Long Entrails Poems

SELF REFLECTIONS

These are poems about mirrors, images, self-image, reflections, impressions and self-reflection. 

Self Reflection
by Michael R. Burch 

for anyone struggling with self-image

She has a comely form
and a smile that brightens her dorm ...
but she's grossly...

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R.I.P.
by Michael R. Burch

When I am lain to rest
and my soul is no longer intact, 
but dissolving, like a sunset
diminishing to the west...

and when at last
before His throne my past
is put to test
and the demons...

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Poems about Things that Break II
 
These are poems about things that break and/or shatter.
 
 
 
Water and Gold
by Michael R. Burch
 
You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower...

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THIS WORLD OF DEW

This world? 
Moonlit dew
flicked from a crane's bill.
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Seventy-one?
How long
can a dewdrop last? 
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Dewdrops beading grass-blades
die before...

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Our lusty voice was in the tramp of narrow, winding,
     Scree-littered, deep-rutted roads;     
 Ravens, uttering guttural croaks, slow-wheeling above      
 ...

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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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The Deception of Free Verse: Dreams I, Translation of Etiemble’s L’imposture du vers libre by T. Wignesan 

(From René Etiemble’s only poetry collection: le Coeur et la cendre: soixante ans de poésie (the heart and...

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My umbilical scar is hollowed out
Now it's like a tiny wormhole on my belly 
Its a cherished remnant of the coil that nourished me into existence 
I still feel a little tug through my bell...

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(Gado is the old name for Caucasus)
Translated by Viktoria Makatsaria

A black door opened,
A black man came out
In a black car.
A black fume appeared over it.
The man said:
‘Fume, where are you going?’
‘To the town of a...

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Animal Chain Atrocities

No longer a bucolic photo op
bedecking a cover of Life magazine

Free grazing
pastoral images
now but bewildered enslavement

Animal commodities
factory farms and feedlots
CAFO habitats raising
sixty billion a year for dinner tables

Chickens

Hi-Tech slaughter
football fields long
alethic poor
four walled...

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Prelude: A BRIDE SET FREE

How romantic, the fall, so far above the pleading waves.
The heights, the depth, to look the deep in eye and weep.
Air space between the lovers’ arc and shallow graves.
The tangible singsong...

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My mind wanders to the stillness of a field
 where wild asters used to stud the grass with blue
 I seem to hear the echo of a voice
 Lamenting over the vast stretches where my...

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Wanton women of Whitechapel
Desperate and destitute
Weakened from want
Shrunken stomachs barren of bread
Dying from disease in dingy dosshouses
Selling themselves on the streets for shillings
to buy beer, a bed for the night
or a bonny new bonnet
to enable...

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              If a poem was a spell at wizard's dell. 
Would it say in a state of dual-singularity come to life 3D...

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What do the dodgers dodge? 
Remind me to lace up my socks, 
Put on my boots and be born again.
Trained and ready, steady, go! 
An old man’s antlers in the rutt,
Dangling keys riding on hips...

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What do the dodgers dodge? 
Remind me to lace up my socks, 
Put on my boots and be born again.
Trained and ready, steady, go! 
An old man’s antlers in the rutt,
Dangling keys riding on hips...

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Annotations of mis-co-ordinations of the latest military drone strike 
The fear when the children of Ukraine hear bomb raid sirens into the night 
What’s near when all that you can contain is silenced by your...

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The Killing Tree (caution extremely graphic)
My daddy hung my bunny on the killing tree 
he wrapped my hands round the concrete filled pipe

a hot burn filled my body, then I went cold
the last thing I...

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FREE VERSE VI

Reason Without Rhyme
by Michael R. Burch

I used to be averse
to free verse,
but now I admit
YOUR rhyming is WORSE!

But alas, in the end,
it’s all the same:
all verse is unpaid
and a crying shame.



What the Poet...

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AmI haveI willI doI as all been some will be with all the helping verbs from Ahman and Ricks in jr high in a timed collective to last a lifetime, I be a  planetary...

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Rollercoaster On The Scenery

Life rolled along on another day’s roller coaster
Two steel rails and rubber wheels forged the way
Speeding along a narrow path from mountain top
Shadowing the vast lake below in green
Left bank is scenic...

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Resemblance
by Michael R. Burch

Take this geode with its rough exterior—
crude-skinned, brilliant-hearted ...
a diode of amethyst—wild, electric;
its sequined cavity—parted, revealing.
Find in its fire all brittle passion,
each jagged shard relentlessly aching.
Each spire inward—a fission startled;
in its shattered...

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Homeward Path                                 ...

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I’m sitting in a dark, nothing but a T.V. on.
I’m watching horror movies, or am I watching paint dry.
I see people, I see faces, but I still can’t shake the feeling I’m being watched.
A scream...

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for Prithwin

first  
      left downstroke
start from the top
  plane out
let the long anchor tip roof-line curve sharply upwards
at the stern down-end
pile it in stuffed in the centre
leave the...

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