Long Encircling(a) Poems

Where Does the Butterfly Go?
by Michael R. Burch

for the children of the Holocaust and the Nakba

Where does the butterfly go
when lightning rails,
when thunder howls,
when hailstones scream,
when winter scowls,
when nights compound dark frosts with snow ...
Where...

Read More

Juvenilia: Early Poems IX

These are early poems of mine, written in my teens as a high school student and during my first two years of college.

Shock
by Michael R. Burch

It was early in the morning of...

Read More

EcoMinisters of Earth Rights
CoArise!

EcoLogicians of resilient encircling might
CoArise!

EcoLegislators of bicameral balancing disposition
CoArise!

What is our highest and best CommonSense
of currently elected policy-choosers?
Where are our optimal health outcomes 
of proactive CommonSense?
What does vast emptiness of positive results
suggest...

Read More

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...

Read More

 The People with Wings
 It was a huge photograph of an eye – an amazing eye that now drew everyone to Mecca.  It was said to belong to one of the ‘People with...

Read More

Part I

Where gladiators fought for life,
we meet to fight for love
The constellations in the Roman night sky,
celestial spectators, bathe the Colosseum
in the white blood of light
The night is throbbing with the heat of our battle,
our...

Read More

Did you ever notice
our vampire legends
are almost always patriarchal,
sometimes even princely
and excruciatingly royalist,
elitist?

While witches plot and evil plan
in coven craven circles
more undershadow than legendary.

Wizards might be BullyVampire Princes
while witches may be victimized and therefore victimizing...

Read More

To faith communities
and fraternities,
brotherhoods
and sisterhoods
and sororities,
local non-profits
and friendly neighborhoods,
mediators
and counselors,
cooperative associations,
trauma-informed learning theorists
and practitioners for resilient
mind/body peace,

Do not deceive yourselves.
Continuing to gaze and daze 
on a monotonous monocultural path

Disassociating 
internal v external
navel v social 
my...

Read More

Your compassion reveals
mutual biological interests,
a powerful tool
for focusing fertile thoughts
and pent-up feelings

My passion regenerates
articulates
seeks to accurately label
read and process,
attend to your best nonviolent communications,
nonverbally hummed flirtations
of this
our potentially significant
Otherness.

These compassion communications,
positions,
postures,
poses,
plays,
prances and dances and trances,

Intuited...

Read More

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...

Read More

Talk therapy
among braver angels
and curious devilish advocates,

Evolves natural contemplative thoughts
of healthy minds and bodies
felt sacredly neuro-systemic

Organic
dynamic systems
reconnecting sensory consciousness
and mindful sexual experience
with worldviews recombining
Liberal YangTruth and Conserving YintegralBeauty
in co-empathic compassion

Nonviolently hopeful
win/win bicameral intelligence
exploring why

And healthy...

Read More

The views and opinions herewith extemporized to spur discourse with me, or to be mindful when exercising the right to vote in the country of your existence, which expressed intimation predicated upon read reliable publications...

Read More

Much has been felt
then written
about loneliness at the top

Less written,
yet perhaps far more often felt,
about claustrophobia in the center.

Problems with delegation,
boundaries,
predictable timelines,
responsive management focus,
follow through performance,
closeted partisanship,
competitions to be heard
listened to
appreciated
respected 
for our therapeutic,
and not...

Read More

How does it feel to you
when presidents proclaim anthro-supremacy
exclusively made
in one universal God's
straight WesternWhite monotheistic 
over-Capitalized 
kleptocratic entitlement
for monopolistic winner 
to overtake all weak
poor in spirit
vulnerable
disempowered
marginalized
despised losers?

How might this have felt
comfortable and uncomfortable
across centuries of...

Read More

David Death

David Death was strong but handsome, 
But he suffered from much discrimination, 
Because his beauty was shaded, unlit, 
Which found him called ugly and unfit. 

He understood why this error occurred, 
So always made...

Read More

Once Upon a long ago time, when the earth was full of abundant life;
and humans, who now have dominion, were but a distant star in the night…
Everything in this magical Kingdom had a spark of...

Read More

WOMB OF ALL BEGINNINGS


In the delicious womb of all beginnings 
we learnt to giggle electrons
to bear all things 
without nusturtiums, pink lilies or doughnuts 
warm gurglings of God’s dream for us

Morning glories were waiting 
deep...

Read More

This little light of mine
I'm gonna let it shine

Wide and longing
for committed dialogue
not surrounded
by elitist debate,

Win/lose games,
Zero-sum asinine assumptions
requiring ego-infested shadows

Resisting win/win opportunities
of healthy
democratic dialogue

Between constituencies,
residents sufficiently humble
to become students together
and unschooled 
unprofessional parents
and not...

Read More

The same speech before hardly could bit me
So that were redden both my cheeks for shame,
And after gave  me comfort as to free;

So used to be the spear, I felt the same,
Of Achilles and...

Read More

It was glorious ...

A glorious, glowing morn ...
crimson crept up the sky, as if air-brushed ...
little round globs of fair-weather clouds tiptoed on the reach,
(so as to not wake the moon, laying down its head...

Read More

imagine, wonder, ponder, think
  nebulous nothing is "surely something"
  more than absence, spontaneous spawning on the brink
  let's fantasise, let's dream awake
  utter the dubious name of nothing
  impostor corralled...

Read More

I was a Taoist
philosophically and spiritually
metaphysically and physically
long before my Public Administration classes.

Which may be poignantly of interest
because the original Taoist teacher,
LaoTse,
taught sensory experiences
of Yang-testosterone energy
and Yin-estrogen synergy
for a bicameral governing audience
with questions about how...

Read More

 Was privileged to have sedentary on the seashore in seraphic poetic submersion;
 the ringing sounds from the distant horizon made me entirely lost in  speculation;
 when the sounds of waves from far nimbly...

Read More

As the Autumn falls
The jays sing
A melody -a tale the old wives would sing 
While the sun fills the sky dripping
With gold as honey to the brim
I catch sight from my window 
Vines and creepyard...

Read More

molten times, volcanising immensity, vast plateau
  belly-belching landform
  oceans, shallow seas and lakes swell up and down
  land-bridging, submerging
  any one place moving astride, stutter-shifting
  continental drifting world
  climate...

Read More