memories

These are poems about sinking, poems about drowning, poems about loss, and poems about new discoveries we sometimes make while feeling lost...

Sinking
by Michael R. Burch

for Virginia Woolf

Weigh me down with stones…
fill all the pockets of my gown…
I’m going down,
mad as the world
that can’t recover,
to where even mermaids drown.

Door Mouse
by Michael R. Burch

Things

Our clothes tatter, our shoes smell,
our wood decays, our paper brittles,
our marble chips, our silver tarnishes,
our drives corrupt, our food rots,
our steel rusts, our wine sours.
Faded and faltering

Some things are nice, some necessary
Some liked, some lusted after
Some longer lived, some longer liked.
Some adored, some abused,
Some displayed, some defaced,
Donated and discarded

Along the stone-tipped buildings, glass reflects
The water ripples flowing near, where home’s
A memory uncorked and lost, complex
As photos seen in every road one roams.
Now winter’s worn the road some fifteen years,
The covered clouds are broken by the sun
And wind-whipped rain blows on till pathways clear
With breath blown in from cold where there is none.
Above looms fog that wafts up from the shrubs
Where herons gather in a game of chance
Along a path where holy men proceed to scrub
The frozen customs free in wartime dance.

I know why purple lips are silent; ice-petals frozen cold
in earth’s rank heat. War-scars streak, bleed purple blood
all over in the sticky, slimy, sooty mud.

I want to not exist.
I want to be a spirit, free and guiltless and light.
I want to feel the sun warm on my skin without the warning of sunburn.
I want to be on the coast of Mexico without suicidal thoughts.
I want to feel the way I felt on the plane ride back to Sacramento when the plane surged from turbulence and my heart leapt and I thought about lightning.
I want to lie upside down on the park bench, deafening music in my ears.
I want to ride my bike in the cold, unable to feel my fingers and ears.