Long Starvation Poems

Psychologically still thirteen 

Ordinarily meaning pre Internet days
familiarization with me would entail
bringing the avid listener 
into my private mancave hideaways
less a physical place than a juncture in relationship, 
(whereby one or the other of us)...

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I cannot let this obsession with Coronavirus (COVID19) go
It is apparent, from the number of deaths projected, to be in the hundreds of thousands, that many Americans still are not heeding the warnings. I hope...

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Here We Shall Remain
by Tawfiq Zayyad
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Like twenty impossibilities
in Lydda, Ramla and Galilee ...
here we shall remain.

Like brick walls braced against your chests;
lodged in your throats
like shards of glass
or prickly cactus...

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Transparently robust private/public healers,
servants,
ego/ecotherapists,
investigate, with appreciation,
cooperative health insurance
for people,
healthy homes,
resilient transportation,
and cooperative tree and plant and children and elderly nursing
preserved through winter kitchens
and solar-fueled composting centers.

Health insurance assurance,
transubstantiating health/wealth reassurance,
investing in cooperatively-owned and eco-managing
therapeutic non-violent...

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What Good Are Our Tears?
by Michael R. Burch

What good are our tears?
They will not spare the dying their anguish.
What good is our concern
to a child sick of living, waiting to perish?

What good, the warm benevolence...

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Late evening March 2045

The Teenagers were adventurous 
They were venturing.  DJ and 
Damali Trech were both 18 years 
Old. The Copy Cat Club was the
Place to  be for teens.  It mostly 
Served...

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A few years back,
in the prior millennium,
1993 to be more precise
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
born without a stage name
had his book entitled "The Evolving Self" published,
by which he meant The ReGeneratively Nutritious Flowing Self,
but he was probably shy...

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Self destructive wickedness arrested, convicted, and gaoled...

with kidnapping little boy 
ordered to suffer
life sentence without parole.

The deadly scourge of  
one obsessive/compulsive disorder
nearly left me starving to death.

Anorexia nervosa absent bulimia 
nadir of onset 
diagnoses...

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 There is a "Secret To Life,and "There is a secret to "The Death of those who will not realize that they are"already dead in the "Spirit"of "The Lord God Almighty! There is a secret...

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Perhat Tursun

Perhat Tursun (1969-) is one of the foremost living Uyghur language poets, if he is still alive. Born and raised in Atush, a city in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tursun began writing poetry...

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Moby Dick, a novel by Herman Melville, published in London in October 1851 as The Whale and a month later in New York City as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. It is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne....

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Always respect this combination of fire and wind,
she tentatively said,
after having listened for healthy and pathological winds
regenerating and degenerating,
investing in and divesting of,
yeasty flames of fertile dopamine.

They, like you,
co-arise of and from the landscapes
in which...

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Au revoir oh perilous freedom...

Since pledging my troth
to the missus July 25th, 1996
after the comma error
punctuated mein kampf with disequilibrium.

Ever since the notions
of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness
coalesced within the mindscape
attributed to one
or more...

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Ours was daily mysterious,
sometimes near mystical, 
rapture;
a sensual yet platonic
dorm-mate love affair,
within the only male grad student corridor
at SFSU.

He was the presumably straight Vietnam veteran
southern white good ol' boy,
athletically studying Japanese,
with a gentle passion for...

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Unquotable quotes: Fat People – XXIX

(I know this piece sounds mean and cruel but as every single parent must have experienced, this is also the expression of utter exasperation, and perhaps there’s also the slightest...

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Placed First in:
Can`t Believe It was a Na Poetry Contest
Sponsored by Silent One

                      ...

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Mine psyche riddled with dybbuk
Thru emerging adulthood awareness awoke
within noggin of average baby boomer bloke
catastrophization toward risk taking I evoke
positive growth experiences throughout vast
number of orbitz around sun never kickstarted,
nor linkedin with potential livingsocial folk,
thus...

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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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Standing up for the kids standing up to sleep in overbearing heat clothes damp from their pee, God made night separate from day, but with lights bright all night as well as all day, the...

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Mine psyche riddled with dybbuk

Thru emerging adulthood awareness awoke
within noggin of average baby boomer bloke
catastrophization toward risk taking I evoke
positive growth experiences throughout vast
number of orbitz around sun never kickstarted,
nor linkedin with potential livingsocial folk,
thus...

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You have fixed   all movements   within time 
every trails destination    have you outlined
no creature     can operate        ...

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As October 1 approaches, HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY……………………
I have enormous tracts of land and vast volumes of water, but cannot feed myself.
So I spend $1 billion to import rice and another $2 billion on milk.
I produce...

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When asked
by my nephew
for an essential reading list
for PermaCultural Therapeutic Design,
my Taoist thoughts went back
to Unitarian-Universalist
Yin/Yang pre-history,
when Earth produced a theologian,
Dr. Thomas Starr King (1824-1864)
reaching out for non-violent dialogue
across all global healing cultures.

This 1800s Dr....

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Inextricably rooted with hair fixation

As a lad in grade school,
yours truly, (a diminutive, intuitive,
oversensitive, and vegetative potato head kid,
whose voice exhibited
a severe nasal twang)
felt envious at other boys,
especially those young bucks
who sported budding antlers
plus thick...

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Mine psyche riddled with dybbuk - haint no joke

Thru emerging adulthood awareness awoke
within noggin of average baby boomer bloke
catastrophization toward risk taking I evoke
positive growth experiences throughout vast
number of orbitz around sun never kickstarted
nor linkedin...

Read More