Long Foraging Poems

Impossible mission to captcha infinitesimal moment

alternately titled: tick tock runneth amuck
seconds elapse imperceptibly 
leaving me dumbstruck,
how quickly fleeting tempus fugit; 
ofttimes imagined as time thief.

Hence following vignette: quiet as a mouse lurks the time thief...

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Salat Days
by Michael R. Burch 

(dedicated to my grandfather, Paul Ray Burch Sr.)

I remember how my grandfather used to pick poke salat ...
though first, usually, he’d stretch back in the front porch swing,
dangling his long...

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Dear John,

All day
yesterday
I loaded up with a cascading river
of mixed anxiety and anticipation
about what to safely and kindly,
transparently and vulnerably
compassionately, so non-violently, share,
what to communicate;

Which narrative tributaries to choose
within this vast spacetime stream
of choices
directions
felt depressions...

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"How Huxley Sees the World"



He composes his world -
dream extractions
simulated from 
the surreal reality of man
colour cognitive from the dead moments
we phantomise to life in sleep
electric light colour bursts forth 
from a perspective unique
a hare...

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Lisa and I went to a reception, yesterday evening, for students who’d landed summer fellowships at a particular hospital in Boston. (Yeah us!) It wasn’t formal, so I wore a crimson cropped sweater, a beige...

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Sometimes,
not often enough,
I stop my morning routine
to watch the feeding drama breathe feathered flurries in and out,
on, 
and under,
my side-yard bird feeder

Outside my kitchen windows
over this morning's sudsy sink,
looking across a twinkling white field
of early...

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Translation of Marcel Moreau's " A Paris " by T. Wignesan

IN PARIS

Paris bores me no end without you
My heart weighted down with melancholia
The spleen given over to asthenia
Empties its own sense of loss on to...

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Neftlix, Hulu, autumn elaeagnus
thorns, small hairy buds, twigs hyper-lenticelled
fruits supposedly edible, leaves elongated, oblong
xerophytic but found in wetland
introduced species, some say invasive

Xbox is invasive
Hulu is the best source of foreign films
and foreign films represent reality...

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She drinks herbal tea.

Goes foraging in the woods at the weekend.

Wears weird clothes.

Tells me if I pass her 27 point plan, I can go to bed with her.

Something told me I was never passing that...

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He wears thick gloves when he strings the barbed wire,
fashioning a thorny fence from prickly metal spines,
reminding me that cattle like to know the boundaries,
the edges of a pasture, clever green grass hesitating
on the borders...

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Huge life like mockup 
rigged up to bark
dare buzzfeed outsize monstrosity
diet coke, McDonald's and meatloaf
pet banality, execrable, and misogynistic words
greets visitors at formerly named
Mosquito State Park forever known as
Donald Trump State Park.

Whom so e'er decreed...

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CHAPTER 6 b (continued...)


Glowing insects and night-crawlers
Shuffling on the ground below them
Moments later they were sleeping 
Near their hominid companions 
 
In our present day, gorillas
Tend to sleep near to ground level
But their Pleistocene forefathers
Nested...

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THE BUG BITES –AGAIN!

We begin to get restless,
And know that feeling
The one when our heads
Start reeling!
It’s time to visit the Kruger Park,
Although sparse rain, and
The bush will be stark!
Adrenalin starts pumping,
And hearts thumping,
We arrive 4...

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(alternately titled: tick tock runneth amuck)

Ever since the advent of civilization
contrivances crafted to measure
days, weeks, months...
analytical “gifted” anonymous minds
wrought ever more sophisticated inventions
to divide existence into manageable units.

Now twenty first century Homo sapiens
technological atomic clock...

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Now, unlike my usually trenchant literary librettos, i regale the unknown (tum me) reader for savoir faire articulation, elocution, and indomitable tour de force proffered by spectrum of bounteous expropriated hegemony rightful to Mother Nature....

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Timothy Catchpole lived in a field
on the edge of a deep, dark wood.
One of a long line of Catchpoles he was,
who tried to do nothing but good.

Home was a nest on an ear of corn,
in...

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When I was very young
All I really wanted
To be was an Indian.
My mother always read to me -
Stories of fairies and elves,
Of princesses and ogres, witches,
And brownies who did good deeds.
Poems, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod”,
“The...

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Orphaned Slab 
         by Odin Roark

They call me a foundation
once supporting siding and stone
wire
plumbing
shingles

Through the doors of my house
trailed family and friends
across kitchen floor
slanted slightly
letting Benny’s agate...

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WHO WERE THE PILGRIMS ?


JAMESTOWN
1607 



 Four hundred years ago high-born Brits sailed to America
Seeking fast fortunes, adventure and fame.
Many would never endure their first year here
Cultivating, foraging, and hunting game.

Arriving in Virginia they came...

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September is aging with a cool beauty
and the Missouri seems to be hurrying the expedition
into a world of natural splendor that is impatient to strip our spirit to it's bare light,
in my silent moments of...

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American Indian, Nightshades, Moonshadows And Howling Wolf

Thirsty for red moon, its sacred beams and eternal pull
howling-out to speak to this dark and blind world, without fear;
Your echoes enter, soulful bones of insightful red man
birthing growing...

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They found her today, curled around a dirty blanket under an overpass.  The coroner estimated her age at 78.

She had been an aged, unhealthy homeless woman, living on the streets, seeking sustenance from whatever...

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Baby birds, it's said, are born not knowing 
their notes. They learn them from their mother's 
throats in the way children learn their ABCs 
at parental knees, muh muh muh becoming mother, 
da da da,...

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where are your eyes in the 11th hour?
do they roam to and fro, roaring
with insipid power, baiting the hook,
fishing for retractable men?

where is your nose in the 11th hour?
is it sniffing out a cesspool of...

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