Long Revision Poems

Poems about Poems VI

The Board
by Michael R. Burch

Accessible rhyme is never good.
The penalty is understood?
soft titters from dark board rooms where
the businessmen paste on their hair
and, Walter Mitties, woo the Muse
with reprimands of Dr. Seuss.

The...

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The title of this talk today,
"Win-Win Politics of New Feminist Economics"
suggests questions,
more than emasculating 
definitively deductive
reductive
answers.

Would you imagine
a minority-identified Buddhist,
more likely as a feminist?
or culturally comfortable
with political and economic Left-brain domination,
monotheistic competing for all-consuming
ritualistic servicing?

How...

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Salve
by Michael R. Burch

for the victims and survivors of 9-11

The world is unsalvageable ...
but as we lie here
in bed
stricken to the heart by love
despite war’s
flickering images,

sometimes we still touch,

laughing, amazed,
that our flesh
does not despair
of love
as...

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"Lizzie Borden took an axe,
gave her mother forty whacks,
when she saw what she had done,
gave her father forty-one,
she washed herself from a watered pail,
she claimed their lies and vicious tales,
she pled not guilty and moaned...

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This page shows my writing process and is part of Poetrysoup's first workshop.  The workshop's intent is to reveal how revision strengthens a poem. Constructive feedback can be a gift.  Should any journal...

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Today
we left off yesterday
to pick up
where speaking non-violent principles 
too often neglect to listen
to liberally artistic,
green and active
yet non-reactive
compassionate healers
may need to co-invest more
in co-operating democratic research
of
and for
WholeEarth DiaLogical Matriotism.

Excuse me,
but co-passioned listening
to silence
speaks not...

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It's weird
and sometimes wild
living with a non-LeftBrain verbal dominant
aspiring child,
now young adult

I find myself waiting for him
to nonverbally connect
and correct me
about my patriarchal domineering
economic and political ableist sins
of felt omission from commercial value
and, perhaps worse,
my...

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This Permaculture Design Operetta
comes out from within you
with universally acclaimed Grand Patriarchal Earth Rights
to sing in reverse harmonic rhythms and blues
with Full-Octave Matriarchal Earther Feminists Wronged,
marginalized in pre-millennial peace-maker roles
postmillennially re-inheriting the Good Society's climate...

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When I was sixteen
I wanted Robert Kennedy's life,
although I didn't know about his time squandered
in staffing McCarthyism's
Make America as Grotesque as Possible campaign,

Which would have given me pause
in that comparatively naive age
of green longing for...

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Who wants to join a sacred cooperative
with both divine and humane purpose,
secular meanings
with organic liturgical rites
of seasonal passage?

Indeed,
who would not
should ego's veil descend
like commodified energy's nonrenewable extinction;
LoseLose trends of nihilism
within psyche,
fascism 
within a paranoid society
which...

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The Twelfth Principle

Cooperatively adopt
and responsively adapt
for creolizing acclimation,
best climate and landscape health practices.

The U.S. today
reweaves two points of national nurturing departure,
both taught in schools
and history books
and multicultural sciences
and scents
and sounds.

LeftBrain dominance,
here in post-millennial enculturing lands,
remembers...

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Have you been hearing voices again?

Still, yes.
No new ones, though,
since the Voice Against Death Investment.

So you're still hearing from the Forest Voices
which are actually more of a rhythm and blues chorus
made up of 4-part harmonic...

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Jesus help me,
cried Mother Earth
to Adam's Sacred Son,
I can't be birthin' all these ego-dominating babies,
gettin' on,
you know...
Makes me sad.
From "Mother Earth's Laboratory Journal", post-millennially self publishing

Money, like fertility,
is sexy,
needing attention
to continue regeneratively thriving,
health icons rooted...

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I had two big projects
from 1970 to 1975,
The first,
to earn a usually white Bachelor dual-major degree
(which sounds at least sexist
as a usually black, brown, red, yellow Mistress nondegree)
of deep learning about yin/yang,
right/left,
east/west interconnections
cultural communions
between persuasive...

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Patriotically empowered boundaries of apartheid
are also economic and ecological apartheid
of borders unrecognized by MatrioticEarth.

Economic and ecological apartheid
of Earth's nature ourselves,
one Immigrant Creolizing Body,
are inhumane and anti-healthy faces
of politically empowered fascism,
totalitarianism,
rulership of patriarchally self-inspired Elites
now rabidly...

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Now watch this video: Planet Earth: Blue Planet II
https://youtu.be/2f9SItUEtJ8







"Breath, in Blue"



Bluebottles broken scattered
shattered legions on the beach of my heart
my blue planet lungs rattle
my breath battered in the honeycomb maze
vanished all my bees belittled forgotten...

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How do we consume,
whether on-line or off-line,
in a doing justice way
to lives we digest
and excrete?

How do we produce
in justice doing ways
for lives invested with cooperative intent
design and long-term planning
by our ancestral Elders?
Themselves descended
from sacred creations
written...

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It was a day like every other day, sunny and warm they said
New Yorkers smiling and happy, looking for their daily bread
Taxis were darting here and there, planes flying everywhere
Children were going to school, parents...

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As her EarthDay drum calls out
to inside outside severance

Amid EarthTribe's gathered laughter
and sorrow,
speaking
and listening,
singing
and silent witnessing,

Earth's wealth
leaks nutritional health 
gifts sharing value with every messiah
in sunshine circles
of care giving
and receiving
sacred shifts 
toward cherished bright esteem.

In...

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The People's Coop
is a warm inviting place,
for some
a reading and meditation
and arts practice and performance space,
for others
a place to ride sleek bicycles
with self-and-other improvement book racks
while peddling energy into the cooperative Grid,
sheltered by solar panel...

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The Tumid River of Acheron (the journey) 
Part One- Final revision

Darkly,  the tumid rushing waters flow
where any man most wisely fears to go.
Liquid blackness singing in epic pain
torture, misery and cries of the insane!
Echoes...

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As Exodus tells his story,
Moses was compelled by God
and then invited,
commissioned by inside/outside Voice,
and bv voices of Israel's extended EarthTribes
to lead them through forty desert years
of sometimes nomadic wins
and mostly immigrating losses
in a competitively shared...

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I talk with indigenous treed elders;
Tell them about my distractions
divisions
severance in-between
secular and sacred beings,
between human nature and divine spirit,
between ecological relationship
and theological redemption.

Communing cultures
and structures
return a secularized version
of theological Earth/Heaven
humanely rooted
and divinely radiant
empowering
enlightening relationships

Popularly seeded...

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"I moved through the Quarter
as if through a stage-set to an opera
which, having finished its run,
might be struck at any moment."
      John Wray, Canaan's Tongue

I move through this post-selection Quarter
as...

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My son, nearly twenty,
living at home while attending community college,
without prospects of healthier, more robust, alternatives,
believes it is now past time
for pollsters to cast aside their neutral professional agendas
and play a more positive role
in educating...

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