The relentless education machine
***** in working class heroes
and churns our middle-class drones.
How willingly they fall in line
to register for that course,
unaware that getting an 'A'
in conformity leads directly
to an 'F' in satisfaction
and a life on the treadmill
to emptiness or nowhere at all.
Become a contrarian anarchist!
Jump off while there's still time.
Run for your life while you
still have one and it's still yours.

Poised on the knife's
edge between old and
too old. It is easy to
count up my misses.

I know now I'll
never get a PhD,
win a Nobel Prize,
discover a
Quantum particle
or find True Love.

It's just too late.

I am broke, old,
not very handsome
and slouching
towards inevitable
decay.

           No matter.

I have always been
better at life on paper
than living in the
world of phenomena.

Never keep score
on your life.

Don't mean nothing:

what counts is
not simply winning,
but learning the game,
loving the game,
playing for keeps,

and dying like
the man or woman
you are proud to be.

  ~mce

Nha Trang, Vietnam, 1972

Darkened portal. Room of shadows. A haze of ***.
Hard vision of *** and combat. Mixed up. Dream.
Young girl smiles outside a Nha Trang bordello.
Smile of innocence in a land of evil. Unreal.
Whose need rejects this process? Transaction of lust.
She removes her *ao dai like lifting fog. Naked.
Mortars fall as we writhe. Danger is my business.
Harder and faster like a rocket barrage. Deep.
Kick of a 12 gauge pump. Flesh explosions.
****** ***** out your breath. So does this.
War and *******. Extinction and lust. The same.
****** a moment from the blood and tears.
All is burning. Cling to any possible refuge.
     Bound together in this instant of life;
     Completing ourselves in this world of death.

Lightening from a clear, blue sky.
Random firing synapses. Fluttering twitches.
A moment where the eye and I diverge.
Mind rockets in flight, morning or night.
Become a twisted ball of rubber bands. Writhe.
Avalanche of trembles. Lungs in a vise.
Devastating payload of cognitive dissonance.
How long will this horror of nothing last?
Waiting is the worst. Paralysis of time.
     Sitting on a sofa on a quiet afternoon
     Hoping for a large slice of normal, soon.

for Herman and Mary*
Old friends. New days. Years like miles fall away.
A visit, a visit. Time collapses. Walks and talks.
Memories in an instant. Tattoos on the brain remain.
This world, inconsequential and uncaring, but home.
Pain and failure as knowledge. A maturity of knowing.
The zig-zag manifestation of life. Pearls of moments.
We live a succession of dangling modifiers. Syntax.
Dreaming the most legitimate activity. Breathe.
Here but not forever. There is no full stop.
     Only a pause in the Bardo for tea
     And then a flowing outward to see.

Our hands rise
and the street leaps.
Our eyes lower,
the heavens collapse.

From our unspoken pain,
a tulip tree grows
mysteriously behind us.

From our cherished wishes,
a star rises
just beyond our reach.

Do you hear the bullets
whizzing around our heads
guarding our kisses?

The sweetness
of your glance
never ends.

No birds fly south
from your eyes;
no avalanches slide
from your *******.

In the paradise
of your sight
the sun never sets.

These are your lips
I return to your neck.

Your blood
burns in my heart.

Everything remains.

follow the yellow brick road...*

The terrible freedom unleashed by typewriters.
Condition of complexity judged without criteria.
Radical provocations. Urinals and prams. Contingent.
Anarchist aesthetic. Not truth nor beauty but freedom.
Materiality of language. Multi-hued wheel barrows.
A cuttlefish. A crate. A cassowary. A cigarette. A ******.
Paratactic order. Particular phrasing. Pulsing pastiche.
An infinite conversation without resolution
as with the stupid friend who won’t shut up. Ever.
A transcendent dialectic based solely on proximity.
Ineluctable modality of the near. Only that. Buck it.
An unquiet ghost endlessly self-questioning. No answers.
Moaning in the meaning. A simple stuttering. Sibilant.
Turbulent and unpredictable as waddling wolverines.
Words that only mean whatever is seen. Juxtaposition.
Dissolving into desired dissonance. The magic chord.
Absolute verity in the experience of the fraudulent
for the same reason as the ubiquity of toothpaste.
     The poem as its own universe, complete and whole,
     fodder for the mind, not balm for the soul.