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...

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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...

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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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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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This is my last confession; there will be no more.

I am impercipient and slow from last night's sleeping pill,
wincing away from the harshness of day.
Kitchen cold, the room tear-splintered,
sunlight striking a watery rainbow in my...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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 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...

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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...

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futures cavort below the horizon
  an expectant dawn glows, duly announcing the first born arrival
  tomorrow then forward smiles, feeling good
  half planned momentous moment, ordering fate, shaping survival

  surf wave...

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I wake to the sounds of laughter and lively music (jazz, I think) flowing free from the empty tenement down the hall. The smooth harmonies and upbeat tempos expand to fill every corner within me....

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All organic parties
committed to EarthTribe
as My HomeTeam
could become EarthPatriots
experiencing every day EarthDay;
which, of course 
we are revolving through
together,
more resiliently 
than ecopolitically polarizing
AnthroSupremacist Apartheid.

Speaking from our felt-within
multipartisan democratic
cooperative co-governing experience
in life's healthier
and safer feeling
thinking
green outdoor communication...

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Another morning I got up and my thoughts returned here. Just wanted to put something of
the memory that lingers still today from scenes we saw of September 11th.  Scenes we would
like to but will...

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