Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier (Canada)**

We all know you now.
You have fallen at our feet.
You have guarded them all
With life and limb,
Noble and brave
Only to fall
at the cowards last call.
You have stirred the souls
of the unknown heroes.
Their disgust shall seek the just dues
from your defamers and saboteurs.
Young lads who now
welcome you in the hereafter
Shall haunt your enemies from near or afar.
The drum rolls sound, as the rifles salute,
The pipes play "the Flowers of the Forest."
You are no more The Unknown Soldier.

America The Proud**

******* parasites, ripping the cord,
bleed from your filthy *****
as you destroy the crumbling foundation,
bound by apes in suits, slinging bow ties
like ******* L.A. traffic jams.

Eat your fistful of ***** treats,
and swallow the Red, White, and Blue.

Today a ten-year-old girl
threatened suicide at school because
a trusted uncle had molested her.

What kind of ******* world
has this become?

Police were called,
Child Services arrived,
statements were taken.
no doubt social workers
were stirred into the mix.

I am a man of the 20th Century,
just old enough to remember outrage,
to remember when too much was taboo,
to remember personal honor.

When I was a kid, this monster
was snatched from his bed
by righteous neighbors, dragged begging
to a private place beyond help
and been beaten nearly to death
by the fathers of other potential victims.

Imagine a circle of men, ordinary men,
mostly World II and Korea veterans:
insurance men, car salesmen, farmers,
store keepers, salesmen, even a lawyer
tightening the circle in the torchlight.

The monster begged, pleaded, wept,
wet himself, **** himself, whimpered.

The sheriff  watched, smiled,
and then rearrested the pervert for resisting.

Had he lived, the monster would never
have touched a little girl again in our town,
knowing that his life would be forfeit
and end abruptly and anonymously.

Probably, he would have just slunk away.

This new state of bureaucracy cares nothing
for the victims it claims to protect.
It only wants the paperwork filled out correctly.

I was 11, 1962 in a quiet sleepy town.
My father took me to see what evil brings,
the best lesson he ever taught me.

If I had been old enough I would have joined in
without so much as a twinge of regret.

You liberal ostriches can call this brutality if you like.
I call it community action, community justice.
People protecting what is there's to protect
when the official guardians just go through the motions

I miss the 20th Century. I miss justice.

  ~mce

I do not write these thoughts
only because I love you. I do.
But I cannot create perfection.
It is your spirit calls them forth.
Your eyes flutter them into being.
Your lips smooth and polish them.
Your fingers shape and craft them.
I'm just the simple monk who writes
them down and returns them to you
as an offering to your inner beauty.

~mce

Read these words
and you will know why
though we trip through
the Bardo ten million times
or lead a billion lives,
my karma is to follow you
forever, beyond endless time,
through limitless space
until infinity itself vanishes
and we are the all, the only
because त्वां कामयामि.

Consider my lips
whispering secrets.
Consider my lips
nibbling your ears.
Consider my lips
touching your throat.

Consider my hand
running in your hair.
Consider my hand
brushing your cheek.
Consider my hand
caressing your breast.

Consider my tongue
sliding down your belly.
Consider my tongue
pausing in wonder.
Consider my tongue
tasting the best of you.

Consider our bodies
melting in euphoria.
Consider our bodies
sliding in ecstasy.
Consider our bodies
engaged in wonder.

So many marvelous
passions to consider.

So many astounding ways
to achieve rapture.

Only please, Lover, consider.

  ~mce

You are the
sandcastle
in my heart
I will never
let wash away.

  ~mce

I want to learn
to play your body
like an instrument.

When that is done,
I will play it
with wild trembling
fingers.

And when my fingers
touch your strings
you will make sounds
so wanton and sweet
even the angels
will blush.

  ~mce

However much think you know,
It is no more than
the thinnest gossamer thread
In the vastness of what is;
However much you value
Your worldly experience,
It is only a tear
In cistern of salt water.
Take courage, only the earth abides.

  ~mce

If you want to be free,
Get to know your real self.
It has no form, no appearance,
No root, no basis, no abode,
But is lively and buoyant.
It responds with versatile facility,
But its function cannot be located.
Therefore when you look for it,
You become further from it;
When you seek it,
You turn away from it all the more.

There is great danger
in seeking the Truth
outside your own mind;
do so and you risk
the Truth becoming a devil.
  ~mce

How do you
fall in love
with a few words
on a telephone
or a few lines
on a computer.

You don't.

But I have.

~mce

The bastardization
of our language
continues apace.

Consider the word

wonderful.

It originally meant:

amazement just beyond
comprehension.

Now we use it to mean nice.
That's a wonderful dress;
She is a wonderful person.
We had a wonderful dinner.

When I call you wonderful,
I mean that even in my arms
you are a mystery
I cannot quite solve,
amazing beyond my knowing.

Remember that Love.

You are the lock I can
fiddle with forever
but never quite open.

The bud I cannot
tease to blossom.

The meaning in my heart,
I'll never know for sure.

Love was meant to be
eternal mystery.

That is why it is *wonderful.

I cannot not how you smell
so I project my own desire
onto your unknown skin.

Patchouli. A scent that
makes him instantly goofy
and transports me at once
to the decade before
you even drew breath.

Even now that scent
on a crowded street
turns my head in wonder.

Scent, taste and touch:  
our first mammalian memories.

Do not be troubled lover,
I will love and linger
on any olfactory lingerie
you care to wear or none.

My second favorite is just
sunshine on bare skin.

But any whiff of you will
become part of my heart
and I will inhale you
deep into my soul.

~mce

The years between us
are trivial lies;
you look at the future
I look at your eyes.

~Mce

Take me in your arms
and wrap me in the
creamy, satin blanket
of your skin.

I will make you,
shudder, squirm
gasp and scream

and when our breath
is nearly spent,

we will kiss
intensely, devoutly
and dissolve
into one rainbow
streaked
puddle of love

where our feet
used to be.

  ~mce

Whichever
way I look,
I only see you.

Such a grand
vista, scenery
to set my heart
aflutter.

~mce

You shapeshift
in my dreams
and whichever
shape you take
fits perfectly
with mine.

~mce

It takes courage to live in a world
that doesn't love you.
But it takes a warrior's heart
to love it anyhow.

  ~mce

Let that lovely gown
slid to your perfect ankles.
Kick it off those cowboy boots.
Step into my arms.
We will meld into
a journey only we can take.
I don't know where will we go.
But if living flesh can kiss
and become one,
it will be a holy trip
to a divinely private world.

   ~mce

There are too many
stars out tonight.
I know you are among them.
Blink at me so I can
kiss you goodnight.

  ~mce

Our secret kisses
are deeper
than what most folks
call reality.

  ~mce

I believe
that inside you
are new worlds
to discover.

Like Captain Kirk,
I am on a mission.
   ~mce

Old as I am,
I often ache for you.
   ~mce

I would  kiss you
under cherry blossoms,
pink petals drifting down
like parachutes of desire
covering us with beauty.

I would kiss you
in the rain, drenched to
the bones not noticing
the fat raindrops
kissing us both back.

I would kiss you
in the wildest woods
surrounded by rustling leaves
beneath the jealous eyes
of voyeuristic birds.

But I have no idea
when I will kiss you
or where or even what
will happen when I do.

Still, in my imagination
it will be the right time,
the right place and
the right circumstance.

And it will be exactly
like kissing lightening.
   ~mce

Society is a mortician.

It will try to make your life a coffin.

Then it will try to make you fit.

If you don't, it will gladly
cut off, your arms, legs and brain
so that you do.

Do not allow it. Be your full self.

Stretch your limbs; use your brain.

When the time comes, lie down and
stretch out on the rich earth whole.

Laugh at the mortician. Die like
a warrior, the same as you lived.

  ~mce

Take me,
draw me in,
swallow
me whole
in those
peridot eyes.

I will not
cry out for help.

Only with pleasure.

  ~mce

Sestina From The Home Gardener**

These dried-out paint brushes which fell from my lips have been removed
with your departure; they are such minute losses
compared with the light bulb gone from my brain, the sections
of chicken wire from my liver, the precise
silver hammers in my ankles, which delicately banged and pointed
magnetically to you. Love has become unfamiliar

and plenty of time to tend the paint brushes now. Once unfamiliar
with my processes. Once removed
from that sizzling sun, the ego, to burn my poet shadow to the wall, I pointed,
I suppose, only to your own losses,
which made you hate that 200 pound fish called marriage. Precise-
ly, I hate my life, hate its freedom, hate the sections

of fence stripped away, hate the time for endless painting, hate the sections
of my darkened brain that wait for children to snap on the light, the unfamiliar
corridors of my heart with strangers running in them, shouting. The precise
incisions in my hip to extract an image, a dripping pickaxe or palm tree removed,
and each day my paint brushes get softer and cleaner – better tools, and losses
cease to mean loss. Beauty, to each eye, differently pointed.

I admire sign painters and carpenters. I like that black hand pointed
up a drive-way whispering to me, “The Washingtons live in these sections,”
and I explain autobiographically that George Washington is sympathetic to my losses;
His face or name is everywhere. No one is unfamiliar
with the American dollar, and since you’ve been removed
from my life, I can think of nothing else. A precise

replacement for love can’t be found. But art and money are precise-
ly for distraction. The stars popping out of my blood are pointed
nowhere. I have removed
my ankles so that I cannot travel. There are sections
of my brain growing teeth and unfamiliar
hands tie strings through my eyes. But there are losses

of the spirit like vanished bicycle tires and losses
of the body, like the whole bike, every precise
bearing, spoke, gear, even the unfamiliar
handbrakes, vanished. I have pointed
myself in every direction, tried sections
of every map. It’s no use. The real body has been removed.

Removed by the ice tongs. If a puddle remains, what losses
can those sections of glacier be? Perhaps a precise
count of drops will substitute the pointed mountain, far away, unfamiliar?

An Exercise in Love*
     ~for Jackson Allen*

My friend wears my scarf at his waist
I give him moonstones
He gives me shell & seaweeds
He comes from a distant city & I meet him
We will plant eggplants & celery together
He weaves me cloth

                   Many have brought the gifts
                   I use for his pleasure
                   silk, & green hills
                   & heron the color of dawn

My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind
He backlights my dreams
He has built altars beside my bed
I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember
his name, or my own.

Risk**

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

Shenevertakesherwatchoff Poem

Because you always have a clock
strapped to your body, it's natural
that I should think of you as the
correct time:
with your long blonde hair at 8:03,
and your pulse-lightning ******* at
11:17, and your rose-meow smile at 5:30,
I know I'm right

We Stopped At Perfect Days**

We stopped at perfect days
and got out of the car.
The wind glanced at her hair.
It was as simple as that.
I turned to say something--

Loving you,
body to body,
mouth to mouth,
sums up
all my hopes,
all my desires.

Only a fool
would keep
searching.

When you meet
someone who
fulfills your
dreams, if you
take to wandering,
you will be lost.
  ~mce

I do not think
you are as complete
as you say you are.

I do not think
that your
comfortable solitude
will provide you
with enough for
the vivid life within you.

You are a young woman,
alive, sensuous, willing.

Too alive for a hermit's life.

Life, love, fulfillment
are still yours to command.

Courage is the greatest virtue.

Take your life in you hands
Like clay or marble or paint.
Demand your desires;
Insist on expressing them.

The way is yours to find.
Risks are eternal.

Sometimes you have
no choice but to walk away
from everything you know.

Make a new world;
the kind of world
in which you want to live.

The kind of world
where you belong.

A lifetime's experience
in peace and war
tells me I can die
in the next minute.

But I know I won't.
I haven't met you yet.
I know I was meant for that.
Until then, I must live on.

On the frozen shortest night,
there is a street lamp
glowing against the cold.

Before I kiss you
beneath that lamp,
I remain bulletproof.

Once our lips meet
in that frigid night
life and death
will only be possibilities.

They won't matter anymore.
The circle will be complete.
I will fear no evil.

Each morning,
eyes open,
a combat jump,
falling back
into the world.

If you trample the world
don't expect it
to kiss your feet.

Practice kindness
or the world will die.
The inescapable choice
we must all make.

Greed is not a virtue.
Make that your mantra.
Greed is not a virtue.

Do not let the enemy
steal the language
of your heart.

You are dying.
Why bother doing
anything you
don't want to?

Wealth and power
don't mean ****
except on a
temporary basis.

Your name means
captivating in Hebrew.
I am your prisoner.

Mammals crave touch
and mammalian warmth.
We are mammals.
Touch me; warm me..

I wish you had
a thousand fingers.

Let us take
an impossible
road trip
through each
other's worlds.

Bring a bag,
I'll bring one,
too.

Away we'll sail
across
the asphalt seas:
finding adventure,
making love,
counting birds,
looking at each other,
exploring ruins,
asking the right
questions.

Eventually,
we will arrive
at our destination
being two, in one,
together.

Finally, home.

  ~mce

GIC to HAR**

It is late at night, cold and damp
The air is filled with tobacco smoke.
My brain is worried and tired.
I pick up the encyclopedia,
The volume GIC to HAR,
It seems I have read everything in it,
So many other nights like this.
I sit staring empty-headed at the article Grosbeak,
Listening to the long rattle and pound
Of freight cars and switch engines in the distance.
Suddenly I remember
Coming home from swimming
In Ten Mile Creek,
Over the long moraine in the early summer evening,
My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud.
I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,
And instantly and clearly the revelation
Of a song of incredible purity and joy,
My first rose-breasted grosbeak,
Facing the low sun, his body
Suffused with light.
I was motionless and cold in the hot evening
Until he flew away, and I went on knowing
In my twelfth year one of the great things
Of my life had happened.
Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek.
On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.
And I am on the other side of the continent
Ten years in an unfriendly city.

Wild Dreams Of A New Beginning**

There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
'It's all taking pace in one mind'
On the lawn among the trees
lovers are listening
for the master to tell them they are one
with the universe
Eyes smell flowers and become them
There's a deathless hush
on the freeway tonight
as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
sweeps in
Los Angeles breathes its last gas
and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
sinks with it
The sea comes over in Utah
Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
An orchestra onstage in Omaha
keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
Horns fill with water
ans bass players float away on their instruments
clutching them like lovers horizontal
Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
Great Books watered down in Evanston
Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
buried masts of Amsterdam arise
as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
manhatta steaming in sea-vines
the washed land awakes again to wilderness
the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
a cry of seabirds high over
in empty eternity
as the Hudson retakes its thickets
and Indians reclaim their canoes

I will find my way to you.
We will meet and decide.
If we decide it is good,
I will take you into my arms
and hold you like a butterfly,
not to crush or to own you;
just to let you know I am there
and that I am yours to enjoy;
to possess and be possessed
for as long as we both desire.
No chains, no tortured promises
extracted under duress
and regretted later.
Just taking time, our time.
for as long as that lasts.

  ~mce

Thinking of you,
my brain stutters
like a broken radio
crying for mercy;

my eyes quiver
at the shining
of invisible
volitant objects;

my ears tremble
to the silent tunes
of ecstatic
unsung hallelujahs;

my lips seal
from the impossible
pressure
of your beauty.

Where
is the end
to this.

No worries.

Come lover,
I would
gladly discover
your  powers

over the rest
of me.
~mce

The extraordinary man
woke up as ordinary
as a ***** shirt,
checked his horoscope
which told him
to go back to bed.

He ignored it like
a weather report
just as often
wrong as right.

His coffee tasted
flat as ironed dreams.

The world
appeared unchanged.

But he was exhilarated.

He reveled in his
new ordinariness.

It hinted at a rebirth
of possibilities:
new boots, new roads,
a new moon
at which to howl.

A new way to be
in the same world,
but reborn.

An unspoken prayer
somehow answered.

Nothing is
ever over
until it is.

  ~mce

I Am Waiting**

I am waiting for my case to come up  
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting  
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier  
and I am waiting  
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming  
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona  
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored  
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find  
the right channel  
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth  
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed  
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered  
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did  
to Tom Sawyer  
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting  
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again  
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn  
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting  
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

We are not
unlike serpents:
at intervals
we must shed
our skins and
enter new lives.

Are you uncomfortable
in the comfort
you have created?
Do you itch for no reason
you can think of?
Do you long
for the scent
of flowers you
have never seen?
Do desire flesh
you have not met?

Lives wear out.

Someone new
longs to be born.

It may be time
to molt and bolt.

New lives,
new roads.

The Dharma
wheel spins
trailing wonders.

Live or die,
we must follow.

  ~mce

For breakfast
a bowl of lust;
at lunch
a dish of desire;
a supper
of salacious stew:
each bite
slowly savored
then swallowed
like succulent,
steamy
bits of you.
  ~mce

What is sadder
than the poem
you forgot to save
vanished forever
into digital darkness?

Where do words go
when computers forget
and memory fails?

Is there a
dead letter office
for lost poems
and in which
circle of hell
would that be found?

Do the poor lost poems
huddle and keen
knowing no lips
will ever sing them?

Too many mysteries
for an ordinary morning.

Birds and lawn mowers
call out for justice
but the lost poem
purrs just beyond reach.

   ~mce

I am drawing
a pentagram
around our bed.
From within it
we shall issue
spells and charms
into the universe
and then lie together
in awed silence,
listening
for their echoes,
magick whispered
promises of
love to come.
   ~mce

No doubt I
could conquer
the living world,
if I could just
get out of this chair
where I sit
enthralled, bemused,
dreaming of your hair.

A storm is coming,
lightening and thunder
consummate.

Soon, it will be
on top of me.

If only that storm
was your electric body.

I would wail out a thank you
and place flowers
on Ben Franklin's tomb.

   ~mce

The word became flesh.

My flesh became a poem
that entered you
and the word grew
within you and a poem
blossomed from your mouth
which I took back into mine.

Flesh, poem, flesh...

perfection of dance,
perfection of union,
intimate perfection,
the  perfect unbroken circle:
enchanted, sacred, whole.

~mce