Long Intact Poems

You’re sick, demented, and twisted and you want to judge me for my sins? What about yours? The ones that lie deep within
The ones that sculpted you into the person that you are, the ones...

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Just enough to make it just
I want this to be enough to make this
The last song ever, the last note ever
The last romantically, poetically sad excuse for an apology, epilogue
But I've already messed up the...

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Salvation of a Formalist, an Ode to Entropy
by Michael R. Burch

Entropy?
God's universal decree
That I get to be
Disorderly?
Suddenly
My erstwhile boxed-in verse is free?
Wheeeeee!



Eternal Currents
by Michael R. Burch

How can I write and not be true
to the rhythm...

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R.I.P.
by Michael R. Burch

When I am lain to rest
and my soul is no longer intact, 
but dissolving, like a sunset
diminishing to the west...

and when at last
before His throne my past
is put to test
and the demons...

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Juvenilia: Early Poems XI

Myth
by Michael R. Burch

after the sprung rhythm of Dylan Thomas

Here the recalcitrant wind
sighs with grievance and remorse
over fields of wayward gorse
and thistle-throttled lanes.

And she is the myth of the scythed wheat
hewn and...

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For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought:
I feel the burnished weight...

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Sonnets XVII-XXIV

Discrimination
by Michael R. Burch

The meter I had sought to find, perplexed,
was ripped from books of "verse" that read like prose.
I found it in sheet music, in long rows
of hologramic CDs, in sad wrecks
of long-forgotten...

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THIS WORLD OF DEW

This world? 
Moonlit dew
flicked from a crane's bill.
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Seventy-one?
How long
can a dewdrop last? 
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Dewdrops beading grass-blades
die before...

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The language and images of Mario Vitale's poetry are so closely bound to the natural cycles of seasons, of generations, of the body's functioning, that is surprising to realize how many of his poems deal...

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Was it a cruel twist of fate?
Sneering, laughing chance?
Perhaps something I ate?
A bad bout of happenstance?

It wrenched and tore at my gut,
A sickening, sober, foreboding sign.
Wretched chance it was not,
This time was by insidious design.

The...

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I met a proper woman in a proper pub on a Monday in Peoria. It was noon, time for lunch, and we were sitting stool to stool over very large burgers at a long mahogany...

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The preparations were almost complete when Lumi reappeared down stairs.  He seemed preoccupied and burnished an all encompassing smile across his face.
     “Lumi... Lumi,” Joulupukki had to repeat himself to...

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Rest your weary head my love and let sleep consume your soul, I promise that your secret I’ll never tell, I’ll let your heart and life remain whole
It has been fifteen years since the last...

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[Continued from ‘Terror Bugs: Part 2 - A Freezer Mice Adventure’]
__________

London’s streets resembled an al fresco mausoleum 
They tracked a trail of body parts which led to a museum
A thousand Terror Bugs were massed, in...

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Queen Elizabeth Alexandra Mary ll
Her seemingly eternal monarch--God has now beckoned
Balmoral Castle, reigned over the United Kingdom
"God Save The Queen" The British national anthem
21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022

“We are all visitors to this...

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Continued from FREEZER MICE

The cat had travelled straight from hell, a hell beyond the stars
The cat that theories claim once levied genocide on Mars
She now seeks vengeance on descendants of the primal shrew
Whoever knew that...

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LOVE POEMS I by Michael R. Burch

These are love poems by Michael R. Burch: original poems and translations about passion, desire, lust, sex, a first date and dating, a first crush, a first girlfriend and...

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                             Brahman Nemesis

    ...

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FICTIONAL BIO:

The missus asked me
(hitherto known as her bozo)
just mere moments ago
to craft humorous poem to glow
nsync with the shiny nose of Rudolph
keeping syncopated metrical flow
thus methought to crow
about being equally as foolish
streaking naked outside...

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THE FRIENDS

They were the best of friends to the best of friendship
They did everything together to the best of friendship
The three wise men that came together from different locations
One from the north, one from the...

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And that is why... this platform is here for answers they can't deny...
It's a truth within a complexity that is standing high...
Let us follow the roots and explore the depths of its grand design...
Cause every...

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I'D GO OUT ON A LIMB                             ...

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Despite the day-to-day signs of man’s bitter degradation, there were many in the South who somehow still failed to see the endless pain of segregation. From the viewpoint of those who never lived there as...

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We disagree
I want to breathe people
Feel a timeless, immortal pulse
My solitude is anonymous observation
Strolling in unnoticed contemplation through worlds stacked upon worlds
The Flâneuse
My sustenance is colorful variety
Diving into the expressionism of bizarre fringes
Taste testing any...

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#1
"It is a sin to kill a Mockingbird.
While playing games with rocks or guns, defray,
them, please, ...shoot old tin cans.  Each whispered song 
from Mockingbirds, can heal the wounds  of the day"

Virtues are...

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