Long Skinned Poems

Family Poems

Mother's Smile
by Michael R. Burch

There never was a fonder smile
than mother's smile, no softer touch
than mother's touch. So sleep awhile
and know she loves you more than "much."

So more than "much, " much more than...

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"As other spirits sail on music, mine, oh my love, swim on your perfume." Charles Baudelaire

"Sometimes you find an old bottle from which the soul returns." 
Charles Baudelaire

"Smell is a Word. Perfume is Literature."

"There are...

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“Forever”



When The Terrors came,
The Uncontrollable Ones,
she closed her eyes
and listened for the notes
her mother had planted
amongst the deep blues,
beds of Forget-Me-Nots,
she followed the 
labyrinthine trail 
and through a gate unhinged,
it would seem destroyed, thrown aside,
she...

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SELF REFLECTIONS

These are poems about mirrors, images, self-image, reflections, impressions and self-reflection. 

Self Reflection
by Michael R. Burch 

for anyone struggling with self-image

She has a comely form
and a smile that brightens her dorm ...
but she's grossly...

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Erin, for a girl who embodies Ireland
by Michael R. Burch

All that’s left of Ireland is her hair—
bright carrot—and her milkmaid-pallid skin,
her brilliant air of cavalier despair,
her train of children—some conceived in sin,
the others to avoid...

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Poems about Children


The Desk
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

There is a child I used to know
who sat, perhaps, at this same desk
where you sit now, and made a mess
of things sometimes.I wonder how
he learned at all...

He...

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R.I.P.
by Michael R. Burch

When I am lain to rest
and my soul is no longer intact, 
but dissolving, like a sunset
diminishing to the west...

and when at last
before His throne my past
is put to test
and the demons...

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Poems about Fathers and Grandfathers III




Success
by Michael R. Burch

for Jeremy

We need our children to keep us humble
between toast and marmalade;

there is no time for a ticker-tape parade
before bed, no award, no bright statuette

to be delivered...

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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...

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Poems about Things that Break II
 
These are poems about things that break and/or shatter.
 
 
 
Water and Gold
by Michael R. Burch
 
You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower...

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“It is the custom of scholars when addressing behavior and culture to speak variously of anthropological explanations, psychological explanations, biological explanations, and other explanations appropriate to the perspectives of individual disciplines. I have argued that...

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The Pied Piper from New York City – Part One

Dare his name be said?
I say, of course, Yes! 

The Pied Piper, himself, is the man, the myth, the legend.
And they, the so-called incurious lot of...

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Set upon the new world stage within the burning fires of hell. Silently posed factions of the elite, suppress the true inherit of Mother Earth. The meek children bending over for millennium, taken spankings of...

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Don't you think that this title is darkly divine?
But, of course, there will have to be weirdness that’s funny,
Though my nightmares are many and have complex arcs
There’s some risk here I might have to work...

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Last night I dreamed.

I dream--

sometimes too athletically,
fertile regeneratively,
viral, positive and negatively 
and in-between sub-climax performing 
some wins and some perpetual losses 
more ambiguously back and forth, up and down, in and out,
and not nearly sensual...

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Instant individual redemption
from predative enculturation
is overly spiritualized,
under naturalized,
rightwing evangelical dogma
more likely found in empire-building
strong business-loyalty development texts
than multi-enculturing
re-connecting
re-ligioning nature/spirit scriptures.

If spiritual 
and capital redemption from baseline natural evils
is good news for individuals,
yet inapplicable to global...

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My jubilant latent, nascent poetic tribute to black history month

Which acknowledgement ought to be year round,
similar to altruistic, humanistic, and philanthropic
unconditional acceptance and respect
crafted with the following words 
mostly written January 23rd, 2023,
cuz I, (a...

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Unquotable quotes: Paris, the last week of the August reprieve – XXXV Part Two
                 II

The first signs reek tell-tale
Buffer-to-buffer...

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Nascent poetic tribute to black history month...
crafted before onset when people of color  
got acknowledged for twenty eight or nine days
depending if leap year occurred. 

Though I yam Caucasian,
rightful to honor most bitter
racist genocidal...

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My thing is,
Yang dear,
EarthMother
is much RNA-green older
than mammalian red-DNA Yang.

Yes,
seniority breeds long-term nutritious merit,
I remember this history lesson
from your creation by fairy tale,
how WinWin Paradise YinYin
wonder invited Yang's Patriarchal CoPresence.

Well said,
dearest,
which is exactly why EarthMother
needed...

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When the StraightWhite Patriarchal President
sent out his Praise and Thanks Message
"We love you"
to those who would cathartically enjoy beheading
VicePresident St. Peter's Pence 
loves homophobic St. Paul,

This felt like too much tolerating
an unconstitutional intolerable
absence of basic...

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Unquotable quotes: Paris, the last week of the August reprieve – XXXV
 Part One                     ...

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Boob jobs and bomb jobs

Sisters in arms those tits and those weapons of massive 
destruction sex and death go together in dynamics
thermodynamics psychodynamics fused on the playground 
of this life of this poem on which...

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There is so many stories telling a child how to grow up, the difference between right and wrong. to follow the rules, to see in color, how to stand strong. But still, you are children,...

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My nascent poetic tribute to black history month

more apropos and alternately titled: 
praise to thee people 
of variegated melanin color,
whose immense understated improvements
and enhancement of webbed wide world
worth more than paltry words
of yours truly can...

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