Every life,
a history crafted
from memory
and oblivion.

The forgotten,
misplaced,
and excluded
have a voice.

White spaces
on a printed page;
emptiness
between
notes of music;
missing children;
cold loves;
dead comrades...

Silence
speaks aloud
when we
quiet our souls
and listen.

Stories
we don't tell,
but know,
saved within
the labyrinthine,
lost libraries
of the heart.
  - mce

How many poets,
by alcohol and despair,
choose to depart
this living air?

The muse can be
an evil *****:
she'll **** your brain,
she'll make you twitch.

With her it's not
a casual roll,
she wants your *****,
she'll eat you whole.

You strive to strike
the head of the nail;
one blow comes home,
but dozens fail.

Soon you despair
to ever succeed:
you open your veins,
commence to bleed.

You give to her,
and give and give,
until it's just
too hard to live.

Then in the bottle
you sadly seek
another day,
another week.

It isn't pretty,
it isn't fair,
and so you depart
this living air.
  - mce

She writhes
         in a slither
                of dyed silk
rending
         the darkness
                with her sighs.
   - mce

I stole a copy
of The Back Country
when I was sixteen
and it set me
upon the Poet's Road.

You signed it
for my friend
while I was
far away at war.

After most
of a lifetime,
I have it still.

May your
mountains and rivers
never end.

  ~mce

For personal reasons,
that name conjures
in my mind only
images of war.

Yelling rebels,
teaming Lakota,
Nipponese samurai,
stealthy NVA.

Perhaps
it is time
to declare

a Peace Moon

and learn
to live quietly,

bathed in its
silken shining.

  ~mce

Most every day
for years now,
I have taken up
Finnegan's Wake
and read a page
chosen randomly.

No doubt, I
have read
it through
at least twice.

I still have
not a clue
what it means,
but, oh, what a
magical stream
of consciousness
in which
to plunge,
to frolic
and to swim.

  ~mce

I used to be
a scholar vulture,
picking the flesh
from other's texts;
now I read
for pleasure
and my mouth
is full of
other writers'
dreams.

  ~mce

Living alone,
I am randomly
eccentric.

It's not a quirk,
if no one sees.

Often at odd hours,
day or night,
I sneak a glance
at my mirror
hoping
to be surprised
by a young
and happy
reflection.

Never happens.

   mce

and how they did:

nine choppers
in perfect formation,

gracefully deadly dancers
in a choreographed ballet
of death.

yet even as you
puked and prayed,

for that suspended moment
you briefly knew
a floating sensation
of mortal beauty,

a brilliant amalgam
of expiry,
elegance
and vitality

never felt since.

    mce

What do you suppose
would happen
if ****, Scotland
and Bald ****, Arkansaw
hooked up
in *******, Austria?
Perhaps they would
stop in *****, Canada
for toys and then
pound hard through
*******, Pennsylvania
and go down to
****** Lick, Kentucky
before coming together
in ******, Michigan.

Hopefully, they
would avoid
Conception, Missouri.

The geography
of the absurdly
possible makes
for titillating
journies of fancy.

Let's all meet up in
Eros, Louisiana.

See you there...


mce

It is only a piece of fruit.
Take its fuzz in your hand
and make a vertical slice.
Seek that rift with your
hot and eager mouth.
Engulf it. Probe it gently
with your tongue and enter it
like a lover. **** hard and
take its sweet juices into
your mouth and enjoy them
dripping down over your chin,
sensuous, sticky moisture.
Lap at it until it is empty
and you are exhausted, spent,
fluidly full and fulfilled
with its satisfying succus.
After all, it is only a peach.

  ~mce

The dying god
born again,
only to die and
be born again,
mirrors the heart
that falters,
hiccups
and stumbles,
but perseveres
to find its way.
  - mce

"The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world..." - Wallace Stevens*

Craft it oblique,
nearly opaque.
English lacks an
****** vocabulary
and the merely
clinical or brutal
fail to convey
the delicate
butterfly kisses
two human hearts
caught up in
the dance of desire
hope to bestow
upon each the other's
fragile essence
as they briefly
touch, embrace
and release
in a physical world
that is so much more
than flesh and facts.
  - mce

****, it's so quiet:
my heart feels like
an abandoned
railway station
rusting in the rain
that no one visits
anymore because
it's so much
easier to fly.
  - mce

If you submitted
to a moment of sanity,
tore off your clothes,
removed your mask
and stood boldly,
for just an instant -
glorious, trembling
and naked -
before another
human heart,
who would you be?
  - mce

Ignition, spark,
a turning key,
sets the writhing
serpent free.
Worlds spin,
words collide;
realities begin
to slide.
Markers
fall away,
lines implode;
unlikely voices
yawn in code.
The palette
melts to a
fluid smear
that  trickles
down a
thirsty ear.
Sounds skew,
scream, resonate
at an inaudibly
alarming rate.
Neither sense
of life nor joys,
only cacophonic noise.
The birds of touch
are flown away,
leaving vacuums
in the day.
The chain-mailed,
twisted, human heart,
tortured from
its fatal start.
Find the answer,
spin the wheel,
stop the madness,
cease to feel.
  - mce

Nothing
Friendship
Conversation
Lust
Consummation
Love affair
Nothing
  ~mce

for my ex, on her birthday*

I have rarely written of it;
I barely think of it.

Now, ten years separate us.

But your heart can not skip
lightly away from thirty years.

When I do remember it punches
me hard in the solar plexus,
like the scenes from that
long ago and far away war.

It took the wind out of my sails;
a chunk out of my life;
more than a little piece of my heart...

so many cliches and all so true.

We have moved on,
as another cliche goes.

It is not the wife I miss,
but the very human person
and the life we made together.

Thirty years does not make
a life sentence, but a long one.

What you think will be
and what becomes,
conjoin and diverge.

Love is like the daily weather;
it arrives and then it departs.

Some storms cannot be survived,
but nothing is really ever lost.

   ~mce

Happiness is an ice cream shop
with a thousand flavors.

You can't visit every day,
but when you do, how delicious!

Choose, slurp, and smile;
delight and be satisfied.

You'll be back soon enough.

  ~mce

The wars, they will be fought again. - Leonard Cohen*

I am harmless now,
my anger long spent,
my bloodied hands
long dried.

I hurt no one,
consciously.

But the wars,
the wars do not
know an ending

and the warriors
in anger
splash blood
across the earth
eternally.

Sometimes,
it is good
to be an old man
with dry hands.

   ~mce

"awake from the dream of judgement."*

Every day
I make my bed,
wrap it tight
as the soldier
I once was
was taught.

Every day
I wrap my life
tight against
the tumult
that the world
has become.

All that remains
is to wrap myself
tightly around you
and hold on
for as long
as that world
allows.

  ~mce

for Sharon Olds*

Never have I
read words
that so truly
capture
the Ordinary;
that capture
the Ordinary
and encapsulate
it as if in amber
where it burns
with such
Extraordinary
intensity and
becomes a life
lived again.

   ~mce

I slept poorly last night,
a night of tremulous dreams
and not much rest.

Poorly, an odd adverb.
The old sleep poorly.
How strange to be that old
and dream young dreams.

I dreamt I was alone
on the floor of the Dojo,
failing my next belt test.

My fading body would not flow:
it stumbled, faltered and forgot.

Beneath my teacher's gaze,
I tasted my failure as if a kid.

I have not feared failure
in the decades since I became one.

But again I knew the metallic
panic of inadequacy,
like the stricken adolescent
who prefers stillness to misstep.

I miscarried and once more
knew the terror of it,
as if I were fourteen,
at a school dance,
wearing the wrong shoes.

Where do these
stabbing visions
originate?
How does fear
stop our hearts?

I do not know these answers,
only that I slept poorly last night
and had not much rest.

  ~mce

When the time is come
a Viking funeral
is what I want.

No crass military honors,
no graveside of grieving.

Place me in the boat
soaked with flammable unguents,
mould my rigid arms
around my life's sword
and push me into the current.

There I will glide alone
until one precise arrow
sings its firey song
and I depart this world
in a burst of flames,

like a warrior, like a man.

  ~mce

After two years
of additions
and relentless work,
just now turned
by shovel and
again by tiller,
this loose earth
slips through
my warm hands
soft as a willing
woman's belly
wanting only spring
to arrive, to penetrate,
to enter with soft seed
planted deeply,
before the quickening,
before the ripening,
before the bursting
forth into abundance
and delight.


  ~mce

Each time
he removed
her clothes,
she imagined
herself
a different
woman,
only
more so.
  -  mce

We are not quite like monks,
although we, too, sit.

A monk sits and seeks
to find nothing in nothing.

We sit to create
something out of something.

Things float in our minds:
childhood slights and successes,
puberty, hormones, pain,
our first fumbling *****,
our first bewildering wars,
colleges, conquests, rebuffs,
disappointments, jobs,
marriages, children, divorce:

all that has brought
us to this moment alone.

The monk sits in
deepening quiet,
unmoving in silence.

We sit, hand
caressing a pen,
a typewriter, a computer,
waiting upon experience,
hoping that
its loose images
and uncertain memories
will coalesce into words.

When they do (not always),
we call that a poem
and we call ourselves poets.

The monk devolves
into a nothing that is.
The poet crafts
a something that isn't.

Is the something
we have wrought
more than the nothing
that swallows the monks?

Or is it very the same:

not an attempt to touch
the depth of being,
but to become the depth
itself.

Not to be a magician,
but to become magick
itself.

To bow to the god
within ourselves
and allow it voice
or silence.

We both, in our ways,
do what we must do.

Namaste.

  ~mce

Anonymous English Folk Song.*

A holiday, a holiday
And the first one of the year
Lord Donald's wife came into the church
The Gospel for to hear

And when the meeting it was done
She cast her eyes about
And there she saw little Matty Groves
Walking in the crowd

"Come home with me, little Matty Groves
Come home with me tonight
Come home with me, little Matty Groves
And sleep with me 'til light"

"Oh, I can't come home, I won't come home
And sleep with you tonight
By the rings on your fingers
I can tell you are Lord Donald's wife"

"But if I am Lord Donald's wife
Lord Donald's not at home
He is out in the far cornfields
Bringing the yearlings home"

And a servant who was standing by
And hearing what was said
He swore Lord Donald he would know
Before the sun would set

And in his hurry to carry the news
He bent his breast and ran
And when he came to the broad mill stream
He took off his shoes and swam

Little Matty Groves, he lay down
And took a little sleep
When he awoke, Lord Donald
Was standing at his feet

Saying, "How do you like my feather bed
And how do you like my sheets
How do you like my lady
Who lies in your arms asleep?"

"Oh, well I like your feather bed
And well I like your sheets
But better I like your lady gay
Who lies in my arms asleep"

"Well, get up, get up", Lord Donald cried
"Get up as quick as you can
It'll never be said in fair England
I slew a naked man"

"Oh, I can't get up, I won't get up
I can't get up for my life
For you have two long beaten swords
And I got a pocket knife"

"Well, it's true I have two beaten swords
And they cost me deep in the purse
But you will have the better of them
And I will have the worse"

"And you will strike the very first blow
And strike it like a man
I will strike the very next blow
And I'll **** you if I can"

So Matty struck the very first blow
And he hurt Lord Donald sore
Lord Donald struck the very next blow
And Matty struck no more

And then Lord Donald he took his wife
And he sat her on his knee
Saying, "Who do you like the best of us
Matty Groves or me?"

And then up spoke his own dear wife
Never heard to speak so free
"I'd rather a kiss from dead Matty's lips
Than you or your finery"

Lord Donald, he jumped up
And loudly he did bawl
He struck his wife right through the heart
And pinned her against the wall

"A grave, a grave, " Lord Donald cried
"To put these lovers in
But bury my lady at the top
For she was of noble kin"

Oh joyous noise!

Slam the door
loud as you like,

the old Finn
is awake again.

Let language
like rivers,
only deeper, flow
in torrents
upon sidewalks
of sound.

We are hereby
delivered from
the tyranny
of definition.

Measure your moons
in red pantaloons.

Let fat pigeons
feed breadless
old men
in lost parks.

Clarity is but
self-abuse.

how hathfanespanned
most high heaven
the skysign of
soft advertisement!

Where mystery is
find mirth also.

Steer by
your ears.

Oh joyous noise!

Come on now,
make some...

Take an ancient iPod
(click wheel!),
splash a few words
on Craigslist,
wait a short while
and it transforms
into fifty dollars
which morph into
a bottle of fine
Tennessee whiskey,
a haircut, cigarettes
and change.

Economists call these
transactions.
Alchemists called them
transmutations.

I call them proof
that miracles
still exist
in the ordinary.

I will now
have a drink,
light a smoke
and luxuriate
in just what is...

   ~mce

By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down,
yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.*

See them, a file,
a line stretching
dusty and torn
rearwards to
that distant time
when first men
invented war.

Run they do not,
but plod like cattle
praying to leave
behind torture,
interrogation
genocide and death.

This line has never
been severed.

It is a living beast
that bleats for
place and peace
finding welcome rare,
finding arms folded
and bolted gates
that sneer coldly.

So easy to look away
and pretend there
will never come a time
when we join that line,
when the gods
of war and fortune
turn their backs
to us and home
becomes only a
forlorn memory
and we too are left
scattered scraps
in a tattered file
extended eternally
backwards across
the sullen heaps
of history.

  ~mce

Out of the depths I cry to thee...*

wake into difficulty
from lovely sleep
of night's negation

to news from the
bird world sung
and insects that know

what finds its way
early into this
familiar room

two of gloom mornings
in glued sequence

sunrise of grey
clouds scudding

of light opaline
through windows
diffused

are windows only
worlds of open

is rain a form
of loss

and truth but
power moving

all melts and
can be replaced

the soul sinks

a day of grey
makes a day
of blues

death spiral
         of the spirit

when did I
become so weak
against the intractable
what is of daybreak

cruel the new has
become

and terrifying
and
continual effort

time not a friend
as clocks threaten
actions untaken

the mereness
of mortality
disappoints

sand mostly gone
to the final
hourglass' bottom

distance incomprehensible
away a way which way

each day a fainter path

fading notes of
unstruck chords

save me from

this cruel unwritten
poem of morning

this syntax of unbidden
meteorology

oh lift me up
and desire
make young

break my human fall

beauty and joy
cannot be sundered

we live by grace
or not at all

allow me survive
what must arrive

for every broken
poety fool

that famous final
Day of Decide

He sits rigidly, like
a calcified projection
on his porch chair
as four butterflies
churn the invisible
atmospheric milk,
indifferent to language.

For he is the type of verb
that disdains noise,
motion or being.

He listens to a radio
tuned to silence,
the acoustics of
emotion, lacking adverbs
or adjectives, pure
as an oblivious ******.

He listens with intensity              
to that envelope
of silence and says
nothing, knowing that
words cost a great deal
and syntax calls
for a life sentence
ending with a period.

Already, the tense
of time stalks him.

Better to leave
the unsaid unheard,
that single noun:
                           death.

  ~mce

"Once I was a young man and all I thought I had to do was smile."*

Generally he was
one part bourbon,
two parts charm,
greeting the world
with a handful
of **** ups
and a mouthful
of apologies
which were
usually accepted
because wit and
a smile will
take a young man
farther than
you might think.

  ~mce

Loneliness
and solitude.
One coin,
two sides.
Always in
my pocket
ready to be
flipped.
  Mce

Make a Zendo
of your hovel.
It doesn't matter
where you park
that lovely ***,
it always floats
on nothingness.

  ~mce

Six AM this
chill morning,
I bear witness
as a single maple leaf
floats to earth.

Winter prepares
to keep her
infallible promise
once more.

  ~mce

Blossoms
are god's kisses
made visible
on the face
of creation.

  ~mce

Love, my loneliness
is a necklace of diamonds
wrought from the crystal
of my soul's tears.
Take it, wear it, transform it.
I long to admire
the work of my pain
remade into beauty
sparkling at your neck.
Not much of a gift,
but all I have to offer.
- mce

by Kim Addonizio**

That summer they had cars, soft roofs crumpling
over the back seats. Soft, too, the delicate fuzz
on their upper lips and the napes of their necks,
their uneven breath, their tongues tasting
of toothpaste. We stole the liquor
glowing in our parents’ cabinet, poured it
over the cool cubes of ice with their hollows
at each end, as though a thumb had pressed
into them. The boys rose, dripping, from long
blue pools, the water slick on their backs
and bellies, a sugary glaze; they sat easily on high
lifeguard chairs, eyes hidden by shades,
or came up behind us to grab the fat we hated
around our waists. For us it was the chaos
of makeup on a bureau, the clothes we tried on
and on, the bras they unhooked, pushed
up, and when they moved their hard
hidden ***** against us we were always
princesses, our legs locked. By then we knew
they would come, climb the tower, slay anything
to get to us. We knew we had what they wanted:
the *******, the thighs, the damp hairs pressed flat
under our *******. All they asked was that we let them
take it. They would draw it out of us like
sticky taffy, thinner and thinner until it snapped
and they had it. And we would grow up
with that lack, until we learned how to
name it, how to look in their eyes and see nothing
we had not given them; and we could still
have it, we could reach right down into their
bodies and steal it back.

Do not disdain
the mundane
eternal language
of now.
You must
understand that.
The common
is the exquisite.
This is a vivid
new morning.
Flowers open.
Women turnover
in familiar beds
to regard
their lovers anew.
Everything desires
to begin again
just as it was.
Do not disdain
the exquisite intimate
or you will be
lashed to the past
by a rawhide braid
of dead words.
Take joy in what
you are offered.
Flourish where your
seeds have fallen.
Love your world.

  ~mce

The only way to discover
the world's true Knowledge
is to suffer and beg for it,
otherwise when it jolts your head
you will think it is only
rotten fruit dropping
from the branches
of the tree of good and evil.

   ~mce

You must believe that you
can escape the prison
of your present.

The innocent future is available
if you empty your memory
and enter the fire that calls you.

You must believe there
is an angelic ****
you can **** that will
rekindle your virginity
and make you pure once more
in this deadly profane world.

You must imagine living
far from the prison of now
in a small house surrounded
by flowers and possibilities;
a small house that can become a home
despite the dreary lovers
buried in the flesh of your past.

What were they anyway but
mistaken barbarian shafts
upon which you impaled yourself
because you longed for love
but discovered only six inches
of throbbing, indifferent muscle
spurting urgent, burning seed
for their own pleasure?

When you never came did you think
you were being denied for settling,
for promiscuously accepting the
futility of their grunting flesh?

You must learn to **** the spirit,
not just magazine bodies and faces.

You must realise you
are ******* for your very being.

This is hardly about mere lust.

****** alone cannot possibly
solve the riddles of existence.

You must open your legs wide
once more to the ******* of hope.

You must know that it is possible
to escape the prison of the present
and emerge like a spring blossom
into the hands of a holy future
if only you let its fingers
pleasure you to ripe perfection,
if only you allow its swollen *****
to ****** deeply enough
to nourish your heart
with its steaming, sticky sanctity.

Meat and soul must finally conjoin
and in their junction innocence
will find and carry you triumphantly
like a chaste bride to the home you seek.

   ~mce

Admit it:

ninety percent of
human existence
is teasingly absurd.

That's OK with me.

I love the smell
of the preposterous
in the morning.

It smells like
domesticated primates,
irrational and
incongruous, hurling
their own ****
at each other.

Exorcise your
inner monkey.

Take a deep breath.

Nothing like a
whiff of nonsense
to start your day
with a smile.

Ah, four
in the morning
my old nemesis.

It has been
awhile since
our last visit.

I have not missed you.

Yet we meet again.

Four in the morning,
the corpse of time,
the still moment
between life's
dubious heartbeats,
when blood sugar
takes a vacation
to the cellar,
when the blues
were invented.

When Mother Angst
knits copious
black sweaters
for doomed souls,
when you hear
the black snake moan
just outside
your swarthy window
and ghouls roam
the aisles of 24/7
grocery stores.

When the loneliness
thickens enough
to drive a
Romantic Poet
into therapy,
when only the Devil
is awake writing
lesson plans in Hell
and the JuJu waxes
evil and ready
to lead you to
some preordained
apocalyptic surprise.

When Thanatos
smiles and proffers
a deep French kiss.

Here we are,
together again, met
in your tenebrous
Kingdom of Tragedy.

I say we have coffee
and do some catching up
as I hope beyond hope
that we do not meet again
for a long, long time.

Four in the morning,
no friend of mine.

  ~mce

Waking wasted
to mornings that
bleed together
and morph into
the serial numbness
of xerox days
shredded into
bleak similarity.

How wonderful
it would be
to awaken into
the dreamy
strangeness of
a fresh and vivid
new life.

Not impossible.

You can't be sure
until your eyes open.

Perhaps tomorrow.

   ~mce

I am never certain
which reality
I am living.
So many strands
dangling in a
multitude of
possible nows.
Like trying to weave
a tapestry out of
shadows of light.

Poems not written
remain forever frozen
in a glaze of ink,
lonely words floating
like icebergs in a
boreal sea of
unrealized possibilities.

Like some antique schooner,
his heart vanished
into the Bermuda Triangle
of her eyes' green oceans.

    ~mce

Change seems inevitable.
Old sentences carry
different purposes.
Mold forms in old coffee cups
like modern paintings.
Tubas boom like thunderstorms.
Your age appears first
on the back of your hands.
A clock talks by ticking
or not at all.
The knot is not the rope.
Poets write only white lines.
Medications are altered.
The brain forgets itself.
Impatience scribbles nonsense.
We become heavier,
weighted and slower.
Playing the Sitar
becomes easy as whistling.
Tamed ostriches preen
in toy cowboy hats.
Lint tells secrets of navels.
Words float in bubbles.
The wicked become tender.
Voices ebb and echo
devoid of throats and tongues.
Speech nailed to walls
becomes the new poetry.
We burn the news
to warm ourselves.
Each dawn forms
a unique conclusion.
A moth destroys Chicago.
Vandalism is elevated
to curated folk art.
How can I be sure
these syllables are real
when everything changes
except the desire for coffee?
Please don't wake me up.
I want to remember this dream.

   ~mce