Long Expediency Poems

You were primarily a spiritualist, 
But circumstances made you a noble warrior:
Your father, Guru Teg Bahadur,  
was treacherously beheaded.
You had to contend invaders from the Western frontier
And ward off repeated imperialist incursions from the...

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You died for our equal treatment, and we demand "affirmative action."

You died for integration, and we justify segregation when we throw public brawls and destroy property.

You died to stop the Klan and the supremacists from...

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Hiroshima Poems I

Let Us Be Midwives!
by Hiroshima survivor Sadako Kurihara
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Midnight...
the basement of a shattered building...
atomic bomb survivors sniveling in the darkness...
not a single candle between them...
the odor of blood...
the stench...

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Sympathetic purpled eyed Suzan                               ...

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Gold Fever 

History will not record the bloated weight
Of this pious and bigoted race 
Or count the fat and flaccid wealth
Of religions idolatry

Those pages have been scrubbed clean
By prosperous forgivingness 
And the cruelty of established...

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Brother Gaus


Gaus is a Rainbow man
Only that he’s not curved.
He’s just a miscellany
That makes him striking.
Gaus has a funny knack
Of repairing any gadget
Can do so with anything
Except repairing himself.
He can service the lot
Except his own...

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“The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience".  Mahatma Gandhi

“Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity...

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Villanelle: Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art

Nothing so upturns creative cauldrons as retching up art
As the craft not art of constructing poetry for expediency
Does the poet’s art lie in not collocating words...

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who ask YSIC about who watches them watch countless MPEGs of people’s posted antics that pile up a profile of their tagged interests,
who believe convenience and expediency are more important than their right to privacy,...

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Torture’s Toxic Contagion
                  by Odin Roark

From where comes these perpetrators,
These conscienceless mortals
Whose senses are quashed by orders,
By fear...

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Ironed Shadows
                by Odin Roark

Her hands lay smooth
the coveralls worn thin
now wrinkled
once charged with earth

Mended armor from
courageous prices paid
embossed with...

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Ironed Shadows

Her hands lay smooth
the coveralls worn thin
now wrinkled
once charged with earth

Mended armor from
courageous prices paid
embossed with crosshatched mending
stands raised in triumph

A home plate remembered
by innocence long abandoned
players made humble from
a boy's first slide for...

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Clinging to sunny Bognors regal
skirts
At his Majesties most royal verges
The readied hand thrusts upon the 
lever,
And, shuddering, She forward lurches.

Clanking ominously over diesel fueled
growls,
Expediency, they said, was driven 
to ignore:
The raised up objections and anguished
frowns,
And...

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The gamblers and the mourners
Explore the vagaries of fate,
The expediency of life
Dangling in the capitol rotunda
Like a hanged man
His hair standing on end,
His boots in the air.

Write, sing, boo,
Do what you will
Never mind the outcome.
Words...

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Illegal Dying


On pursuit of greed
On pursuit of fame-
Gambling with precious life
Is no longer funny play.
We don’t guard ourselves
Marmon broke all bounds
Greed, flood gates opened
There’s a deluge
That inundates humanity.
We’re bait in water
Thrown by bungee jump
Into the...

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I try to be humble
when it comes to evaluating poetry,
reminding myself, that my penned gems
may seem paste to others – addicted
to cuneiform glitter, my mining deeply within
our shared reality tunnels sometimes left mere holes 
for...

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Constrained by the sober exercise of judgment,
And dignified by deliberation and privacy.
I yanked my soul out of its secret chamber, 
And held it to the mirror of my eye.

To see it like a star or...

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Micro-Feasting
                          by Odin Roark

To propagate the dung heap of ignorance,
Is...

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I CURSE HER UNIVERSE!

Uh-oh!  She’s not going to like me
The lady as fair as any flower
She’s going to treat me with an iron hand
Because the wields  holds all the power

Don’t you hate *****es...

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How mighty did she stand
 tall and regal, stately on the land
within her branches stretched
 a view along the earth's great edge
in the curve unseen lay God the architect;
 but life itself is dealt within...

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I view it as unseemly to use high-sounding language to make an impression.
I perceive it to be ostentatious to  marshal words vainglorious in succession.

It is a determinant of consternation, if not constipation, to be...

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There was much chatter about the new mad hatter
He is madder than the other, said my sister and brother
I want to meet him, I told them, intrigued by the new him.
He was a bit crazier...

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LEISURE FROM LISTFULNESS
A long & dreary time,exquisite
delight has passed.A perverse
unaccountable feeling.A moment’s
reflection,a store of recollections
a painful task to concentrate upon.
Questions come thronging my pen,
difficult to convey,a matter of doubtful
expediency,leisure from listfulness,
dreamy,beautiful,inconsistent,reflective.
Passion and affections a mute...

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Your eyes have gone empty as earthenware.

There are no more tragedies, no selections,
no decrees. There are just faces numbed
or edged to laughter: old stories of expediency,
slow dancing to mechanical music.

All things turn ocher and eggshell.

It...

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Forgo friendships built on sand dunes
Scattered in the desert of expediency
Driven by greed and ceaseless searches for fortunes
Flying in air balloons of inefficiency. 

Forgo fantasies caught up in streams of nonsense
Cajoled in monsoons of short-termism
Driven...

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