Long Tenuous Poems

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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Poems about Poems VI

The Board
by Michael R. Burch

Accessible rhyme is never good.
The penalty is understood?
soft titters from dark board rooms where
the businessmen paste on their hair
and, Walter Mitties, woo the Muse
with reprimands of Dr. Seuss.

The...

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Rejection Slips 3

Rejection Slip
by Michael R. Burch

Whenever my writing gets rejected,
I always wonder how the rejecter got elected.
Are we exchanging at the same Bourse?
(Excepting present company, of course!)

When editors reject my poems, did I slip...

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Sonnets LXI-LXX

Erin
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 it. For nowhere
is evidence of...

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Lozenge
by Michael R. Burch

When I was closest to love, it did not seem
real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness
it might dissolve in my mouth
like a lozenge of sugar.

When I held you in...

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The Moon as a Metaphor for Your Mouth
by Michael R. Burch

When I was closest to love, it did not seem
real at all, but a thing of such tenuous sweetness
it might dissolve in my mouth
like a...

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Enough!
by Michael R. Burch

It’s not that I don’t want to die;
I shall be glad to go.
Enough of diabetes pie,
and eating sickly crow!
Enough of win and place and show.
Enough of endless woe!

Enough of suffering and vice!
I’ve...

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Rejection Slips

With over 5,700 publications if I count poems that have gone viral, I suppose I shouldn’t complain … but I do have some poems that have never been accepted for publication. Here are a...

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I wonder if everyone
has a most dreaded dreamed
nightmare worst way 
to conscientiously drop wrong dead.

Mine is claustrophobi-recallish buried
half alive at best is worse
in a wooden rough pine crate.

I'm feeling angry with those who raped,
then buried...

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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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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...

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Shame and guilt sabotaged mine healthy growth...

and let yours truly not forget emasculation
that prickly emotional immobilization
whereby these lovely bones 
subject courtesy senescence 
upon cremation reduced to obliteration.

Inching closer to mortality
linkedin with concomitant
subtle deterioration of body...

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...inspired by 'Portrait Of A Lady' by T.S. Eliot


On winter days the view outside is nebulous at best,
within, the furniture is as it always was, and I am waiting,
waiting for a glimpse of you to...

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The word "Galaxy", is derived from the Greek "galaxias", literally "milky", a reference to the Milky Way galaxy. Galaxies contain varying amounts of star systems, star clusters and types of interstellar clouds. (Nebula is Latin...

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Fraught With IBS Irritable Bowel Syndrome...

today – late morning of November 4th 2022
sudden onset experienced whereby
whooshing waste naturally flushed out
ala mine body electric performed colonoscopy
diarrheal gangbuster instigated
maybe Machiavellian microbe
with powerful rectal surge
analogous to invisible plunger
forcing...

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EPIDEMIOLOGICAL NAME: Donkey Pox

ORIGIN: First detected in insane asylums and faculty lounges across America.               

TRANSMISSION: Pathogen mostly attacks highly sensitive unhinged...

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The man lay painfully wedged between two large boulders, 
his position an anomaly only the cruelest of fates could bring to a man. 
 In one moment he’d been sure-footed, gingerly climbing  the cliff....

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You're slipping away again ...

Will you return this time, or are you done?
          Are your feet set on the path to oblivion this time,
  ...

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IT, Revisited
BEHOLD, this perilous journey, tis a whimsical tale of woe, that is delightfully bespoken, for welcomed ears to bestow, as a clown be found awakening, his oversized feet abound, his frizzy hair stabbed outwardly,...

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Bartender Oh Bartender
(a stout rendition of O Captain! My Captain!
Perfect rhythmic rhyme with tonic 
when the doth ale).

Mine eyes espy the glory per the ending 
of another work day beckon Baileys Irish Creme
with Absolut certainty...

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February 13th, 2023 - old man winter gave a one...two punch

Overladen snow covered crackle and crunch
though, this skeptic owned a doubtful hunch
that such 24/7 round the clock whether coverage
would make laughingstock of forecasting
how Jack Frost...

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Stokey 2014

I am working the door

At an all night bar

Sometimes I think I have spent too much time alone.  These long nights remind me of flowers and effigies. I drink too much.  There’s...

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Elusive ephemeral ethereal expansive eye (I) witness timelessness

Analogous to Möbius strip -
measured passage of existence
seems to defy any beginning or end
(unless Artificial Intelligence
supersedes developers smarts 
of computer technology
evincing brain power
designing sophisticated machines 
that enslave their...

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Pity Clarity
by Michael R. Burch

Pity Clarity,
and, if you should find her,
release her from the tangled webs
of dusty verse that bind her.

And as for Brevity,
once the soul of wit—
she feels the gravity
of ironic chains and massive...

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I kept my Patches living with medication and trips to the Vet for a year.
But, I did not mind because I loved her so much. She had cancer and would
die.  I put that in...

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