by Kenna Marie*

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Yet, people smolder every meaning of the word beauty.
Taking procedures in order to obtain this image of perfection, but it is right built inside of you. Believe it or not, whatever you need you got!
Reading this now with your eyes, heart beating to the sound of survival.

Educating yourself on how to accomplish revival because you are dead.
The laughter comes in sequences syncing perfectly to those begging for attention.
Revolt revolt!
Build a catapult to launch yourself away from here.

Lose yourself in all the sincere.
Perform a test to see if you're the best.
“You are defeat compared to the rest!”
Start to dress to impress when the isn’t up to par.
Spend days alone at empty bars.

“Dare to make a move!”
“It won’t improve you.”
“You got nothing to lose!”
“Yeah, well how about your skeleton starting a rebellion. You’re yelling, starting to tell your children the beginnings of this addiction.”

It swallows you whole, your body is totaled.
Now, you’re in the rusting pile of traveled miles of rot...
Forgetting what you are and what you’re not.

Let us make Spanish the official American language.
All Spanish speakers have a touch of the poet in them.
There is a bit of Neruda in every humble trucker.
It is a mellifluous and sonorous tongue.
If you want her in your bed, te amo is more likely than I love you.
English, on the other hand, is a language to make deals in.
How much? is probably the most repeated phrase in English.
English is the language of ******* people over.
English is the language of conquest, money and ******.
We insist that the world speak it so that after
we bomb them, invade them and **** them they can thank us in English.
Let us make the change official. What have we got to lose
except our insufferable indifference, arrogance and greed?
On top of which, siestas will become the national pastime.
I am taking this to the UN. I have no hope but it's worth a try.

   ~mce

The wind is part of the process/The rain is part of the process.

Gesamtwerk.* Parts making whole from parts.
Language. Alphabet, words, phrases, sentences
create a total work based firmly upon... alphabet.
Throw in grammar, punctuation, syntax. Anything possible.
To be. Verb not noun. Moves beyond syntax. To real.
Poet as tinker. No matter. Poems as language. Do.
Right language, correct path, shining mountain.
Seeker sits. Solitude. Transcends journey. World announced.
End as beginning. Form. Gestalt. The beginning of Awe.

  ~mce

by Randy Newman*


Broken windows and empty hallways
A pale dead moon in the sky streaked with gray
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today

Scarecrows dressed in the latest styles
With frozen smiles to chase love away
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today

Lonely, lonely
Tin can at my feet
Think I'll kick it down the street
That's the way to treat a friend

Bright before me the signs implore me
To help the needy and show them the way
Human kindness is overflowing
And I think it's going to rain today

Kiss me, Love.

Your body
is a soft,
white temple
discovered
at the end
of arduous
pilgrimage.

I stand
before you,
the pilgrim
who knocks,
waits,
and hopes.

Kiss me;
open your
secret heart
that I might
enter you
and dissolve
in your
mysteries.

Let me worship
at the altar
of your flesh,
of your spirit.

I have traveled
long and hard
seeking
the one
engendered
by two.

I tremble before
the possibility
of who you are,
who you might be.

Kiss me, Love,
please be
the end
of my journey,
the sanctuary
I have sought.
- mce

Tonight,
the Dark
gathers it's
greatest might,
but will
be broken
by morning's
triumphal
Light.

  ~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

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

Look It Over**

I leave behind even
my walking stick. My knife
is in my pocket, but that
I have forgot. I bring
no car, no cell phone,
no computer, no camera,
no CD player, no fax, no
TV, not even a book. I go
into the woods. I sit down on
a log provided at no cost.
It is the earth I've come to,
the earth itself, sadly
abused by the stupidity
only humans are capable of
but, as ever, itself. Free.
A bargain! Get it while it lasts!

Sometimes, for no
apparent reason,
I am reduced to a
fulminating idiot,
quivering and
flummoxed by
divergent impulses.

Do I hit the panic button
that will eject me to
anywhere but myself
or simply yawn
and take a nap?

This may be a proof of
The Uncertainty Theorem.

I'm not sure.

  ~mce

for Uli*

I am divorced,
but not stupid.
Time was, I was a
mentally unstable
*******. That is
why my wife divorced me.
She did what was necessary
to protect herself
and our children.
I don't blame her,
I am grateful
for her courage.
I tell people
I will never marry again
because I couldn't
find someone better.
That is true
and from the heart.
You can't be sorry
about 30 great years.
Sadly, not all endings
are fairy tale happy.
I can only sincerely
wish her happiness
and I do.

Grab Your ***** And Hide The Starch!*

Begin the day with a lean and hungry cook. Seize her.
Catch the tide or lose your dentures. Vault of jars.
Cry "Amuck!" and let slip the hogs of yore.
Bid me done, and I will thrive on the impossible.
This foul **** shall stink above the hearth.
Pardon me, you breeding piece of worth.
You crocks, you crones, you worse than senseless things!
Consider the I'd's and beware of scam.
Perhaps by dusk you can say: This was a yam!

  ~mce

Love Compared**

I do not resemble your other lovers, my lady
should another give you a cloud
I give you rain
Should he give you a lantern, I
will give you the moon
Should he give you a branch
I will give you the trees
And if another gives you a ship
I shall give you the journey.

ἐγγὺς μὲν ἡ σὴ περὶ πάντων λήθη· ἐγγὺς δὲ ἡ πάντων περὶ σοῦ λήθη.

How many streets,
how many times,
has he strolled
in this irrelevant
town?

Fifty years
The perambulating
flaneur.*

Change must be
but often arrives
glacially.

Crows on wires.
Nonchalant bunnies.
Indifferent children.

These ancestors
of that first ramble
take no notice
of the white haired man
with a cane.

The scenery never
comments on the drama.

Walking old streets
where many lives
have lived and vanished

brings neither sadness
nor nostalgia,

only the reminder
of time's inevitable,
ineluctable vortex.

Once I fought in a losing war,
I never asked what I was fighting for,
but now my warrior days are done,
I leave the battles to the young.
They will fly and they will die,
I’m content to watch  and sigh.
It seems that I am not so brave
as I approach the yawning grave.
It felt much easier to fly and die
when swooping from a youthful sky.
I took those chances, I made that bet,
but now it’s easier to forget.
My wars are over, my fight is done,
I leave the battles to the young.
They will fly and they will die,
but pray they ask the reason why.

Next time
you stand
on the corner
of Asylum Street,
there can be
no return.

Often love's soft, sweet offering
shows up when you are least prepared,
busily preoccupied with tracing
ephemeral alphabets in the rain,
rejoicing in former suffering,
learning the grammar of mud or
experiencing eye blasting hallucinations.
Love does not know patience;
its moans return to oblivion.
You never notice and it vanishes
and doesn't matter at all because
you can't miss something unseen,
not even love's soft, sweet offering.
  ~mce

The frozen meadow
is a hard, white
**** carpet.
Seven wild turkeys
arrayed in a
gobbling skirmish line
pick their way
carefully across it.
I stand silently
on the frozen deck
in my bare feet
and watch.
The algid world
contains us all,
no exceptions.
Strutting fowl,
the flaneur
who watches,
no one escapes
this brumal vista.
The God of heaven
is simultaneously
the God of phenomena.
Skepsis slips away
when your toes
are cold.
  - 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

They are ubiquitous as red, white and blue.
Everybody's entitled to them.
Everybody has many, all insightful.
Everybody feels compelled to share them.
Frankly, I don't care what you think
about Trump, Obamacare, refugees, Syria,
the patriarchy, pumpkins or the Patriots.
But go ahead and fill me in. I know you will.
I will smile politely, as I always do,
while imagining twenty ways to ****** you.

When I look into her eyes,
I see my face before I was born.

Ha! Take that Zen Master.

Throw me a hard one next time.

   ~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

While teaching at a local
community college,
A 19-year-old man
announced to my class
there was no reason
to learn foreign languages
because if English
was good enough
for Jesus, it should
be good enough
for everyone.

You are a
gentleness factory;
I want to
wrap my heart
up in all your
easy goods.
  ~mce

Three A.M.
Standing
on my deck.
No sleep.
Something calls.

Still and frigid,
waiting quietly,
I breathe in and out.

My breath rises
in misty, white
mortal plumes.

Inspiration;
expiration.

Beyond my cabin,
I feel the deer
dancing
in the deep night,
chanting the old
secret songs
of their antlered clan.

Exaltation.

I watch meteors
drop on
the ridge top
like God's tears
streaking the sky.

Clarity.

Two coyotes
howl a duet
in the darkness;
the creek whispers
and I understand.

Revelation.

I think
of your flesh
warm beneath
a thick quilt.

Expectation.

So many marvels
attend me.

Surely I am
a lucky man.
  - mce

-mors vincit omnia*

The many old who live alone
must pay attention, take care.

Any misstep might hasten their descent.
Tumble down the lonely steps.
Lie waiting in your own filth,
unable to reach a phone.

What loneliness must attend such a fall?

If only we could choose.

Proud Aeschylus was struck down
by a falling tortoise.
That’s not too bad.
To be hit by a bus while
lighting one last lethal cigarette.
That’s even better.
In bed, at ninety, chugging toward
one, final gasp of ******.
Even better yet.

But not in a strange bed hooked up
to noisy, indifferent machines,
poisoned by chemotherapy,
surrounded by terrified
friends and family struck dumb,
embarrassed and uncomfortable,
stunned by their own fears.

Best on your own two feet.
Like a soldier before the bullet.
Like a Viking struck down in battle.
Like you might have even mattered.

But there is no choosing.

Decrepitude is woven in our DNA.

You cannot escape the
inevitable carnage of mortality,
but you can be very careful
where you place your feet.

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

The mundane world
must yield to imagination.
Eyes are not microscopes,
nor lips but for drinking.
Facts do not make a life;
events alone cannot explain
a single, beating human heart.
Nothing exists so basic that
it cannot be expanded and exploded
by whimsy and effort.
A butterfly is just an insect
until the tale teller awakens its potential;
a lover is just a lump of flesh
until a story renders her beautiful.
Our fictions generate a reality
beyond the dreary limitations of mere truth,
and truth is always mere,
always waiting for the magic touch of more.
Knowing only the particulars
amounts to knowing nothing.
Lift your hand to the world
like an astonished magician
and cast your soul’s spell,
ensorcell the ordinary;
lift your brush and paint a scene
with huge, wild brush strokes;
shout your words into the chaos,
bring about a new order,
a vivid, lush world,
a world that echoes, on and on…

Rain plummeting
like rivets.

Seated in the mud,
soaked beyond notice,
beside a fried APC hulk,
eating cold C-Rations
with my ***** fingers.

Eyes like vacant windows.

This photograph
can never fade.

  mce

Temagami, Ontario. 1967*

Take out wheat wafers,
spread on thick cheese
and crunch loudly.

Wash it down with
long cool swallows
of Molson's.

Sit by the window
and watch the rain,
smoking a cigarette

and dreaming.

  ~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.

he calls it that -
last,
      long,
            five
                 days
before pension payday

always an adventure:
will he, won't he,
how much is left?

this time 30 bucks
to last till Wednesday

piece of cake

money is a fickle *****
a goddess of tease

never let her force
you to despair

her only real power
is to make you wait

and being poor
in Amerika
you have already
mastered that skill

   ~mce

Try to paint imagining. What does that look like?
Maybe use a thinner brush or none at all.
Wear Birkenstocks with white socks.
Helpful? If not, look for details of masochism.
Listen for the fractal music. Hear its nots.
Those are swirls that were your eyes. Blink!
Try playing dinosaurs at a local **** store.
Chug a quivering quart of whiskey as primer.
Focus on penetrating the dance of ******.
No? Then imagine your imagination imagining.
Or, just give up and buy a copy of Cheese For Dummies.
Kick back and enjoy a gnawing evening off.

What if the cost
of machines that think
is people who don’t?
Think about it,
before your phone does.
   ~mce

In each finale, there is a start.
It is hardly difficult to argue
that this is no time for the fatuous
and that nothing is more fatuous
than scribbling poetry at dawn.
But compulsion and desire will out.
We must sing of this world
not some better unknown star.
The given is the wool we weave.
All times are equally terrible
and equally sublime.
The eternal politics of horror
must never stifle the human heart.
Which serves to make clear that
we must begin again seek the light
and toll the bells of our human souls.
  - mce

When I get really decrepit,
I will wear mismatched clothes
on purpose; fill my pockets
with useless pennies; leer
lasciviously at girls far too
young; mutter arcane
wisdom to myself just loud
enough to hear but not to
understand; eat everything
that makes the health Nazis
cringe; smoke in inappropriate
places; get drunk in the
mornings if I so desire
and smoke *** in public.
It will be an ecstasy to
not give a rat's *** what
anyone thinks. My only
regret will be that I
did not start sooner.

   ~mce

Were I a conspiracy theorist
(which I'm not), I would
tell you there will be
no 2016 elections
because before then
another faked terrorist
attack, like 9/11 only
worse, will be staged,
the elections will be
suspended, martial law
will be declared
our own military,
will occupy America,
resistance will be crushed
and dissenters will
simply disappear.

But I'm not a
conspiracy theorist
and I won't
tell you this
because it would
make you
uncomfortable
and Americans
do not like to be
uncomfortable
regardless of
the cliff they
are about
to step off of.

  ~mce

an anarchist’s style guide...


Poems are liquid prose. Prose insists. Poems plead.
Kale tastes best in darkness. Residue of texture.
Texture makes the text. Don’t dress it up.
I is romantic vestige. Deport it. Feel the freedom.
Irony is literate decadence. Stick to sarcasm. Common voice.
Drumbeat of iambs in veins. Just the facts, Ma’am.
Edgy as opposed to hard. Violent refusal to respond.
Adjectives limited. Adverbs useless. Nouns just sit.
Ah, but verbs. Verbs as we are. *We are verbs. Creating.
Other parts, only utilitarian. Sequence of composition.
Words in a row marching like soldiers to certain death.
Metaphors compressed as diamonds. Regal and rusted.
The clock’s face reveals nothing. Blank chronology.
Humor provides shelter. Lear on the moor. Fool.
Lines in a stanza remain lines. Mere artifice.
Love is in and out of every door. Root of desire.
Say what you must as you must. Shout if you must.
Take whatever you like. Make it new. Make it new.
Feel noose around neck. Have the last word. Anyway.

Riprap*

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles--
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

Complexity sometimes so basic.
The most common sentence,
"I love you," only understood
by a single, unique reader
in all the living world.

  ~mce

Three times the gods of war
snatched me from the sky;
three times the gods of war
decreed I shouldn't die.

The gods of war knew full well
that I must live til I met you;
the gods of war knew full well
that we would be divinely true.

The gods of war are not often kind,
A man to them is but a fragile toy;
The gods of war are not often kind,
But they spared me to discover joy.

All praise to you Aries and Mars
for sparing me to kiss the stars.

  ~mce

alles klar herr kommissar*

Write it all down with painstaking haphazardness,
carefully constructing nested memories,
exotic confections, negligible nuances,
dubious symbols of great insignificance,
an absolutely truthful pack of living lies.
Your readers deserve exactly what they get:
stumbling horses, nuzzling cassowaries, dead flowers;
the impenetrable clarity of an imagined life
imagining its mind imagining itself.

The paper of life is dangerously thin
yet we dump heaps of words upon it
and are still surprised when it splits.
  ~mce

Slide that dress up
over your hips,
part your thighs
like a promise,
pull your knees up
in welcome.

I am a thirsty man
who needs a deep drink
from paradise.

You are a woman
who understands
and quivers
at necessity,
who loves to have
her liquids lapped.

Tongue on secret lips,
we nourish each other.
Love and lust,
the perfect marriage.

  ~mce

*****, Nip,
*****, ****,
Towel Head:
you call them
whatever
allows you
to ****** them
comfortably;
the terrible
dark side
of the power
of words.
  - mce

Poem 1403**

As the poets have mournfully sung
Death takes the innocent young,
The rolling in money,
The screamingly funny,
And those who are very well hung.

They gathered
in skinny packs,
in laughing circles
around him.

He stitched their cuts,
bound their wounds,

gave them,
like some OD Santa,

chocolate bars,
antibiotics,
aspirins and
C-Rations.

They laughed louder,
begging for more,
shrieking and calling him
Doc-san #1.

This phony comedy
made him feel better,
feel human,
even though he knew
at night their parents
would do their best
to take his life.

Decades on,
he knows behind those grins
they must have hated him:
his height, his food,
his round eyes
and the doom
he had brought their world
that no trinkets
could ever allay.

Now, there is nothing to do
but remember and be sorry.

   mce

Lovers Dream World - a Villanelle**


Katie could put her feet behind her head
Or do a grand plié, position two,
Her suppleness magnificent in bed.

I strained my lower back, and Katie bled,
Only a little, doing what we could do
When Katie tucked her feet behind her head.

Her torso was a C-cup'd figurehead,
Wearing below its navel a tattoo
That writhed in suppleness upon the bed.

As love led on to love, love's goddess said,
"No lovers ever ****** as ****** these two!
Katie could put her feet behind her head!"

When Katie came she never stopped. Instead,
She came, cried "God!," and came, this dancer who
Brought ballerina suppleness to bed.

She curled her legs around my neck, which led
To depths unplumbed by lovers hitherto.
Katie could tuck her feet behind her head
And by her suppleness unmake the bed.

The future is a movie.

We sit in darkness
before a blank screen,
worried and uncertain.

This is our movie
and we know that
we don't know
how it turns out.

Will we be happy?
Will we be together?
How can we make it
happen as we'd like?

Separated by distance,
country and age,
we have to write
this script together.

No one will see
this movie but us,
yet it must be
perfect as a
a technicolor dream,
perfect as this
deep attraction
that we feel.

Only we can write it.

We hold it in our hands
like a crying newborn.

What does it require;
how will we know?

Whatever lies between
the now and the then,
I'm holding out
for a happy ending;

how about you?

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.