Poems

WHAT NEXT…

/ Michael Burns

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...

YELLOW FISH

/ 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...

Poem: WHITE DOG

/ Michael Burns

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...