Long Headlong Poems

Somehow, 
Forward, and headlong
I knew it was day again

There was a shift in the dark mutterings of the Devil,
Who now refused to sleep as I refused to sing,
Almost an anticipation in his voice,
As if he...

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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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 A French ‘Indianist’ Doctor: A Tribute to a Die-hard Humanist
                         ...

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(Somewhere in late 18th-century Europe a friend, Laetitia, by way of a letter warns her beloved girlfriend, Euphoria--a young, gay and unsuspecting mistress--against the almost inevitable seductions of the infamous and maundering philanderer, Melancholia.).



Dear Euphoria,

...

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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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Self help addict needles unsuspecting reader 

Expounded late today April 27th, 2023
since being written
countless years ago
maybe a baker's dozen
as thee doodling cock doth crow 
scouting about for carrion 
scavenging for dead animals 
and rooting about...

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The missus served me high test coffee...

Ah... tis nothing more heavenly 
(to one borne again devout atheist)
then a spring like January 18th, 2023
here at Highland Manor apartments
picturesque green covered landscape,
where intrepid dandelions 
dare to defy...

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spend your day expressed by grace ordered from a Payton place
cheer each moment from the edge of the setting sun a very well done
climb each pillar of thought and deed to reach forth every bit...

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a force for good
(for john coltrane and ahmed obafemi
based on ‘trane’s treatment of ‘nature boy’)

“…I wanna be a force for good…”
		-John Coltrane
 
…there was a man…
a very brave, enchanted man…
and he spoke of many things…
peace...

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Yuletide pageants vis a vis merry go round revisited

healthy progeny regaled being alive
analogous to children ecstatic twenty-five
on December exhaling joie de vivre at dive 
in into neat stack of wrapped gifts, when...
what! out of thin...

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Yuletide pageant merry go round

Panoply of mystical elements of holly day style 
breathe prez sense frostily exhaled aired
per millennia athwart 
(this terrestrial spaceship planet Earth)
two plus seventeen carousel rides resonated
veritable pantheon of pagan rituals 
and...

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Lapsed contra dancer rediscovers his happy place

I tip figurative hat to the late Cathy Robertson, longtime (lifetime) Thomas Paine Unitarian Church member, who unwittingly and quite casually made mention of contra dancing, which inopportunely, inextricably,...

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                                  ...

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anticipatory anxiety fosters catastrophization...,

especially bombardment of online scare tactics
courtesy fiendish insidious loathsome sinister oafs
rubbing their hands at aggrieved party;
punch drunk cyber thieves ecstatic
acquiring by hook and/or crook
sought after precious, priceless, and proverbial data
after loosed ransomware...

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Courtesy severely receding hair line..., 
yours truly enveloped within morose mood

I (Samson incarnate) 
frankly experience zapped strength,
hence sulk and pine for salad days of youth
when abundant golden locks adorned me noggin.

Now in doddering dotage scant wisps...

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Figurative paralysis laid waste body electric of mine

This is Spinal tap 
bamboozling, binding, bleeding, bombing...
ripped from every dog eared 
and book marked page
recounting latest ill fated fiasco, 
now peppering my life and hard times
causing quite...

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“Childhood only exists”
“While its innocence lives”
“In time, it is stripped away”
“By what, our invidious reasoning gives”     WIZDUMBs by JA 223           ...

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One particularly stormy day, I wandered along a back alley way.
I slipped on my galoshes and fell headlong into a gigantic storm drain.
It was a pain, as away I went, tumbling around in the pouring...

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This SoothSayer's Warning – July 24th, 2021

Dire prognostications 
(terrestrial inhabitants blithely heeded)
with contemporary age
fortune tellers foretell day of (w)reckoning,

sans total mortal kombat annihilation
when human (and many) other innocent species
(stalwart cockroach adept to survive)
pitch headlong toward...

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The real fealty
Fellowship with Deity
Not aseity

Where is His power?
Do not let His will sour
Why you don't flower

Man is not the cure
His righteousness is manure
God-Man must procure

Can't laugh off this One
Demons in the swine are done
To...

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*To fully appreciate this a person would have to be at least somewhat familiar with the movie: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

"Dude, here's a heads up - ENTROPY BITES!" said Bill as he limped up...

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Love in Kyiv
by Natalka Bilotserkivets
translation by Michael R. Burch

Love is more terrible in Kyiv
than spectacular Venetian passions,
than butterflies morphing into bright tapers–
winged caterpillars bursting aflame!

Here spring has lit the chestnuts, like candles,
and we have cheap...

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(Three Lives, Three Sonnets, Three Friends, Fate's Dark Hand)
POEM 1. Nights Were Our Time Setting Our World Ablaze
POEM 2. When Man Lusts For All, Seeking All The More
POEM 3. Yet A Cure Within Light's Truth,...

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Heaven’s chill clouds hide blazing stellar light.
Winter wet with fresh white flakes falls tonight.
A morose man maunders at his baby grand, 
Keys awaiting the touch of bony hands.

A sunlit melody from two souls’ springs
With a...

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CATULLUS TRANSLATIONS 4

Catullus LXV aka Carmina 65
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Hortalus, I’m exhausted by relentless grief,
and have thus abandoned the learned virgins;
nor can my mind, so consumed by malaise,
partake of the Muses' mete fruit;
for...

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