Finally to Burn, by Michael R. Burch

Landscape with Fall of Icarus, unknown artist copying Pieter Bruegel (Netherlands) c. 1560s.

Finally to Burn
 
Athena takes me
sometimes by both hands
 
and we go levitating
through strange Dreamlands
 
where Apollo sleeps
in his dark forgetting
 
and Passion seems
like a wise bloodletting
 
and all I remember
,upon awaking,
 
is: to Love sometimes
is like forsaking
 
one’s Being—to glide
heroically beyond thought,
 
forsaking the here
for the There and the Not.
 
*
 
O, finally to Burn,
gravity beyond escaping! 
 
To plummet is Bliss
when the blisters breaking
 
rain down red scabs
on the earth’s mudpuddle ...
 
Feathers and wax
and the watchers huddle ...
 
*
 
Flocculent sheep,
O, and innocent lambs!,
 
I will rock me to sleep
on the waves’ iambs.

​Michael R. Burch

With over 4,500 publications (including poems that have gone viral), Michael R. Burch claims to be one of the world’s most-published “complete unknowns.” His poems, translations, essays, articles, letters, epigrams, jokes and puns have been published by TIME, USA Today, BBC Radio 3, Writer’s Digest–The Year’s Best Writing and hundreds of literary journals. His poems have been translated into fourteen languages and set to music by four composers. He also edits www.thehypertexts.com and has served as editor of international poetry and translations for Better Than Starbucks.