Voices is intended to be a collection of poems written and illustrated
by Mike Burr .
brush
if my brush
charged with colour
washed upon the page
there you would be
your eyes first formed
wet moist and slightly chiding
and your hand pallid and yet liquid
in its smooth pale beauty
and your lips would burn the page
and render it to ash
in the words concealed beneath the wash upon that page
i made a pun upon your name
and in those words formed as enigmatic shape
within the ghost like poem
i move as would avenging death through its landscape
as i believe i did
through our last goodbye throes
upon that roaming road from London town
and the reasons
which ive nere explained
would be oblique and odd to you
for we are weak and unsighted of our own prejudice
which hides behind us and is vapourised within the warm glass
of self assessment
but yours despised the very art of notes
and that same substance
with which you worked
crotchets unorganised discordant within a tune
disdain
and that superiority you felt
in that i saw your vanity
that admires itself and preens within the self same glass
in which we looked
that mole aside
i think you had little flaw
and when i look upon your pages
spread throughout the worldly book of images
i see you've aged with beauty
and the slight refrain it calls upon the laughter lines
so subtle reefs
then in similarity the rills and breakwaters
ran silent cross the wash i placed upon the moisture in the page
and ran along the words that lay underneath
my brush is just a little saline
its rich sable salted thread merely the echo of sad voices
calling from the elegantly lighted hall
and galleries of that sainted church
wherein death has both been celebrated
and decamped and gone
killed itself so many times