Long Unchanging Poems

I often surprise many people in many ways
With the words I say…with the actions I make…
It’s extraordinary how many seek high praise
With the words they say…with the actions they fake…

Neither will I…
Assume the worst in...

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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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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...

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MODERN SONNETS I

I prefer the original definition of the sonnet as a “little song” of indeterminate form and length. These modern sonnets vary from more-or-less traditional to free verse.


Maker, Fakir, Curer
by Michael R. Burch

A poem...

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Sonnets XXV-XXXII

Archaischer Torso Apollos (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

We cannot know the beheaded god
nor his eyes' forfeited visions. But still
the figure's trunk glows with the strange vitality
of a...

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Today is assiduously
religiously different,
as I review our local RiverEast News.

Every week
Mike Thompson writes a solid Editorial
in a compelling voice.
I expect to only add
my hearty sacred
happy secular "Amen!"

Our nearly fearless Editor and Chief
calls for political "ACCOUNTABILITY!"
like...

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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...

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I suppose you might have missed out on Paul Feyerabend's,
and especially Thomas Kuhn's Problem of Incommensurabiity.

Oh, not at all.
I have not looked at science or culture
or language
or even your attempts at communication
quite the same since...

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Juvenilia: Early Poems by Michael R. Burch



Desdemona
by Michael R. Burch

Though you possessed the moon and stars,
you are bound to fate and wed to chance.
Your lips deny they crave a kiss;
your feet deny they ache to...

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I believe it was Alfred North Whitehead,
an early developer of cognitive systems thinking,
who observed frequent miscommunication
and confusion
and chaos
over bilateral complexities
of Set v isolated Individual issues
within a systemic set
of inter-related issues.

This comes to mind
as I listen...

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EcoPolitical Responses

Resonant empathy
trusts co-empathic experience
and cooperatively communicated reflection,
dialogue,
discussion,
discernment,

Multilateral paths toward shared values/disvalues
InBetween win or lose risks
misvalued as unfortunately necessary
forces of natural/unspiritual history

Of squandering opportunities to notice
PolyPathically resilient value systems
culturally 
bicamerally robust,

Politically 
and economically
and ecologically
and theologically
and...

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In some primordial 
wandering birth-canal way,
I imagine we all experience traumatic excommunication

An internal climate PanDemonic
cerebral yet narrowly competitive 
win/lose health today or safety tomorrow survivalist
life or death revivalist

EcoFeminist MotherYang Warriors for GreenPeace Experience
or DeGenerative LoseLose...

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I was raised in one of those white nationalist churches,
passing itself off as a Christian evangelical Bible church,
where "evangelical" meant fundamental
and "fundamental" meant we did not interpret scripture
but accepted it as God's literal trans-historical Word
of...

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Icons are funny things,
she thought.

Heaven feels like a warm light circle
when we are thriving
and more like a cold dark triangle
of weaponed tipping points
against me
and mine
competitively not communicating
when we are barely surviving
above the mortally terrifying bottom
of...

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Friday May 13th, 2022

An excerpt taken from a lengthy tome,
written courtesy a favorite poet of mine.

Paraskevidekatriaphobia  struck within a blink,
I swear yours truly never took a drink,
nevertheless he witnessed
and falsely accused of being a...

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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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My continuing impatience problem
with smug fundamentalists
self-asserting holier than thou moral positions,
is that Christ's main point is not
Holier Than Others, like Chosen People
but Holier With Thou,
as one interdependent EarthBound BodyMind.

British King James monotheistic readers
digest at AntiLiteraturist...

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Who died
and made God the Father
the Christian Fundamentalist Law of Cooperative Redemption?

Well, dear, that was Jesus of Nazareth,
your CoMessianic Avatar of regenerative health trends,
remember?

Right,
OK, so,
in my heroic ego-narrative,
we are the purest, most right, oldest exegetical...

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K169 and K170 of CANTO XVII of the THIRUK-KURAL with Translations and Commentary

[If one could put together all that has been said, written and published on the Thiruk-Kural and on its progenitor Thiru-Valluvar, it could...

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Our humane-empowering species,
steeped in regenetic history
of human nature connecting
disconnecting
reconnecting
preconnecting,

Has an unfortunate tendency,
especially in Abrahamic historical traditions,
to imagine that our own religious tradition
is not only free of historical-cultural adaptation
but also the one supremely right-wing Way
orthodox Truth
healthy...

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I
How long have I been doing this
Throwing my time & money
Into a hole
Filling up notebooks
Mining overheard conversation
For lines
Squeezing the sponge
Of my wine soaked
Mind
Into the bucket
Of poetry
And now here we are
Gulping down the
Lead tainted water
Like Romans
Romans
Forced...

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My inside mystic still searches
for my strongest and best
omnipotently higher all-embracing Power
of unchanging monotheistic Truth
and Beauty.

My outside voices
still long for deeper Power
through widely multicultural EnLightenment
of changing
flowing spanentheism
in-between Earth's ecological Nature face
and my own ego-identity's theological...

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You, alone, can be the cure to my grief
The guilt that overflows and then gives birth to mirthwhile relief
Because of you, my temporary highs don't easily wear off
Because if you are here, life would be...

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15.7
“You are That in which the universe appears 
like waves appearing in the ocean
You are Consciousness itself
No need to worry”


The concept being that the world is nothing but thought
Transient and therefore necessarily unreal like a...

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"Energy fields extend to infinity.
Consequently they are open--
not a little bit open,
not sometimes open,
but continuously open.
The long-established view of the universe as an entropic,
closed system is rapidly losing ground.
Proposals that living systems were open systems
led...

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