Long Survivors Poems

What fills your goals, son?

I told you!
Need to get my car rolling [life rolling, love rolling]
yesterday,
if not today...

If I may interrupt
to process mindful resilience
for a bit...

Let me ask again:
Noticing you are concerned about long-winded
and -winding
and...

Read More

For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought:
I feel the burnished weight...

Read More

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...

Read More

The three little pigs came to the ball
Tried to blow the castle down
It didn’t work
It was made of solid gold
So they gave up and sat at their trough 
Ate noisily 
And snorted quite a lot

They...

Read More

It was 1968 we'd gathered again in the school auditorium my tiny hands sweating only five years old while my name was called in all of this cold  
civil rights riots plagued my little...

Read More

World War II Poems and Holocaust Poems (I)

These are poems about World War II and the Holocaust, which is also called the Shoah in Hebrew. 



Epitaph for a Child of the Holocaust
by Michael R. Burch

I...

Read More

Why does my multicultural applauding message,
my polycultural cheerleading,
sound so monocultural chant, rant,
a passionless litany of redundant verse?

Who would have it said of their voice
It remains both too rich
and yet wandering on far too long?

Even resonance
can...

Read More

EcoMinisters of Earth Rights
CoArise!

EcoLogicians of sustainable tribal might
CoArise!

EcoLegislators of bicameral balancing disposition
CoArise!

What is our highest and best Commons Sense
of currently elected policy-choosers?
Where are our optimal outcomes of Commons Sense?
What does this vast emptiness of positive...

Read More

1.

                                  ...

Read More

if you have taken the time to browse through this eclectic collection of self-indulgent foolishness, I hope you’ve been entertained by the quirkiness of its content, or at the very least, annoyed by the pervasiveness...

Read More

Raid versus woe

Black flag(s) show up
on social media platforms
when potential homicidal maniac(s)
communicate(s) intent to strike
with ambush and ready
read - able, eager, and willing
to embark upon murderous rampage.

Prospective killer armed to the teeth
usually a young bucking...

Read More

Glory to thermodynamics in general...

and generation of heat in particular
cuz yours truly 
spoiled with trappings 
of Western Civilization.

How ideal I imagine 
to dwell in a self sufficient domicile,
where thrum of the central heater...
automatically activated 
upon...

Read More

"We have an enemy within called the ego
who prevents us from using our mind intelligently.
It hides deep within our heart
and emerges with regularity
to challenge and consume our will."
     Rumi (M. Mafi,...

Read More

The constant assault of the silence on his senses is intense 
Hands clenched in fist he wished for noise and bliss
Buddy stopped talking and drinking he begins pacing as he’s thinking 
Tired from walking he...

Read More

"The Reptilian Anthropocene"



The Reptilians
war daily 
enrobed in their
stiff distinction suits
rainbow coloured badges 
pinned to their lapels
they beat their breasts 
and oily palms
profiting from all 
the soft-boiled 
foxes on the run
cerebral cortex bound
thinking they are free-willed
and...

Read More

This brisk, sunny March morning, I return from delivering my son to his adult daycare van.  

Upon opening The Norwich Times, I delight to read the new Center for Safe Futures "will be taking...

Read More

I finally finished retiring four years ago,
a process that started in my mid-fifties
due to late adopting kids with special needs,
including needs for me to be home
to personally walk them on,
harness them in,
and wheel them back...

Read More

My transportive 
awesome Muse
speaks of a hiking trail
for an aging snail.

My communicative
wondrous music
is dancing choreography
for an ageless bee
coming.


I ask if I might speak
with the Editor in Chief
of my town's daily GoodNews Bulletin...

No.
I do not have...

Read More

Many of you live
humbly and heartily
patriotically and industriously
nutritiously and faithfully
in Western and Southern States,

United in this time of shrinking reservoirs,
dying rivers,
hurricaned coastal residents

Displaced by floods,
invasive mold,
voracious rot and rats,

Barren top soil,
failing electrical networks,
drought,
inhumane heat,
decimated forests

Bereft...

Read More

The flames of the furnace (well-travelled by wind
slowly glazing the rags of gray women chagrined
at the sight of a hair fleeing tresses now thinned) 
sometimes billow like waves flooding naves through the night,
when the lightning...

Read More

Poet's Pre-Notes: A poem from my 8th week in a Stanford continuing education class offered on the internet, a study of free verse and structure. The poem writing technique is to write as unconsciously as...

Read More

"transference"


transference 
in a narcissistic world
propaganda for the 
unsuspecting
validation 
for the damaged

writers 
soldiers 
victims 
survivors
war fought daily
in shallow trenches

buckling at the knees
stand up 
brave comedians 
salute compatriots and cowards 
caught in their camouflaged net
all the crumbling...

Read More

Severe surge regarding thou shalt not kill violations

Fifth commandment breached regularly
epidemic of gun violence in America
bullets fly, scream and tear into flesh
senseless rampant mass killings
rip across fabric of society
buzzfeeding, jump/kickstarting, 
paradigm of mortality.

Since January first
two...

Read More

Whatever Happened To Glasnost And Perestroika?

Hobbit those characters who lived 
within the realm 
of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
as far removed as
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
upon squelched cusp of progressivism,
now most likely 
experience bitterness at the...

Read More

*LETTER TO MY FATHER*

 
Dearest Father
With heart ripped into rags and shreds I write ? to you tonight
Trembling hands and ink made of tears and blood
Teary ?? eyes and bloody heels like a defeated soldier
Lost...

Read More