Long Earthy Poems

You've heard that self-unfulfilling prophecy?
"I love humanity--
it's just people I can't stand."

I love healthy humanity--
it's just uppity and/or snooty people I can't stand

I love cooperative humanity--
it's just overly-competitive individuals I can't stand.

Not so distant from,
I...

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I love you only because I love you
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
Between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates...

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Sonnet LXXXI-LXXXIX

Day, and Night
by Michael R. Burch

The moon exposes pockmarked scars of craters;
her visage, veiled by willows, palely looms.
And we who rise each day to grind a living,
dream each scented night of such perfumes
as drew...

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Every Day You Play
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Every day you play with Infinity’s rays.
Exquisite visitor, you arrive with the flowers and the water.
You are vastly more than this immaculate head I clasp...

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Dream-worker 
delves deeply into my dream;

vibrations fondle anticipation
foreplay wakes wide-eyed 
swells of liquid libido quake the rendezvous edge -
a primordial being in his prime
a masculine ego quest for affaire d’amour;
her night-loving body 
c h a...

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(A somnambulistic drama in four acts)

Actors:

Jean-Paul Marat; 
Charles Barbarou;
Charlotte Corday;
1st Philosopher;
2nd Philosopher;
The Commentator’s Voice.

Act 1. A tavern. Two philosopher sit at the table; 
Marat sits at the other, some distance away.

1st Philosopher 

…or even worse:...

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** I apologize, but if you're viewing this on a phone, it probably wont look right, as the browser page on a phone is not wide enough to indent the right edge properly. It was...

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Face to the sky,
Breath of the Caribbean
Woven with earthy Autumn,
Saturates the alveoli of my lungs,
Pouring raw impulses into the neurons of
My pleasure centers, so triggering a myriad of
Memories ... the demurring requiem to summer tide...

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Mother nature oh! Rose of roses!
Mother of all flowers' and smell,
Ylang Ylang! You don't know what it causes!
An aphrodisiac turns you on like hell!

Sandalwood with its masculine warmth poses,
Rosemary clears the head, you can tell,
Peppermint...

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Temporal incarnation of Aphrodite...

induces idyllic reverie
delight evoking similar surge,
when skirting, and eluding 
fidelity defining the marital law
on par with courting in flagrante delicto.

After reading about 
Greek goddess of love
fancy notion woke whereof
warmth suffused me
snug as...

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When we encounter problems
in daily relationships,
as all species and individuals do,
from healthy time to wealthy RightBrain systemic rhyme,
practicing nutritional v toxic awareness
facilitates RealTime health preparedness
for what is not not causing power-stuckness challenges
to otherwise healthy nests...

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Spring equinox arrives March 20th, 2023 at 5:24 PM

Despite what outside temperature registers
(even absolute zero), the official arrival
of spring occurs, when thee eel hip tic
of coe phish hunt holy Mackerel
becomes tangential to barenaked ladies 
barren...

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Which are your points for living
if we all die into cold leaky stink or ash anyway?
What's the point of dying
if we could otherwise live continuously?

Heading down the river
on AAA rite of ritual passage.
Six years since...

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My acquaintance with poetry in general and the simplistic literary brilliance of Robert Frost in particular, came at a relatively early age. My mother would ambivalently imply that I was too young to remember, however...

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Walking through the cornfields of  memory with glee reminiscing about self-journeys and the laws of love and care how life has provoked the mind to think of love as the guest of free earth...

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Sitting atop a large flat stone in an open field
Brushing aside his long silver locks
Bringing to his lips a long clay pipe
Steadying for a light, his gnarled knuckles make this a fight
His sandals dusty, brow...

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When you and your wife visited,
you shared a question asked by a pastor
of a raped
and thereby pregnant
vulnerably young and questioning parishioner.

"If your unborn child survived
his first year
and walked back into your home
do you think you...

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Dear people,
A true Voice speaks pure truth in two tones. 
      Real Ears can only hear one. 
Get one half of two true whole truths, 
    ...

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I. Early Childhood’s Gifts

Gift 1:
Is love felt from our parents, our friends a true gift
or more something we earn bit by bit over time,
(a child adds to, subtracts from, as days turn to years)?
This is...

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Silent, alone, with no mates at all
We went on there one forth the other back,
Like the minor friars a narrow way crawl.

Of the Aesop’s tale was now on the track
My thought after the previous seen...

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The Naked brazen placid blue
Meets its foe the dark forbidding nemeses
Who unleashes his growing anger and fury
Obliterating and defeating his enemy
Proclaims a victory and unrolls his miserable shroud
With utter contempt
And spews his venom
Impregnating his virgin...

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To love, agapic and/or erotic,
is a positive economic-political relational choice
to trust whomever
and whatever is our Other right now
with open caring empathy,
even when we may feel like withdrawing
into suffering,
self-isolating
depressive,
repressed concerns of mistrust and dissonance,
because we have...

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"He made a difference."

Gramps, my mother's father, 
Dave Luke -- my grandfather, 
a tall unlettered white (decidedly white) 
Louisiana man -- was born August 1888.  
He lived 87 years.  He grew under 
the...

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My twilight Dream Catcher.

Sweet melodies tug at my heart strings.
The waves roll in as the blue whale sings.
As empty moonbeams fade,
In the cosmos evenly laid.
Layers of complexity.
Clouds meandering are a formality.
A tonic of love, a...

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I would like to hear and see
how and why you live,
when and where you prefer to die.

I would like to touch and taste
who and what you think and feel
is your greenest dreamed sanctuary
without imagined ultra-violet...

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