerate...

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Enjoying Earth's promised land
of compassionate
multicultural communion,
we share a preference for deep
rich soil
and fertile green-blue
resonating surf

As our bodies adjust
to rocky and prickly
either me
or not me space

And our minds flow
back and forth
through gooey both "me"
and organic neurosystemic...

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What does it feel like to wake up into your skin?
Your day?
What do you feel first most days?
Is it in any way influenced by gratitude,
or totally given over to worry,
anxious
or, worse, anticipating 
shortness of healthy...

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An Eastern term, karma
for Western causes
leading to subsequent events,
one bilateral lined dimension
temporally expressed,
explicated,
delineated,
articulated
co-arising dipolarity
correlational
co-relational,
negative and/or positive

Energy
empowerment/disempowerment
enlightenment/disenlightenment

Pathological benightedness
dualdark bilateral
East v West dissociative energy
potential power
shadowed unfore-giving lacking light

Repeatedly,
redundantly enough
that we create "pathology" language
to describe constant,
or nearly constant,
win/lose...

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At sixteen
People's Bible Church
sent me from rural Michigan farm lands
to Moody Bible Institute
in siren-screaming Chicago

Church fathers assumed,
despite curious evidence to the contrary,
that I was a StraightWhiteMale
born-again
wanna be choir director

Because I could sing with gospel appeal
and...

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