Long Ripeness Poems

Says Csikszentmihalyi,
"Social scientists
(Abraham Maslow, Lawrence Kohlberg, Jane Loevinger, [Ken Wilber, Edward Podvoll, Julian Jaynes, Jack Kornfield, Richard Dawkins, Clare Graves, Carl Jung] and James Fowler)
describe a dialectical motion
between [Yang-ego-form] differentiation
and [Yin-eco-logical function] integration,
between turning attention...

Read More

Where was I on "Bull" Conner's day,
When the world saw white-hate on display?
Attack dogs, hoses, and lawmen's feet,
Blacks felled like timber on a southern street.
As fists and batons flayed the air,
Hate left the wounded laying...

Read More

Upon a dark and stormy night...

as jagged bolts of lightning
tore thru the the midnight clear
and figuratively ripped the sky to shreds
(analogous to jumping Jack flash),
and ear splitting thunder crackled
testing the threshold of tolerance
zombies of Sugar...

Read More

Kind, like the time hope
Filled me with light,
Sunrise showing up in the dawn,
Silencing the dark and gentling
A calm breathed through the oaks,
Compassionate, dreamy 
Feelings bleeding through the mists,
Erasing the bitterness, the tears
Embracing the miracle of...

Read More

The Book

How good the night that darkens so
To guide me to my rest.
Where a favored Book lights up my eyes
As I nestle to my nest.

A few pages turned to praise the Lord
Seems too little price...

Read More

NOSSIS

There is nothing sweeter than love.
All other delights are secondary.
Thus, I spit out even honey.
This is what Gnossis says:
Whomever Aphrodite does not love,
Is bereft of her roses.
—Nossis translation by Michael R. Burch

Most reverend Hera, the...

Read More

Gentle, like a soft rain
Often silent, soothing away
Fears that trampled 
Over my soul, erasing the little girl
Innocence
With a sense of darkness
A kiss of dread, pouring out the
Melancholy, the doubt
Insecurities looming ahead
In the ripeness of a...

Read More

21.

I care not a fat hairy fig
For your task to decimate
And predicate my world
With such villainy and hate.

You evaporate the sunshine.
You bring nigh the distant gloom.
Like a pestiferous browsing parasite
Intent on some impending doom.

Crawl! Crawl...

Read More

EARLY POEMS XXI - JUVENILIA

Dance With Me
by Michael R. Burch

(circa age 18)

Dance with me
to the fiddles’ plaintive harmonies.
Enchantingly,
each highstrung string,
each yearning key,
each a thread within the threnody,
bids us, "Waltz!"
then sets us free
to wander, dancing aimlessly.

Let...

Read More

Marriage is much like going to the grocery store to select your favorite fruit…What may look 
good on the shelf? May have a different taste once consumed at home? As I walked through 
the isles...

Read More

Aware of my attention to her as well as my proximate presence, she went on in a steadily refined rhythm, neither upset nor uplifted, holding my slick sight at reducible ductility and scotching its sneak...

Read More

Watashi Yoku........ Complained about his life. It gave him words often angring him into comparision. His father had left him with his five siblings. His mother raised them. But his father sometimes would appear only...

Read More

I've started my stand-by diet: a few different fruits each day,
and having repeated it time and again, I feel qualified to say
apples, unless of a rare and crisp nature, are mushy and generally gross.
Halfway into...

Read More

Written: September 330, 2024 For Edward Ibeh Contest

                        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A brown ribbon-like road...

Read More

My beloved Drino,

Take me to the memory

a neverlasting dream

which lived in yester yesterday

long before destiny took its toll

and footprints marked separate paths

Take me back to that  December night

where we ran holding hands

to the cottage...

Read More

Sweet Blessed Poetry
                    55.

There is a ripeness to our labor
As tumbled words are laid to bare.
We...

Read More

This August day is like an unwritten poem
and if I could I’d write it for you.

I would tell you how tiny bits
Of puffy white clouds skitter along the 
Open expanse of the azure sky.
They sail...

Read More

         I

  first flowers open, seasons begin ! : 
  bloom before doom 
  as always

Rajasthani breeze sweet and scentful 
fanning out to the...

Read More

Fair Spring, a lady, palely loitering,
    Whose brow is decked with flowers and with dew,
Whose bosom births youth’s essence which does bring
    Unto the barren glades, a glory, new,
...

Read More

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit...

Read More

Blackberry Memoir 

Blackberries, round and glossy,
Always invite me to return
To dusty country summer afternoons
When languid waves of mirages
Puddle into shimmering hiatus.

From the gently swaying hammock
I hear the rattle of berry pails
To see my grandmother, in...

Read More

To decline in sense by standards, morals and dignity,
perceived decay in honor, faith and most of discipline.
Falling into the process of condition deterioration,
societies antiquities and its embarrassing vulgar declaration.
Excessive indulgences for the riches spoil,
and the...

Read More

*****;;; *****


l.
tears rip at the seams of memories’ betrayed  trust
like liquid fists gushing through desolate waterfalls
gargling bloodied sobs upon lungs lumped with crust,
wet, wet on crumbled sagas  of  tortured, brick walls

this is...

Read More

The quotes say's kill them with kindness,
so you offer the most righteous kind of kindness you can,
And they take that kindness that you so carefully cultivated and nurtured,
And with gates wide open you allow them...

Read More

“Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all”--  King Lear Act V Scene ii

Why should not folks be mad
My dear, when women
Wear the same painted face
And men the...

Read More