You and your juvenile ways.

She’s blinded by a hazy state of mind
While
The call of an iridescent siren
Throbs in her ear.
The question of
What
Is
Time
Molds her soul.
It is a template on which
Other phenomena pile upon,
Continuously building
A tower of forgotten reflections
In anticipation of a collapse.

An infinite sky exits within my teacup.
Rose, mint world..
in a porcelin bowl.
Blue backdrops the newly budding tree,
its green sprouts compliment the sun with
their shine.
I do not wish to drink this world away.

My tongue is dry.
My lips wrinkled from the thirst.
I kiss the bowl one time.
And swallow this world.

I wasn't the ghost, you were the echo..

Reflections on the Loss of Vision
by Michael R. Burch

The sparrow that cries from the shelter of an ancient oak tree and the squirrels
that dash in delight through the treetops as the first snow glistens and swirls,
remind me so much of my childhood and how the world seemed to me then,
    that it seems if I tried
    and just closed my eyes,
I could once again be nine or ten.

The rabbits that hide in the bushes where the snowflakes collect as they fall,
hunch there, I know, in the concealing snow, yet now I can't see them at all.
For time slowly weakened my vision; while the patterns seem almost as clear,
    some things that I saw
    when I was a boy,
are lost to me now in my advancing years.

The chipmunk who seeks out his burrow and the geese now preparing to leave
are there as they were, and yet they are not; and though it seems childish to grieve,
who would condemn a blind man for bemoaning the vision he lost?
    Well, in a small way,
    through the passage of days,
I have learned some of his loss.

For, as a young boy I endeavored to see things most adults could not—
the camouflaged nests of the hoot owls, the woodpecker’s favorite spots.
But now I no longer can find them, nor understand how I once could,
    and it seems such a waste
    of those far-sighted days,
to end up near blind in this wood.

Keywords/Tags: reflections, loss, vision, childhood, eyesight, perceptiveness, acuity, age, aging, cataracts, blindness, days, years, decades, near-sighted, far-sighted



What the Poet Sees
by Michael R. Burch

What the poet sees,
he sees as a swimmer
~~~underwater~~~
watching the shoreline blur
sees through his breath’s weightless bubbles ...
Both worlds grow obscure.

Published by ByLine, Mandrake Poetry Review, Poetically Speaking, E Mobius Pi, Underground Poets, Little Brown Poetry, Little Brown Poetry, Triplopia, Poetic Ponderings, Poem Kingdom, PW Review, Neovictorian/Cochlea, Muse Apprentice Guild, Mindful of Poetry, Poetry on Demand, Poet’s Haven, Famous Poets and Poems, and Bewildering Stories

In the mirror
the hickey looks like
lipstick. When I rub
my neck
her teeth stay
stuck like kissy lips
on mirrors
of girly girls.
On the surface
the blue-blood egret
and his
white-toothed egret
friend look like
enemies.
They share the lake’s
surface like comrades splitting a spliff
during war.
The mirror’s surface
reflects my haggard
face.
The kiss on my neck brings me pleasure
that is difficult to peck in the eddy formed after she swelled along my desire.

In the mirror:    
his naked body
my naked body
like the cartilages
of comrades marching back
to their bombed base.
That night he finished quiet like the veteran
egret pecking his prey.
That night I spread––
the eddy after the prey was pecked. On my surface I can’t find any traces
of his breath or his pecks. The mirror’s surface reflects our haggard love––
tired of slithering away
from egret beaks
finding it difficult
to breathe
lifting its long neck
above the swell
in the eddy
in this sea.