Long Finding Poems

Where Is Your Mind?

Where is your mind?
Is it way out there in the clouds of smoking cigarettes and cigars?
Is it way out there in the clouds of smoking marijuana?
Where is your mind?
Is it way out...

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Humanity keeps looking forward, toward the coming of a birth,
and we’re all deemed as equals on our first day on this earth,
but as the years go quickly by our lives become our own;
we’re seen as...

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"Open Oceans"



Kneeling on pearls
wisdom preys

praying
preying

hungry hearts
count the days 

wasting away
in all that preying 

for prayers 
to be answered

children become
strangers

reading 
strange words

finding 
themselves puzzled

genuflecting to a deity
they do not know, nor wish to

fumbling
mouths closed,

swallowed hole
in the...

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This is for the Contest - 'Titanic - Fare Thee Well' Sponsored by Tom Woody.
                    ...

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Vacuum
by Michael R. Burch

Over hushed quadrants
forever landlocked in snow,
time’s senseless winds blow...

leaving odd relics of lives half-revealed,
if still mostly concealed...
such are the things we are unable to know

that once intrigued us so.

Come then, let us...

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"As other spirits sail on music, mine, oh my love, swim on your perfume." Charles Baudelaire

"Sometimes you find an old bottle from which the soul returns." 
Charles Baudelaire

"Smell is a Word. Perfume is Literature."

"There are...

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State of the Art (IV)

These are my "ars poetica" poems about the art and craft of writing poetry. 



Hearthside
by Michael R. Burch

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep...”  — W. ...

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Instruction
by Michael R. Burch

Toss this poem aside
to the filigreed and the wild tide
of sunset.

Strike my name,
and still it is all the same.
The onset

of night is in the despairing skies;
each hut shuts its bright bewildered eyes.
The...

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Rejection Slips 2

The Shape of Mourning
by Michael R. Burch
 
The shape of mourning
is an oiled creel
shining with unuse,
 
the bolt of cold steel
on a locker
shielding memory,

the monthly penance
of flowers,
the annual wake,
 
the face in the...

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Rejection Slips 3

Rejection Slip
by Michael R. Burch

Whenever my writing gets rejected,
I always wonder how the rejecter got elected.
Are we exchanging at the same Bourse?
(Excepting present company, of course!)

When editors reject my poems, did I slip...

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Villanelles

The villanelle is a poetic form based on repetition, with a double refrain. 



Villanelle: The Divide
by Michael R. Burch

The sea was not salt the first tide...
was man born to sorrow that first day, 
with the...

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Lozenge
by Michael R. Burch

When I was closest to love, it did not seem
real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness
it might dissolve in my mouth
like a lozenge of sugar.

When I held you in...

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I am fairly new to this Norwick community.
If I recall correctly
we have about forty thousand households here
where the Connecticut River
conjoins the Mohegan and Iroquois Rivers;
originally deep rich virgin eco-forest 
of and for harmonic rhythm and...

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GILGAMESH . . .  

Story has it you used your power to run amuck
Putting fear into the people, and brides in Unuk

So the people of Unuk pray to the sky God Anu
To sort out...

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A Stolen Memory
A Mirthful Chorus
By Sy Roth 


We surrounded him 
Asked to let go.
She stared at the misshapen face,
Unshaven sandpapery skin 
Eyelids a tabula rasa
Fluttery sere skin
And we could see the humor blossoming in his...

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The organic building of a coordinated artist
begins with reconstructing competitively clumsy LeftBrain technicians.

Whether learning to play the piano
or learning to communicate in some new language
or learning to adopt,
and/or adapt,
norms and nuances of some new cultural...

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Explain your historical evolution radically, inclusively, expansively, good-humoredly; 
not carefully, deductively, reductively, sarcastically.

We once had a school of thought
among up and coming geneticists and historians
that the precursor to the regeneration of a species,
or even an...

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I saw a girl at the museum. I had to take her number
It was like my heart woke up from a long slumber

She was admiring a Picasso painting.
 I knew nothing about art so I...

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We need to talk.

Is this one of those times
where you need to talk
and I must pretend to listen
while you rant?

Well, yes,
if you could extend this favor.

Your topic?

Social Darwinism.

Isn't that the birthplace of unfettered Capitalism
and Fascism
and...

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I remember several prayers
to invoke God's blessings on America,
a reminder of traditional political 
mindfulness?
Fundamental lack of awareness 
of righteous economic investments
in win/win GoldenRule
positive social-psychological security.

No one "keeps"
or "makes"
this confederation of uniting states great,
unless we democratically...

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"Overcoming misleading [economic and political] metaphors
that are physically [naturally, ecosystemically, phylogenically] in [and of] 
your [ecological-organic embodied] brain
is never easy."
            George Lakoff, The Political...

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Lake county music company filled with 
slots carney folk real carny folk the little 
pete's illegal gambling road show throughout 
the  Midwest gaming like your idol Frank Peter 
Balistreiri the mad bomber stops Metropolis...

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Three voices required,
Professor,
and two students:
Yang as Fr. Time
YinYin as Sr. Gaia

In a college classroom with Win-Win Game Theory written on whiteboard.

Professor: 
Today we are going to role play 
a Win-Win enculturation game.

We will define enculturation...

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Every year In Robin Hood Country Nottingham
There in October, they hold. What is known, as the Goose Fair. It's huge. and goes back centuries, straining the Middle Ages, perhaps even longer.
My pals and I back...

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[Well, ShallowMan’s ne’er at a loss
for voicing shallow thoughts that gloss.
With trenchant wit he reaps the dross
when seeking sense in applesauce.

But to his aid flies FactoidMan
who always has a Fact at hand;
with him, who needs...

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