by Michael Burns

I was painting ten paintings the other day. In the music studio and lost an idea among a pile of dead poems sitting on a shelf,

it was a good idea!

It was something about the sound a bird makes after a terrible storm;

for the world is stilled and made over completely in that single solitary second.

This is not the only world…by far.

A thousand million universes compel the worst to be imagined…and the very best.

And yet, there is still more.

All round and threaded on a string like pearls around my lovers neck…

This fake world stops as it does, at my ceiling, the real thing above it all, collides with it itself endlessly…and I am safe in this false cave.

It all ended I feel, before I was born.

A subversive’s poetry sung by his revenant…

from another dimension.

A message in a lonely dream…a warning to the future ones “Beware all, pay attention. For the cancer of the universe draws near.”

If not closed off and in a box…

in hope that the future is not shut then forever, and exalted for the good, as good.

Barred off, and running round, a fence, a paint peeled sign; for sale.

Shutters closed, the door nailed shut. The weeds are long and the house is dressed in a veil of dust.

Old newspapers cling to past-time walls, the monthly bills under a foot of it…heaped up flyers collect to a barbed wire fence around its heart.

And echos fall back and to the boulevard of unleafed trees.

Long shadows cast, and the sun is low, red and in that last day.

There will be no tomorrow.

A cat walks past that mouseless place, on the street were no one lives.

Were, no one a has ever lived.

A dream with no one dreaming it.

I’ve seen this place within, and wake now in exhausted hurry.

The last one again…time will move on slowly. At it own pace; and I will sleep it through another aeon.

Looking up, and I see the grey imitation, and come to worry why I had not noticed this, long before.

Or had pretended that I had not noticed.

I watch the watchers watching, and they, unaware, that I am not really here, but in the other.

I will always be safe now…I know that,

for I have come to the end of that long journey of fear, and there is none here but me.

A tall woman, the most beautiful woman in the world; her breasts rose and slightly fell saying, “Summer is quick here, and we are cheated, like unrequited lovers…hours are stolen from us…and in the fall, a war for the soul continues and still the heart of a man beats on.”

And then she sang it in a song.

I looked outside this morning and turned a deaf ear

At the coldness, the din of a harvest assaulting my flowers.

Wooden ducks gather at my back door, waiting for their messenger to return and say its time for them to leave; and the once great migration will begin again.

And the few that are ancestral to those millions that once leapt into a granite sky,

leave on time and in an orderly fashion, bit players in that grand play.

A storm starting…rains that blocks the sky with clouds as thick as oily smoke, lightening moves through them like, yellow fish in barrel of dirty water.

The thunder yells to my ears about its power…rainwashed and then it wanes and waits for his brothers reply.

I was painting ten paintings the other day. In the music studio and lost an idea among a pile of dead poems sitting on a shelf,

it was a good idea!

It was something about the sound a bird makes after a terrible storm,

for the world is stilled and made over completely in that single, solitary, second.

All images and writing are the copyright of Michael Burns.