The brunt of me.
Ends up bursting and unsalvageable.
Maybe I have another pill in the corner of my mind.
Just churns into the slop.
And lets out a bellow.
Everything about depression.
Just teeters around in a crusty way.
But it is thorough.
Is loving as a centipede.
The brunt of me.
Doesn’t end, just creates spots in my eyes again.
Bursting and unsalvageable.
I had a plan to build a new mind out of blades of grass.
It stayed up longer than expected.
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 we do,
that our bodies are wise
in ways we refuse
to comprehend,
still insisting we eat,
drink ...
even multiply.
And so we touch ...
touch, and only imagine
ourselves immune:
two among billions
in this night of wished-on stars,
caresses,
kisses,
and condolences.
We are not lovers of irony,
we
who imagine ourselves
beyond the redemption
of tears
because we have salvaged
so few
for ourselves ...
and so we laugh
at our predicament,
fumbling for the ointment.
Keywords/tags: 911, war, violence, surreal, survival, survivors, recovery from, love, lovemaking, lust, sex, tears, redemption, body, bodies, flesh, touch, caresses
Redding Poem 2
"Sacramento River WordScape"
These descendent waters swim like mad lagoon fish,
Heading decidedly south with a fiery mindless turn,
Their cool liquid urgencies reaching to all sides enticing
The bosomy turning earth and its pectoral indecencies,
With an impotent power unknown to anyone alive now,
As watery signatures knife their way into the crestfallen sand bars,
Adrift in an ambiguous undertow of death-marked reticences;
Swimming and floating lazily as a red lily floats downstream,
Enveloped cooly in blue clarity, absorbed by diamond sureness,
These arching trees lapping inward the reeking salmon atoms,
As rippling currents of heaving hands and wild bone sneezes,
Salvage the unsalvageable, and a solitary blue bird
Jiggling a crimson ring, as it bobs upon its ascended perch.
You set fire to my soul
When I thought I was lost
Brightened my whole world
Warmed every square inch
Of my ice block heart
You thawed me inside out
Put a light in my eyes
The sparkle I thought I lost
Then burned the whole thing
Threw it in the flames
They destroyed me
I went up in flames
Charring my once thawed heart
Burning it to a crisp
Unsalvageable
You lit a match and
Dropped it in the gasoline
Igniting everything
Like the pyromaniac you are
(Pyro-Kings of Leon)
I leaf through a notebook,
re-reading old poems.
I cringe at the childishness,
the bare, colliding words.
"Unsalvageable",
I think to myself.
Better to bury them quickly,
before they try to get out.
New poems must be written;
the old cannot be saved.
Or can they?
Can I perhaps rework them,
reshape them into something new?
Could better poems be created,
if old poems are revived?
Music so sweet to these ears:
MAYHEM
MURDER
MASS DESTRUCTION
LOOTING
SHOOTING
ATOM BOMBS POLLUTING
It is a symphony in 2 acts
One:A Final reading from the Apostle before the final Chime
Two:Ashes to Dust in continental plains and Weary early American valleys
EVE OF DESTRUCTION is my father's favorite 45
I still have in it's original wrapping but the stereo is all but totally unsalvageable
My house is a rubble,covered in Radiation
Neighbors,no more,as our block is a complete disintegration
You and I-
on the dance floor this night?
Come death with me ,perhaps..
under the Moon's dying light!!
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