Rushed in wet wool, mad mud underfoot... Left the house at three, it was dark and I was heart-dipped in honey Courage and other belongings stuffed in an old pillowcase, my mother's swollen eyes and her smothered kisses It is the sickness that is the worse for me, moving always moving I drown in this smell, of vomit and the urine. I am so afraid...I have never been this afraid I tremble and am banged about the broken world outside of me It is always the same
Poetry
Poems, verse, poetry, odes, ballads
POEM: The Convent Burned down last night.
The convent burned down last night. It's end had already started with collapse, in forgotten areas of the building... and waterlogged ceiling, and weakening sections of the roof. Caved to slowed fall. Wallpaper peeled as like old skin -- walls were surrendering to age and the mold. The ghostly revenants that occupied it for the many decades were forced to ascend and reach for heaven's gate. I stepped on careful legs, bearing witness of its dying. Parts gave up, like vital organs surrendering to exhaustion...
POEM: OCCULTED MAN, WAITS.
A thousand years inside a stone, at the bottom of a frozen...lake. Glacier slow the earth reactors warmed it, the sun dried up the lake. New green showed it's tender leaves. And crowding in around, and thought it theirs. Years flicker in time, like bubbles in clear glass. Images from one brief life, onto the next. I've lived a life of just one day and lived also a hundred years...
IN THE JAWS OF THE BLACK DOG: Part 2
... I have reached a measure of greater understanding of who I am, and am proud of my abilities, the skills and talents I have had to achieve just to remain off the street and not a homeless man. To have taken advantage fully of the many gifts personally, but have not achieved the success in those that I should have had, all those that were given, along with the emotional baggage and emotional immaturity and insecurity and weirdness sometimes that I can be. I am a greater artist even though, condition stopped me from painting. I have made many inroads into music and my guitar and carpentry and working with my hands; my writing of poetry and storytelling which has helped me to develop a way into my own mind and find out where I falter with language. I am an obsessive dictionary reader, always unsure of my use of the language...
Poem: BREAKER BOY
by Michael Burns The newsies and the match girls, and the breakerboys in back. They toiled away their little lives to keep their mamma's happy. Six days a week they left their youth inside the warmth you purchased, and easy reads from newsie feeds that salted your accounts...
POEM: WHAT NEXT!
Eight-carbon molecules in rivers of waste, and the sun in a sack cloth hauls itself up again into the sky. And looks down in disgust at what was…a good idea. These mayfly lives, passing through and piling up, one upon the other as sediments on the basement of this world. Built up in that wake of seconds upon seconds. Relent. Red cushion for a place to sit, amidst rancor. Nihilism for a heart, and reluctance. And crazed mystics still keep pushing shopping carts up hills of abuse...
ANGELA LOIJ: The Selk’nam Genocide
Today my mind is occupied with strange thoughts, they don't seem to be my own...I have written this tale before only to delete it. Out of some sense of shock or disbelief. Shame. Maybe pain at how outrageous we are as a species. Maybe because I didn't want to remember something like this...or possibly it stimulates my imagination to wonder how many times this has happened, in the past; long forgotten tribes of people wiped out in genocides for the sake of progress and the industrialization of the world. And will it continue to happen. In my lifetime there have been the genocides by forced drought on African people, and so they die of starvation. There have been illegal wars like that of Iraq which has killed a million of the citizens of that country, and the purposeful brutal and bloody genocide in Rwanda in the mid nineties....
POEM: YELLOW FISH
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...
Poem: IT’S NOT THAT COMPLICATED…
by Michael Burns The versions of old stories took on a life of their own. The sheer amount of time involved, expressed itself as well. It began to no longer be a campfire tale, an interesting thing one speaks about on a long voyage. It seemed it became the most logical answer to that age-old problem -- well, wonder that is...many people tried to exploit it, they push mystery into what otherwise was a simple thing. Claimed they had inside information. Claimed all kinds of things. Swore to high heavens they knew someone who, knew someone...told lies, to impress their friends or lovers. And some were, genuinely delusional, or crooked, or just plain old lonely, and looking for attention, swore they knew the real truth of it. It was in fad, and then out of fashion. Some even threatened, to eradicate that curiosity for good. Others, went to war over it -
Poem: WHITE DOG
The white dog stops... we breathe in for a minute and take in the universal breath. It is dark out here... it's black and darkly cold, out here. The wind cuts the image from my eyes, and I watch it fall frozen and split like glass into the snow. This deep and unwritten thing -- waiting on edge, for a free life to write it, too large to see it all deep back in there beyond my visions reach. The starry dingle...I begin, and now I see it, I raise my head to take in all this...
