In my dream, I fell through the floor,
Whispers of a father I can’t ignore.
His hands were warm, but his eyes were cold,
Behind that mask, a truth untold.

I reached for him, but he slipped away,
A shadow where his love should stay.
A laugh that shattered, sharp and cruel,
The mask of love, a twisted fool.

Am I alive, or just a ghost he made?
I can’t recall the promises he betrayed.
All that’s left is the hollow air,
But the mask? Oh, it lingers there.

Death kissed my lips and took my hand,
Guiding me through a world so strange,
Where we never parted, never knew the pain,
Where love was never lost, never estranged.

What joy we’d have known, what life we’d have lived,
If only you had not gone away.
I would have held you close, forever near,
In a world untouched by cold decay.

But death’s embrace is all I was granted,
A walk with him, through memories undaunted,
Where you and I remain unbroken,
In the shadows of what might have been.

Bound
by Michael R. Burch, circa age 14-15

Now it is winter—the coldest night.
And as the light of the streetlamp casts strange shadows to the ground,
I have lost what I once found
in your arms.

Now it is winter—the coldest night.
And as the light of distant Venus fails to penetrate dark panes,
I have remade all my chains
and am bound.

Published as “Why Did I Go?” in my high school journal the Lantern in 1976. I have made slight changes here and there, but the poem is essentially the same as what I wrote in my early teens.

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.