Long Problem Poems

Dandelions…
They flutter, now I see
Fiery lions…
They're dancing with me
Sunlight…
Come out and shine down 
Moonlight…
Shun out my darkened frown

I am the infinitesimal stars in the tranquil, terrestrial night
I am the scars minutes before the sunlit dawn...

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For ten months now I’ve brooded over coming second place
in the pickle section deeming, it no less than a disgrace.
It was written plain and simple, so there can be no excuse,
that the pickles in this...

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The Sun Is a Liar



It’s been quite some time since I've awoke early enough to meet the sun coming over the horizon. As I gazed out the window from my bedroom window seat, the sky...

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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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Dad hit me only once, an upper cut to the solar plexus. It nearly lifted me off my feet. I was 17 then and already fairly tall, 6’1.” He was 48 and of medium height,...

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It may have been the devil himself who prompted the kids in my schoolyard back in 1947 to chant "Patsy Foley's roly-poly from eating too much ravioli."

At first, no one could remember who started the...

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Poems about the Coronavirus I


yet another iffy coronavirus haiku #1
by michael r. burch

plagued by the Plague
i plague the goldfish
with my verse



yet another iffy coronavirus haiku #2
by michael r. burch

sunflowers
hang their heads
embarrassed by their coronas

I wrote...

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Zen Death Haiku

Brittle cicada shell,
little did I know
you were my life!
—Shuho, translation by Michael R. Burch

Returning
as it came,
this naked worm.
—Shidoken, translation by Michael R. Burch

As dew glistens
on a lotus leaf,
so too I soon must vanish.
—Shinsui,...

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Epigrams by Michael R. Burch



Negligibles
by Michael R. Burch
 
Show me your most intimate items of apparel:
begin with the hem of your quicksilver slip ...



Negotiables
by Michael R. Burch

Love should be more than the sum of its...

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This is for the Contest - 'Titanic - Fare Thee Well' Sponsored by Tom Woody.
                    ...

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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...

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Epigrams

Autumn Conundrum
by Michael R. Burch

It’s not that every leaf must finally fall,
it’s just that we can never catch them all.

Piercing the Shell
by Michael R. Burch

If we strip away all the accouterments of war,
perhaps we'll discover...

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Limericks I - Relatives and Relativity

The Cosmological Constant
by Michael R. Burch

Einstein, the frizzy-haired,
said E equals MC squared.
Thus all mass decreases
as activity ceases?
Not my mass, my a$$ declared!


A$$-tronomical
by Michael R. Burch

Relativity, the theorists’ creed,
says mass increases...

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It’s heading for our planet at ten thousand miles an hour
To stop it all the experts say we haven’t got the power
All the nukes in all the world won’t constitute a plan
So someone said, ‘All...

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Twenty two years had passed  by

She blinked, and a lifetime had passed

She started this job as a lark

She never thought it would last

Two husbands and rehab were part of this bar

The husbands...her clients all...

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Poems about the Coronavirus II


This World's Joy
(anonymous Middle English lyric, circa early 14th century AD)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Winter awakens all my care
as leafless trees grow bare.
For now my sighs are fraught
whenever it enters...

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Not to play any blame game,
in this our new co-evolutionary capacity
for LeftBrained Language CommunioNation
long become YangDominant associated
with monotheistic 'civilization',
aristocratic anthrosupremacism,
including Earth's newer colonizing history
of evolution by Orthodox Moral Elitism.

Processes of GodWord supremacy
became belligerently associated 
with...

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Brilliant writers
have recommended to younger students,
to only write if they cannot live without doing so.

Elder successful icons of artistic expression,
dance,
voice,
drama,
sculptors
have similarly advised apprentices,
do not do as I have done
unless you could do naught else.

But what...

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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...

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The difference between 
bad-old-boy 
competitively evolving 
egg white privilege

And good-girl 
cooperatively revolutionary 
just-us-yolks

Foreshadows a symbiotic contrast
between prophetic performance
and messianic practice,
said Professor Glory
in her Gospel of Permaculture class,
one Friday morning
while sitting on her crass 
desk of...

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Near Sainthood
by Mirza Ghalib
translation by Kanu V. Prajapati and Michael R. Burch

On the subject of mystic philosophy, Ghalib,
your words might have seemed deeply profound
and we might have pronounced you a saint...
if only we hadn't found
you...

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A good time was had by all at
Mother Daughtry's. The next 
Day Damian was in his usual 
Mood with Molly in her cozy
But large room. He layed on her
Bed she layed on top of him.
"Hmm,"...

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Damian Stood with the front 
Door opened and said,  "Family! 
We will be leaving in fifteen 
Minutes. Do whatever you have
To before we hit the road. Use
The bathroom whatever! 
Come on!! HAKIM!! About 7
minutes...

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The problem of military reactions
to territorial control issues
is not merely that violence breeds further strategic development
of violence,
although this is no small,
nor amoral, 
concern.

This primal problem of militarism by historic default
is that it is an intrinsically...

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It's hard to say where and when our town's People of Faith Cooperative started.

After all,
we have all emerged together,
and are still emerging
people of TaoGod,
right?

Our faith includes defining our still humanizing species
as among those not capable...

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