Long Rocked Poems

I believed that I was rural … that I lived in country style,
where the city was close handy … that big distance was a mile.
Trains and buses ferried daily; a freeway ran close by …
comforts...

Read More

Juvenilia: Early Poems by Michael R. Burch

In the Whispering Night
by Michael R. Burch

In the whispering night, when the stars bend low
till the hills ignite to a shining flame,
when a shower of meteors streaks the sky
while...

Read More

Juvenilia: Early Poems VII

These are early poems I wrote as a boy and as a teenager.

The Leveler
by Michael R. Burch

The nature of Nature
is bitter survival
from Winter’s bleak fury
till Spring’s brief revival.

The weak implore Fate;
bold men...

Read More

Here he stands, Edwardian vogue, sometimes with his spats, 
sometimes with his brogues below his dungarees. With rounded collar points and tie, and jacket donned below this flying suit, his waste is tied with simple...

Read More

“Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and...

Read More

I was reading Rev. Julian Clifford Jaynes' homily,
delivered May of 1919
to the First Unitarian Society in West Newton, Massachusetts,
commenting on the 100 years since Channing's Baltimore Sermon.

Rev. Jaynes had a son, 
a second generation Julian...

Read More

My love is light (a fairy kiss?)          
               Like the pressure of...

Read More

I was hungry and headed to one of the tents that had been set up as a field kitchen and noticed Tim who came over to talk to me , he said that he was...

Read More

I am an Outlander
Who lives on a high hill
Overlooking a man-made lake
That once was a rapidly rushing river
Along whose banks the Ozarks Bluff Dwellers and the Osage and then Delaware
Hunted, fished, and created shelter
For their...

Read More

They were joined by Ceridfen, Lumi, Gwaldon and several others a bit later in
the day for a late mid-day meal.  Seileach, the efficient elf that he was, had already forwarded a letter containing specific...

Read More

WINTER, 1948 [40 Saxton Street]

for W.W

The winter nights that pass now
are so unlike the winter nights
that passed before, that I often
struggle back in those suspended moments
when sleep grapples for a hold,
to once again hear the...

Read More

"The Crow Bar"

she said,
here I bury my dead,
you can hear them sleeping
somnulent forget-me-nots,
snoring blithely unaware,
in neat rows between 
the thick,
ink injected lines,
their soiled lives
ploughed and 
turned over 
replanted
sunnyside down
expunged and 
wrung out

eventually,
not totally oblivious, 
they...

Read More

Brownian motion writ large...
within small medium 
as light brainstorm doth 
hail forth the following poem.

Across the realm of gray matter
slowly percolating within tissue
composed of neuronal, glial 
and endothelial cells, and although 
there must be biological...

Read More

Dad, I remember well the night I grew up. 
I know you remember that night too...
   I know you never forgot this happening:
  
It was 1966, an early Fall night, around 10:30...

Read More

Blind Man’s Five-Legged Dog Rap 

Yo, gather 'round the table, let me spin you a tale, 'Bout a blind man named Benny, he was never frail. Owned a dog with five legs, yeah, you heard...

Read More

When I first awoke in this hospital, they tell me I had stared straight ahead and never uttered a word. I was in shock for a while, but now Dr. Albright, the therapist assigned to...

Read More

As I watched my daughter playing with her son, I couldn't help but see myself in her. I still think of her as a child, but I guess parents always see their grown children as...

Read More

* Examples for the contest

Jack and Jill (the real story)

"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after..."

Of course, neither...

Read More

Warning: Mature themes, though at the time.             

             Recollections of a...

Read More

It was midnight and my dream was shattered
I fell into darkness
A nightmare
I was sinking, drowning, dying…
But then I heard the laugh of a child
Carefree and joyful was the music of her lips
She smiled and suddenly...

Read More

Driven by the forces around you driven by the forces behind you
Driven by forces above you driven by forces beside you, driven by
Forces all around you. The mouth is moving up and down but half...

Read More

Days passed, and became weeks.
Weeks became months. Soon it
Was June. "Everybody in the pool!"
All the kids communed. Molly and 
Dolly joined, in the cool blue zest.
The children answered the heat
With all day swimming relays.
Dolly and...

Read More

In the year ninteen eighty one on the nineteenth day of December
A day the town of Mousehole in Cornwall, will always remember
An R.N.L.I. Watson class wooden lifeboat, the 'Solomon Browne'
Launched from Penlee lifeboat station in...

Read More

I remember yesterdays
                                ...

Read More

major storm on the horizon reported from the "Fo'c'sle"

Though forever being a landlubber
a vision analogous to the nether world
deep within the bowels of the Earth
immensely distant from the sheltering sky
amidst a thick fog enveloped landscape
with...

Read More