TN 2008

There is a girl in my cabin.
She sits on my 70s brown, velour
*****-couch with her long legs
tucked beneath her
like folded promises.
She wears nothing but a pair
of wool socks and an old, flannel
shirt of mine.  The wood fire blazes.
Her honest blond hair
cascades to the small of her lovely back.
Her skin is the flawless pink
of an unexpected spring sunrise.
Her eyes are emeralds that blaze
like novas when we make love.
Botticelli might have painted her.
I am reading Harrison to her aloud.
She imbibes his words like a toddler
learning language for the first time.
I light her cigarette and she laughs,
radiating the shameless pleasure
only the very young experience.
She expects nothing of me,
but this one evening,
and that is all she will get.
She tells me her name;
she is all of twenty-one.
Perhaps I am a ***** old man;
perhaps I am incorrigible;
perhaps I will burn in Hell;
perhaps I am a casualty of Eros;
or, perhaps, I am simply
still alive.
- mce

Age blunts
the fine edge.
Distinctions dissolve.
Solids deliquesce.
Each day becomes
a struggle
just to feel.
But if you struggle
hard enough
you can delay
the inevitable.

For a while yet.

  ~mce

He has devoted his life
to a Ph.D. in Uncertainty.
Now he is aging
and thinks it nearly done,
but he just can't be sure.

  ~mce

Time has lost track of me.
Daytime, night time, no difference.
Go to bed imbibing the right drugs.
Still no sign of sleep.
Finally at 3 AM I say **** it.
Get up, smoke a cigarette,
get out the cushions.
Twenty minutes of ZaZen.
I sit, I breathe, I wait.
The meditation concludes.
My knees and hips hurt.
Another cigarette, write this poem
and back to bed. Will I ever sleep again?
No way to know, no way to know anything.
I am a poor Monk lost in time.
The monkeys chatter, I am getting old.
I love a woman who frightens me.
My body deteriorates year by year.
My friends age, sicken, die.
Should I worry or just let it go?
Am I a fool or have I followed my Karma's path?
No way to know. Know way to know anything.
I am going back to bed to try again.
Only one thing for certain:
There are no more days in my life.
Every day is just the same ******* day.
Nothing to do but hit the sheets and hope.
Hope that today will be better than today.
Hope to keep breathing. Nothing else exists.
Night thoughts of an insomniac Monk.
Silence and submission, signifying nothing.

  ~mce

In the Beginning, God touched the world;
not Logos but the embrace of tactility.
God pressed himself into creation, every
animal, vegetable, and mineral imbued with
the exalted power of consecrated touch,
leaving marks that remain for us to discover
like marvelous pieces of a sacred crossword puzzle.
A celestial charter, holy Magick, necessary theology.
But seeing is difficult and knowledge is demanding.
We are shattered, splintered, fractured lenses,
mirror fragments of  broken insight.
Rational and credulous, we see only what we want.
To read God's fingerprints we must first of all burn,
burn away the human barriers of debate and common sense.
To meet the transcendent requires clear-headed madness.
Unshackle yourself from argument and logic,
the Magick focuses into a massive corona of power.
Dross and gold separate when touched by that flame
and only the purest, precious metal remains.
You must connect directly to the mystical
to access such bold, terrifying, inhuman force:
only stolen fire or knowledge contains this power
and that theft demands sacrifice of great pain.
But with them you can meet angels personally,
discover the Soul's hidden treasure horde,
speak with corpses, become animals and plants.
No longer chained by causality, you fly free,
in danger of igniting and dying of gladness.
Only walk through the fire and reclaim your birthright:
to see God's imprimatur on every earthly object
and to know that fingerprint is set upon you too.

  ~mce

No one has
ever given me
anything greater
than time, light
and silence.

Time to work.
Light to see.
Silence to think.

What could mean
more than these?

   ~mce

It is
a long day
since
last night.

  ~mce

This morning I enrolled
in the Nihilist University,
but I don't believe
that I will attend.

  ~mce

From nothingness I fell
into the world of substance,
into the world of becoming:

and became, a toddler, a teenager,
a soldier, a husband, a father,
a professor, an old poet.

Sixty-four orbits of the sun;
over 37 trillion miles so far.
It should feel longer than it does.

Thirty-seven trillion miles of
Reality, Maya, Monkey Mind,
the inevitable, unceasing chatter
we call existence; all the pieces
of this enormous jigsaw puzzle
I have given up try to solve.

You cannot solve life
as if it were just a calculus problem.

Too many variables.

Instead, I try to compose
a kind of music I cannot understand,
only enjoy and share with strangers;

an often futile attempt to harmonize
the discords of living while
getting  a little peek of insight.

Poetry: an attempt to part
the reeds and see what there is
swimming behind the behind,

before the orbits finally end.
   ~mce