Long Post Poems

Flint 
Within its brilliance gleaming
Cool black in lacquered polished silver chrome
Cranked up pistons bleached in summer’s heat
Hot steam rising as gears thundering
Beyond the crystal liquid city lights
Highways built across the land
In hearts felt pride American...

Read More

Matthew delivers his latest bullet – tin...

from the Harris-Walz front
where liberal minded socially progressive
electorate doth agonizingly grunt
targeted in crosshairs scoped out 
eager and ready to be mortally wounded 
courtesy notorious big headed 
(and bigoted) infamous...

Read More

How unparticular the day had particularly been,
On March the third of two-thousand and eighteen,
For the caretaker at an historic Adirondack Inn,
Had lacked company, and therefore, dopamine.

 ‘Twas Sunday when all the guests had fled,
From either...

Read More

Psychologically still thirteen 

Ordinarily meaning pre Internet days
familiarization with me would entail
bringing the avid listener 
into my private mancave hideaways
less a physical place than a juncture in relationship, 
(whereby one or the other of us)...

Read More

Limericks VII - Naughty, Bawdy, Risque, Absurd

There continue to be modern sequels of the famous "Nantucket" limericks, including this bawdy one of mine:

There was a lewd whore from Nantucket
who intended to pee in a bucket;
but...

Read More

What fills your goals, son?

I told you!
Need to get my car rolling [life rolling, love rolling]
yesterday,
if not today...

If I may interrupt
to process mindful resilience
for a bit...

Let me ask again:
Noticing you are concerned about long-winded
and -winding
and...

Read More

State of the Art (III)

These are my "ars poetica" poems: the ones about the art and craft of writing poetry in a modern world that doesn't always recognize the artists or their work. 



Come Down
by...

Read More

The first soft snow: 
leaves of the awed jonquil 
bow low
—Matsuo Basho translation by Michael R. Burch

Come, investigate loneliness! 
a solitary leaf
clings to the Kiri tree
—Matsuo Basho translation by Michael R. Burch

The cheerful-chirping cricket
contends gray...

Read More

Please be informed: 

The Nigerian youths have agreed together in love and oneness that in 2023 presidential election and in every other elections, whether state or local government. We will not vote for anyone who...

Read More

Dusk-gliding swallow, 
please spare my small friends
flitting among the flowers! 
—Matsuo Basho translation by Michael R. Burch

A bee emerging
from deep within the peony's hairy recesses
flies off, sated
—Matsuo Basho translation by Michael R. Burch

That dying cricket,...

Read More

Can you make any sense of
systemic racism?

No more common sense than
too much patriarchalism--
all leftbrain-rightwing dominant things
oppressing sacred Earth's
polycultural win/win systems
promoting resiliently wealthy
resonant synergetic health

Care given
as received
in fruitful wombs,
like apple cores in transition
from refuse
toward rebirth

Maybe an...

Read More

In Colchester, CT,
and possibly in your town too,
we have a LongTerm ReCoVery Committee
looking at 20/20 prevision
for post-pandemic climate health revisions
for wealthy local and global EarthJustice.

So, what have I noticed
that might be economically
and ecologically win/win useful?

In...

Read More

My protagonist today,
a Gay Black Religious Mature Male,
not quite ready for silver-grey Obama temples

Is off this morning
to a new full-time job,
8 to 5,
Monday through Friday.

He has been out of his calming,
regular custodial collared routine,
for over...

Read More

Poems about Poems IV

The Toast
by Michael R. Burch

For longings warmed by tepid suns
(brief lusts that animated clay),
for passions wilted at the bud
and skies grown desolate and gray,
for stars that fell from tinseled heights
and mountains bleak...

Read More

Some days and nights
I am terrorized by death,
cold silo ache-echoing fear,
claustrophobic breathless dark
barking inevitable factness and finality
of my decomposing mortality,
of history's posthumous demise,
post-humorous as hell.

What good is death
if it cannot at least invite eternal engagement?
Hopeful...

Read More

Grasses wilt:
the braking locomotive
grinds to a halt
—Yamaguchi Seishi, translation by Michael R. Burch

Oh, fallen camellias,
if I were you,
I'd leap into the torrent!
—Takaha Shugyo, translation by Michael R. Burch

The first soft snow:
leaves of the awed jonquil
bow...

Read More

I was skeptically listening 
to a retiring social researcher,
and problem-solving imaginer,
from the American Enterprise Institute;

An Institute
I usually find more destitute
of bicameral consciousness than not,
and thereby with less healthy resonant imagination
than more pathological dissonance.

But, I found...

Read More

Wounded Sacred Dementia: Part Two

Dementia's derelict WinLose SocialWorker
suboptimizingly hesitates
when I tell her
I have not changed my mind
about not adopting Fetal Alcohol Syndrome
into my vulnerable home
with a seven-year-old AfricanAmerican boy
blind
and unable to defend himself,
or even run...

Read More

Transparently robust private/public healers,
servants,
ego/ecotherapists,
investigate, with appreciation,
cooperative health insurance
for people,
healthy homes,
resilient transportation,
and cooperative tree and plant and children and elderly nursing
preserved through winter kitchens
and solar-fueled composting centers.

Health insurance assurance,
transubstantiating health/wealth reassurance,
investing in cooperatively-owned and eco-managing
therapeutic non-violent...

Read More

You've heard that self-unfulfilling prophecy?
"I love humanity--
it's just people I can't stand."

I love healthy humanity--
it's just uppity and/or snooty people I can't stand

I love cooperative humanity--
it's just overly-competitive individuals I can't stand.

Not so distant from,
I...

Read More

Truth is a feather 
pushed off to the other side.

Truths are a body of feathers
within which our bodies reside.

OK, students of life’s healthiest purposes and meanings,
it’s time to regather, if you would be so kind.

Namaste.

[Silence]

[My...

Read More

Poems about Poems V

Distances
by Michael R. Burch

There is a small cleanness about her,
as though she has always just been washed,
and there is a dull obedience to convention
in her accommodating slenderness
as she feints at her salad.

She...

Read More

An old Greek word, ecclesia,
is often translated as church,
but could also be thought of as a civilization
acting civilly,
as a citizenry
acting as responsible citizens.

The noun side of Ecclesia
casts residents as consumers
of democratic and economic cooperative systems,
while...

Read More

Numbers, numerals,
like words,
combinations of letters,
mean something,
sometimes more secular,
sometimes more sacred ecological.

Numerals and letters share sacred iconic human-intelligence root systems
within a bicameral ecology of mind-body nonduality,
both RightBrain matriarchal empowering flow of integrity (Czikszentmihalyi)
and LeftBrain patriarchal Yang...

Read More

Why do questions hope to end with answers
while answers seem to never end 
without yet more questions?

As a case in point...

How are the Case Studies of economic and political history
different than Einstein's Thought Experiments?

Wait a...

Read More