For each poet,
only one poem exists.
Again and again, he attempts
to write it down, exactly
as it should be.
It shifts and sways and eludes.
It is like trying
to capture moonbeams
in a ******
or music
in a garden hose.
Be ready to work a lifetime,
many lifetimes and even more.
  - mce

She drops her dress
like a bouquet
and steps like a bride,
naked and trembling,
brave and eager,
onto a new path,
into a new world
beyond imagining.
- mce

She is a clear running stream,
her pools a mirror reflecting me.
She wakes me up
to my virtues and failings.
She fiercely challenges me
to be the best I can be.
Like water, she is irresistible,
but conquers slowly,
wearing away the bad,
leaving the gold beneath.
The sounds of her fluid flowing
speak the language of creeks,
saying: you are more than you think.
A clear stream running
through my life, my heart.
White hot corona of fire;
tempering cold stream of desire.
Opposites reconciled.

Consider my arms your refuge.
You are always welcome
and always safe there.
Come into my arms and
I will come into you.
Separate, we are people;
together we will be a poem.
We will create each other.
We shall be as complete
as a perfect villanelle,
whenever you come into
the refuge of my arms.

  ~mce

~ for Erwin Schrödinger

Facts are light;
sometimes photons,
sometimes waves,
always dancing,
never for certain,
purely the creation
of the observer,
only the stories
we tell ourselves
about what is,
the dramas
we act out
on the stages
of imagination,
in the theaters
of our hearts.
  - mce

I was born to malinger.
I plan my days carefully
to allow time for nothing.
It requires effort
to avoid work.
Hemingway said that
all stories extended
far enough in time
must end in death.
Eternity is vast
and waits patiently.
I have seen what
comes of too much hurry:
a cloud of falling debris,
a puff of pink mist
where a man used to be.
I would rather stay
a shiftless old monk
for as long as I can,
just sitting, doing nothing,
trying to be better,
content to be me.

  ~mce

My love
goes everywhere
in sandals
wearing abalone
at her throat.
She calls herself
a commoner,
but I know
she is a goddess
from an older,
fiercer
order of things,
a warrior woman
struggling
to be free.
When she laughs
the birds listen.
When she touches me,
my heartbeat slows.
She says what she means
and knows what she knows.
Unafraid of who she is,
she takes herself
wherever she goes.
My love in sandals,
walking.

   ~mce

July 15th,  2015,
6:30 AM, 55 degrees:
the summer that doesn't
want to happen.

Once every seven years
we shed our skins
like inevitable serpents.

I am in my ninth seven.

I know the time has come
to make a new life,
not so easy at sixty-three.

Although I practice
avoiding desire and craving,
I do so want this.

To be born again,
at least this once more,
into a fresh existence.

To plunge my clean hands
into pellucid water
and be made pure.

To walk with a new woman
through another rendition
of the fabulous Garden.

To be content with what is
and if the right birds sing
maybe even occasionally be happy.

I know that my story,
like every other story,
can only end in death.

I only want this last chance,
which is what we all want,
before the final curtain falls.

I am in my ninth seven
and I shall see what I shall see:
what remains possible for me.

  ~mce

Most mornings
I wake up satisfied
with the life I have.
My bowl may be empty,
but it is my bowl,
my choice. Still,
if a wayward Muse,
say one with
a diamond in her nose
and a chip
on her shoulder,
were to pass by
and choose to dally
for a while,
I could move up
from satisfaction
to contentment
with a smile.

  ~mce

Even after
he had touched her
in more places
than she knew she had
he plunged onward
like some crazed explorer
seeking out El Dorado,
looking for that golden city
where rest and consummation
might be possible
for both of them.
No need to hurry.
You can't be lost inside
someone you love.

  ~mce

Only the dead know the end of War.*


The truth at the heart of combat:
those who have seen war never stop seeing it.

There is combat and there is the rest
of your life. Nothing ever measures up
to the mad rush of combat; nothing in
your life can compete with that
heart-rending, dire intensity.

Explosions, fire, everything extreme,
the melding of terror and pleasure
into an apocalyptic ****** that rocked
your soul, your mind, your body.

Not the sort of thing you encounter
at the office or in the factory.

So some small part of you never returns
and in deep secret longs to feel it again,
to return to that holy, redemptive horror.

War is life increased exponentially;
it is life on the brink of insanity;
it is the most alive you will ever be.

The truth at the heart of combat:
those who have seen war never stop seeing it.

When you are young
you believe
you will never be
middle-aged.
When you are
middle-aged
you believe
you will never be
old.
When you are old
you believe
you aren't really
that old.
And then you die.
Surprise!

   ~mce

The ploughman stands above,
his stick hard and thick.
With effort and pleasure
he opens the green earth's seam,
penetrates her fecund being.
She accepts the treasure
of his sticky, slick seed.
There is a burgeoning...

  ~mce

Weave your
nightgown
out of the
darkness.
Modesty
imparts to
your nakedness
willowy grace.
I thirst for
clarity.
I want
to drown in
the white bones
beneath it.

  ~mce

I am but a mortal
who lives by chance.
I do not know why
you love me.
Praise the Great Wheel
where the Spirits dance
for allowing me to
to move inside you.

~mce

I have spent 45 tedious, difficult
years trying to learn the universe.
Now, I spend all my energy
trying my best to unlearn it.

Which is better?
Which is even different?

  ~mce

I've been everywhere
and
there's nowhere to go.

  ~mce

We are caught out
in the cold road
and there's no door
to get back in.

  ~mce

How do you separate
the **** from the *******...

  ~mce

I knew a woman
whose perfect ***
could send men
to die horrible
deaths, smiling.

  ~mce

She only saw the duplicity
of men and how they treat
they treat their ***** as
both a compass and
a weapon of conquest
and scepters of power.

It didn't occur to her
that they might also
use them to please her
and her, of all the women
in the word) alone.

  ~mce

It is so hard to know what
comes next because
the world is round and it's
hard to see around the corners.

  ~MCE

She felt she was a writer
and therefore she was privileged
to edit the world.

  ~mce

My canines are
thirsty today.
They want blood,
any blood will do.
The enemy
are everywhere.
Find the. **** them.
Drink their blond blood.
They are all guilty.
They all deserve
to die. The only real
game is played for blood.
**** their women in the ***.
Crawl back to your lair.
Let the Danes sleep
in fear, twitch in fright.
This I will be back.
They will never
sleep in peace,
just as I never do.

  ~mce

Death determines life.
Embrace it: ecstasy.
Reject it: despair.
Scary choice isn't it?
Choose well. Your existence
completely depends upon it.
No pressure.

If you say
the noun
Nebraska
to any
easterner
their eyes
will glaze
like doughnuts.

But if you
go there
and experience
the exquisite
loneliness
of the Niobrara,
the empty
intensity of
the Sand Hills,
the primordial cry
of the Cranes
and more stars
than you could
imagine one sky
could ever hold,
it will fill
your soul
to bursting

and you will
never again
belong wholly
to your thin
strip of coast.

  ~mce

You've read many books,
think your homework done,
consider yourself
well-informed.

And then you stand
on the hillock
at Wounded Knee
or the spot
at Fort Robinson
where Crazy Horse
was murdered
or the ravine
at Sand Creek

and you smell blood,
leather, horses, sweat, earth

smoldering around you

and suddenly you know
what you didn't know:

history is more than words.

  ~mce

Try to remember
that poetry chooses
the poet and if chosen,
beware, for she
can be a real *****
and will rarely provide
a cup of coffee
much less groceries.

Do not think poetry
or fiction will supply
a living, they won't.
Plan accordingly.
Make hard work
and frugality
your floorboards.

Stay rooted.

The coasts are
foreign countries.
America is in the middle.
Nebraska is real;
LA is certainly not.

Talk with poor people
wherever you go.
They know great stories
and because they know pain
laugh more often
than the comfortable.

Find some other work
to hold onto.
Lay brick or landscape.
Write complex software.
Anything physically
or mentally exhausting.

If you are foolish
enough to introduce
yourself as a writer,
ninety-nine percent
of the people you meet
will think you mad,
stupid or simply lazy.
Garrulity marks
the mediocre. Listen.

Keep your true love
separate and secret.

Keep at least one toe
in the natural world.
Fish, hunt, pick berries.
Avoid war and commerce.

Make your poems; craft them
like the things they are,
sparse and flinty,
made of nouns and verbs.
Adjectives and adverbs
are only spices; use only
the fewest and freshest.
Modifiers are poetic;
poetry is not.
Avoid irony like
the plague it is.
Say what you mean.

Do not be disappointed
by misreadings
and misunderstandings
for consciousness
can never be fully shared.
They gets it or they don't.

Drink if you must but
remember that alcohol
is the writer's version
of black lung disease.
It will end up swallowing you.

Mostly just do your art
and try to be kind.
You are just another
sentient being
babbling into the Void.
Modesty and humility
might save you
from the angry gods
but it's no sure thing.

Although you were chosen
for this you are responsible
for your own salvation
or destruction.

How great is the darkness
in which we *****?
Remember:
you can't step into
the same river,
not even once.

If this seems altogether
too much, consider
investment banking
before it is too late.

   ~mce

The process
is Neuroscience
not rocket science.

A poem is simply
an assembly of a few
thousand neurons
out of trillions
which like a trout
rises through
the currents
of your brain
and takes the bait
of your imagination.

All you must do
is reel it in,
clean it, cook it
and eat it.

Then, cast again
and hope for luck.

Maybe; maybe not.

  ~mce

America**

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go **** yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
******.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need ******* *******.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

When he told his VA shrink (a nice lady)
about his chopper being shot down three times,
she asked him what he dreamed about.

Falling, he said.
                           No ****, she said.

She asked if he was afraid to fly.

He said wasn't cause he'd never,
ever get in an aircraft again.

She said these were perfectly sane responses:
If I were you, she said, I wouldn't ride elevators.

He didn't mention he avoided them when possible.

  ~mce

Myself I yearn
for love and light
but must it come so cruel
must it be so bright?*

  ~Joan of Arc

RPW*

There are moments
in life when
unconsciousness
seems your truest friend.

And now
I lay me down
to sleep.

To what
unimagined world
will I awaken?

Unless, if I
should die
before....

  ~mce

Life twinkles
and vanishes
like fireflies
in the July night.

There really
is no past,
only what
we remember.

  ~mce

Writers often mistake themselves
for serious people because
they write about serious subjects.

Give this some serious thought.

We might be just be *******
with  excellent vocabularies.

The two are not the same thing,
nor do they have the same value.

  ~mce

It is difficult
to find anybody
who hasn't been
diagnosed
with something
and seems
to wear their
alleged affliction
like a shiny
merit badge.

People seem to want
to be rewarded
for being troubled,
as if falling into a hole
is the same as
jumping down
into it.

I suppose
they want sympathy,
but put sympathy
in a shoebox
and see how much
it weighs.

Victimhood:
the new disease
of our time.

Prognosis: poor.

  ~mce

Do not squeeze
the life
out of your life
trying to follow
someone else's
principles of right
and wrong.

  ~mce

I wasn't paying attention
until I saw your face
and love struck like lightening
detonating a sacred grove
while the soul of thunder
swept through my body
in precise explosions
of unexpected desire.

  ~mce

I didn't know him well.
I was only just twenty.
He was the first Indian
I had ever met though
he called himself a Skin.
Came from northern Nebraska.
He was tall, strong, quiet
and soft spoken
with a strange authority.
Somehow, he could sense fear.
At the end of the first day
over An Loc I was
well beyond fear, beyond
terrified, barely functional.
While we refueled
he came over and told me
not to worry. Every day,
he said, was a good day to die.
First time I ever heard
Crazy Horse's famous phrase.
In the morning, his waddling,
overloaded chopper took
a SAM missile up the ***
and totally disintegrated:
no wreckage, no bodies,
no anything left at all.
There's nothing
really left to say
except I hope that for him
it was a very good day.

  ~mce

True Love
All the lost loves
of my life
have prepared me
for you.
Isn't it about time
you show up?
- mce

Sometimes
my heart
feels the kiss
of ecstasy.

Sometimes
my toes
brush the abyss
of madness.

Sometimes
I can't tell
the difference.
  - mce

for Pablo Neruda*

In your poems
the sun sang
yellow invitations,
eagles swam
in lilac ink,
butterflies discoursed
on desire,
the moon
whispered white
mysteries.

Your syllables said:
these are my arms, Lady,
lose that silky frock
and come into them.

My love feeds
on your love,
Love.

My lips
are for you.

You are mine;
I am yours.

We stand here,
the briefest moment;
let us stand together,
naked in eternity.

Dare to embrace this,
you murmured,
for it is all
the world can offer.

Eyelids fluttered out
ardent yeses;
sighs replied;
fingers danced;
many dresses
glided to the floor
with tiny gasps
of imagined pleasure.

Flesh and spirit
conjoined.

What woman,
could resist
the implacable sweetness
of your songs?

What woman,
having a heart
to hear,
would want to try?
- mce

Every rope
has an end;
the question is:
do you hold on
once you've
reached it
or do you
make a noose?
  - mce

I do not understand
the geography of love.
Perhaps I dozed
through that class.
Again and again,
I lose my way
in Love’s wilderness.
When I ask directions,
women answer
in languages
I can’t understand.
So many wrong turns.
So many dead ends.
Sister, if you
know the way,
show me the way.
  - mce

If I say out loud
that I love you,
do our names
and beings change
or do our names
and beings define,
in the first place,
the simple phrase,
I love you?

What can we be
without each other?

Breath without lungs,
kisses without lips,
fingers without touch.

To name it is to be it;
to say it is to birth it
in the world of flesh.

Less than that,
only silence;
less than that,
nothing at all.
  - mce

"A man goes far to find out what he is."* - Theodore Roethke

It takes
a long time
and much pain
to get to nowhere,
but believe me,
when you do
it's not worth
the view.
  - mce

“The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night”* - Nietzsche

He slept alone,
the nights were long;
suicide
sang its song.

Walking in
the light of day,
its melody
seemed far away,

but in the night
the song rang clear,
tantalizing
in his ear,

promises of
rest and peace,
oblivion
and sweet release.

He slept alone,
the nights were long;
suicide
sang its song.
  - mce

Love remains
inscrutable
as prayer;
not something
you understand,
but something
you do.
   _ mce

its report

sharp as
a rifle crack

the shot
that misses

this time

jangling the brain
with anxiety

for the bullet

next time

that will not
be heard

  - mce

Join me
between
pillow
and sheet,
the bower
where soul
and body
meet.
  - mce