A habit

be fed

keep starving it
on good food

and it will get sick of you#

When life be speeding up
live in slow motion
When things get heavy
drop them and live light

Be weak its stronger
Let go or be holding on
Be letting in
what you be putting out
Drop them, they, him, her, that, there, you from all memory

Look through one eye be blind in the others
Be the softness of an answer
not the edge of a question
Flow through the mouth
not from the tongue

Be little its much bigger
Stand up in your skin
***** in your wo-manhood
Receive and don’t return

Live through the chest not the forehead
Summon life's energy not knowledge
Lean in the middle
not left not right

Be
slippery
as eel

and sharp
as the arrow

Its
only
cure


seeing
beyond what is

I
be
mine

not
another's

Soul
be's the medium
in which we exist

What is taste
before I taste it

or sound before I hear it
or touch before I feel it

I make real
what
isnt

The past is a ribbon

Threaded with shiny beads

A curled string of memories

That once belonged to someone else

Pity Clarity
by Michael R. Burch

Pity Clarity,
and, if you should find her,
release her from the tangled webs
of dusty verse that bind her.

And as for Brevity,
once the soul of wit—
she feels the gravity
of ironic chains and massive rhetoric.

And Poetry,
before you may adore her,
must first be freed
from those who for her loveliness would ***** her.

Published by Contemporary Rhyme (January 2005) and The Columbus Dispatch (Sunday, April 3, 2005). Keywords/Tags: Poetry, pity, clarity, obscure, webs, dusty, verse, brevity, gravity, irony, chains, manacles, massive, rhetoric, imprisoned, prisoner, jailed, *****, ******, *******

because you are mine,
something inside me screams "no"
i need to be loved.