Long Whirring Poems

Rejection
a roundel by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your beauty from your heart has so erased
Pity, that it's useless to complain;
For Pride now holds your mercy by a chain.

I'm guiltless, yet my sentence has...

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Medieval Poem V

A Proverb from Winfred's Time
anonymous Old English poem, circa 757-786
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

1.
The procrastinator puts off purpose,
never initiates anything marvelous,
never succeeds, and dies alone.

2.
The late-deed-doer delays glory-striving,
never indulges daring dreams,
never succeeds,...

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“Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and...

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Translations of the Oldest English Rhyming Poems

The Rhymed Poem aka The Rhyming Poem aka The Riming Poem
Old English/Anglo-Saxon poem from the Exeter Book, circa 990 AD
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

(excerpt)
He who granted me life...

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Nylon waste is often akin to a brushed out stable, manger, or stall. But brushing the carpet is often a resemblance of a swirling cloud of dust and tobacco shards and tobacco shards are not...

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rise and shine deflect common sense while white dilapidated guts spawn oppossing beats an treats that are not so daring as uncommon feats and relativity clings to gravity and in spite of everything nothingness has...

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Inevitable death defines afterlife - deux

Flinty stones figuratively rolling inside
whooping out that primal 
binaural beat of your drum
ma mind haphazardly 
ricocheting axon to neuron
inducing inxs of chaos 
wreaking entropy beheld 
by beauty and the beast
enveloping...

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I never told anyone how my ears reverberate in a silent room.
The whirring drone ever present, a conquistador of my private spaces.
This is my cohabitation with an industrial generator.
But I’ve graduated from the torment. 
My...

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I was driving home late one cold Winters night
It was minus ten and the moon shone bright
Then in my car headlights a young girl I did see
I swerved hard to avoid her and hit a...

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If I died today March 2nd, 2020...?

No matter unfulfilled dreams never came true,
nevertheless yours truly doth gladly bid adieu,
where repurposed afterlife (mine) atomic brew
reconfigured, reconstituted, and reconsolidated
out maws of madness, no matter any blues clue
(yea...

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Lulled to sleep courtesy white noise of the fan

Onset of first 2023 heatwave
found yours truly lulled to sleep
courtesy rattle and hum
(U2 can dreamily tread 
where the streets have no name) 
of oscillating fan.

Nestled under blankets,
the...

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Immune system boosted, and bolstered...

to build better back me
analogous to hatches being
battened down 
courtesy COVID-19 12+
(Pfizer only) and Flu Vaccine (65+)
October 31, 2024,
which found me convalescing
one day later with minor aches and pains
remedied with acetaminophen.

More...

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Sappho Translations by VI Michael R. Burch

Sappho, fragment 121
translation by Michael R. Burch

1.
As a friend you're great,
but you need a much younger bedmate.

2.
Although you're very dear to me,
please don't be silly!
You need a much younger...

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Nestled among the trees in a primitive campsite,
A cub scout and his mother were on their third camp-out.
The tent was pitched; double foil wrapped food was cooked just right.
The young campfire cook gave his skills...

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Violet Smith lived in Center Kingdom. Her neighbors were Jack and Jill;
Like orange sun, of a pink morning, when it's just peeking over blue hills.

With Mother and Father and sister, Ava, Violet enjoyed life on...

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This happened about fifteen years ago.
My son and I were camping in the woods.
He pitched the tent in a forest with a clearing.
We took out supplies to build our campfire.
He was about eleven at the...

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Pin drop,the silence was loud
Hashtag a baby is born, dead gone the mother was
Bang bang,the landlord overthrew 
Loud cries,papa had fled
Nosiy chaos was the start of it all
@JayHeart

I came into the womb like a clout...

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She kept it all inside her
and never spoke a word,
though her thoughts flew and darted
like a trapped and frantic bird.

Inside her was a garden
that was hung with Spanish moss,
like the massive oaks were weeping
to remind...

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I woke up late this morning, my phone was dead. I guess I never plugged it in, I found it buried under my pillow (erah!). I barely had time for anything, just managing to cover...

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(Piece is intended to be the most complex vocabulary gothic ever)

Grandiloquence,
mellifluous pulchritudinous,
gaiety of quintessential moistening serendipity,
bile deluge if you show the sanguinary breath,
crimson waterfall sizzling on lava rock hellscape.

Yclept necrophelia maestra,
macabre tableau,
dips douse abyssal incarnate,
now...

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Why is technology more difficult to grasp, the more they try to simplify it? Take the computer for example, when it first came out it was big, expensive and bulky and not in use for...

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Nestled under blankets,
the gentle whirring sound
soothes the savage beast
within mine body electric
of one generic, opportunistic,
and wholistic garden variety man.

Within blink of closed eye
yours truly transported
into the realm of deep sleep
benumbed to reality as unconscious guy
experiencing...

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To the Invisible Friend 

The dredging decades have floated by like drifting clouds in the beckoning western sky.
Hello dead friend of my distant youthful days under these erotic jacaranda blooms.
It is my firm hope that...

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It was summer as I was walking along the dirt road of
 my uncle's cornfield.  I had to get out of the house because 
I couldn't stand talking about how my grandpa's funeral 
session...

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Cobblestones of pantry and a wide toothed grin. Visitors from afar pay no heed and paramount is the settling and uprooting of cultures old. Might as well be blood in that feather quill who prints...

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