Long Impossibly Poems

I heard two distinct voices in the night,
Conversing amongst themselves most eagerly
They whispered like children in excitement
Their sardonic mouths sung many savvy tunes
It was Death I could perceive, defending me,
And he, a strange, distant friend
Seemed...

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The Lay of The Best Man - Part 4

I ask you this: Have you ever known a man to ‘buckle under stress’?
Or have you never seen a man have a ‘moment of madness’?
Have you not...

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I have heard many moms repeat
"You never stop being a parent."

Sadly, I don't see or hear that quite so much from the dads,
although I know of remarkably nurturing exceptions.

I thought of this as my impossibly...

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      In the purple shadows of the black's monoliths, where an ancient echo calls forth, at the blurry forge of "Ralkon Dis",
a salient dragon from mystery's petra cliffs drifts you...

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1.

I remember 20:

Aflame with ideas and visions,
A mind unfettered by necessity's constraints,
Spirit open to everything -
Tomorrow held no fears, 
Yesterday no regrets;
There was only day following day,
Each new with something to give,
Each corner I turned
Led...

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Yesterday brought not a storm, 
But a suffocating stillness.
Everything stopped.  
My throat grew dry.  
My bones began to ache.  
The silent but constant rhythm of my little world seized.

Everything stopped.
Then in exactly...

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The telescreens hummed their endless drone, 
A symphony of truth alone, 
Dictated, printed, beamed so wide, 
Where independent thought had died. 
Newspeak choked the rebel tongue, 
And every sunrise sadly sung 
The praises of the...

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Weird "fake" news

This pencil necked geek
did hair thru the long grapevine
actually following false tidbit
originated within imagination i.e. mine,
while stationed at Macbook Pro
laptop - time already inching close

to hour of rise and shine
yikes still no bloody...

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I see us
cowering within
our safety walls
of sterile
nonorganic comfort

I feel us,
almost smell us,
struggling
vacillating between pungent stink
of fear inside
and acrid
acidic anger
about life sucks outside

Emerging toward viral hate
directed against entitled Others
unwelcomed emoting immigrants
encroaching on our safe home space

It...

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What are these days of mourning stories
I choose not to tell about myself,
my emotion-driven journeys
to windy hot imagined future
and remembered warm wet green
and impossibly resilient blue past
pre-historic paradise,
before people
and our mosquito
and cockroach
and locust
and indoor rats...

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Robin Wall Kimmerer,
in Braiding Sweetgrass,
describes the first three woven rows
in process of making an ash basket.

The first Yang row of ecological root structure
is most impossibly conflicted
between extreme tensions up and down.
Weaving Yang-dominant is more of...

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Out 
of the darkness

star-lanterns’ beam finds an awakening dream - 
a strewn snowy stream 
gracing the depths of the black swan night


Earthbound

from the realm of the pulsing Polaris 
   ..traveling through time zones...

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YESHUA
His name was Yeshua, the legitimate, not immaculate,
scion of a young Jewish couple named Miriam and Yosef and surely
a brown-haired, brown-eyed Middle-Eastern man, sun-bathed and beige,
raised in the traditions of Abraham and Moses, David and...

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She'd been raised to despise them, and despise them she did
  The Orthodox, be they modern or old-fashioned, and the Chassidim
She'd grown up loathing their Sabbath and their dietary restrictions
  Their clinging to...

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Il pleure dans mon coeur (“It rains in my heart”)
by Paul Verlaine
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It rains in my heart
As it rains on the town;
Heavy languor and dark
Drenches my heart.

Oh, the sweet-sounding rain
Cleansing pavements...

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memories
vast x-pan(d)s
BLue
Symbullic Prower
each let-ter numb
my hands
my oh my
the seimene

cognizance 
WHHO?

its all backwards
the wizard? states plainly

you should grow your hair long and sail the sea once more
with a handshake and a heavy chest being loaded onto...

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keeping low walking softly blending in
as a defensive buttress against you name it
shall we get back to categories vs. kaleidoscope
asked the autisticly artistic ship's doctor
his specialty more melancholia than anesthesia
I'll gladly tell you that much
which...

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When it stopped and I saw the target, a handsome 16 year old, part of me wanted to jump up and run. This party wasn’t with my usual friends - except my BFF Kim was...

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ZEN DEATH HAIKU IV

These are my modern English translations of Japanese Zen Death Haiku. 

The moon
hovering above the snow-capped mountains
rained down hailstones
—Sekitei Hara, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Oh, dreamlike winter butterfly: 
a puff of...

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HE WAS NEVER A CHRISTIAN!

His name was Yeshua, the legitimate, not immaculate,
scion of a young Jewish couple named Miriam and 
Yosef and surely an olive-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed
Middle-Eastern man of medium height, raised in the traditions...

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A dreamer, words on the page.
Perhaps I am the empty book,
Pages begging to be written on,
A chapter is coming, but here we are,
Change and travel on the way.
Fear of the change is slowly
Replaced by the...

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Back straight, shoulders down. Straighten the computer. Stop staring at the purple walls.
Light the candle once, twice, three times -- why won’t it light? --
before the flame finally catches,
the scent of pine blooming among the...

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...The man nodded a bit, taking it in,
then absently stroked the beard on his chin,
said,”Everyone wants hat they think they deserve,
I can’t help but think you got it backwards.

“Not you alone, the issue is this:
You’ve...

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Preface:
Earlier today May 28th, 2021,
the 12-member jury unanimously
found Cristhian Bahena Rivera guilty
of first-degree murder in brutal stabbing death
sentenced to life in prison 
without the possibility of parole
of Mollie Tibbetts remembered as then friendly
20-year-old who was...

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Back straight, shoulders down. Straighten the computer. Stop staring at the purple walls.
Light the candle once, twice, three times -- why won’t it light? --
before the flame finally catches,
filling the room with the scent of...

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