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1.1k · Mar 2016
Planning Is Everything
Mike Essig Mar 2016
Another day and what to make of it? Tu Du list.
Things start to happen, don't worry. Don't stew.
Water down darkness. Ask the sun for a light.
Loot Frederick's of Hollywood. Cultivate pompous grass.
Rewrite Moby **** as free verse. Irritate life with art.
Plant Rhino rhizome and grow *****. Turn over an old leaf.
Take a road trip to a state of anxiety. Try chewing gun.
Play the Jew's harp in a mosque. Pray for drains.
Steal a cop from a donut. See if LSD still works.
Listen to Rockabilly noir. Experiment with dysentery.
Set out buckets to catch sky. Talk with, not to, turnips.
Insist on having the last word. Get it. Die.
   Or just admit another wasted day,
   lonely as your heart, not as grey.
1.1k · May 2015
Progress V 3.0
Mike Essig May 2015
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
True incident
1.1k · Jan 2016
Do You Take This... ?
Mike Essig Jan 2016
I could never
be married
to myself.
We just aren't
that compatible.

  ~mce
1.1k · Nov 2016
Chanson f d'amour
Mike Essig Nov 2016
I'm only a poet with only a song,
and sometimes I get it, and sometimes it's wrong.
I live in a box, a box made of pain.
It sits in a field at the end of a lane.
A house without windows, a house without heart.
It's hardly a castle, but I call it a start.
It sits in its loneliness, no cars pass it by,
it crouches in loneliness beneath a gray sky.
The world stops outside. I stay within,
with my words, my memories, my pride and my sin.
I remember you baby when you came to this place
with your cheap lingerie and your lust on your face.
I remember you baby how you gave me that look
that no lonely alchemist could find in a book.
That look that told me that you wanted it all,
that led us to gasp and to writhe and to fall.
Your fingers were fever, your tongue was a snake,
you drew me inside you, your fire made me shake.
But love burns out as it flares in the night.
We got most of it wrong, but some of it right.
And then you were gone and I was alone
with a heart that was broken into pebbles of stone.
Left in that box, that box made of pain,
that sits in the field at the end of the lane.
See I'm only a poet with only a song,
and sometimes I get it, but for you I was wrong.
1.1k · Mar 2017
Underground
Mike Essig Mar 2017
You sow
these words
in a graveyard.
They  sprout
in deep darkness,
never to see
the light of day.
It drains you
to plant only
nightmares.
Your heart
submerges.
Do not expect
to live long.
1.1k · Jan 2016
The Word Made Flesh
Mike Essig Jan 2016
Wrinkles and scars
are medals
won for valor
in the thousand
private battles
we call a lifetime.
  ~mce
1.1k · Aug 2015
Motel Wall Concerts
Mike Essig Aug 2015
It begins with
nervous laughter,
creaking springs,
builds to
loud supplications
to Jesus and God,
ends in final
melting moans.

Funny how little
the notes vary;
more classical
than baroque;
more advertising
jingle than
hallelujah.

The simple sounds
of who we are,
where we come from,
what we do
to each other

played on mortal organs
by ardent amateurs,
overheard through
thin motel walls.

   - mce
1.1k · Apr 2015
My Ambition
Mike Essig Apr 2015
I want to be
the Troubador
of your Heart;
allowed to roam
freely within it,
singing you songs
that no one else
can hear.
  ~mce
Troubador: wandering medieval minstrel.
1.1k · Mar 2017
Gnosis
Mike Essig Mar 2017
Hallelujah

is the one true
commandment.
The Sacred
is not a puzzle
to solve;
not a commander
to follow;
not a creed
to mumble.
It is a joy
to experience;
it is a love
to share;
it is a way
to be.
It is simply
and divinely,

Hallelujah.
1.1k · May 2015
May 4th, 1970
Mike Essig May 2015
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.”*

History is gravity
pulling me helplessly
into time's abyss.

Forty-five years ago
the sound of guns

in Cambodia,
in a small Ohio town.

I am not
responsible for what
I could not
prevent.

Such a thankless truth.

Do your best
and get on with it.

Leave the lost wars
where they belong:
eternally lost.

Stop trying to explain
what you don't understand.

Do not listen
to the chattering
of Hungry Ghosts.

Walk in the Now
if you hope
to keep walking
at all.
   ~mce
May 4th, 1970. The Kent State Massacre following the American invasion of Cambodia.
Mike Essig Apr 2015
"The most important piece of technology in any classroom is the second hand of the clock. The purpose is to teach millions of students the identical prayer: Please God, make it move faster."  

Derrick Jensen
1.1k · Sep 2015
The Single Guy's Cookbook
Mike Essig Sep 2015
Find someone else
to do it.

  ~mce
1.1k · Nov 2015
Vortex
Mike Essig Nov 2015
An old man's head:
a bucket full of lies.
A vortex swirls there like
confetti at the ticker tape
parade of a traitor.
Fragments adhere and disperse
becoming ephemeral poems
that mean nothing for a moment.
Whoever and whomever become
a jaded lump of whatever.
That empty head contains
multitudes of nothing that
never quite achieve something.
Poems made of offal.
Thoughts never finished.
Whenever he is, he has been,
he will be. Vortex like
water in a flushed toilet,
disappearing into ****.
Unspoken words sounding loud
in a cistern of silence
where nobody pretends to listen.

  ~mce
1.1k · Nov 2015
Brumal Daybreak
Mike Essig Nov 2015
First gelid dawn
of the dying year.

A crescent moon
shivers above
achromatic frost.

Four crows perch
like fluffy black
lumps of ice
on taut power lines.

Hungry sparrows peck
the severe ground.

The old poet
fears the cold.

Chilled eyes notice
bare ruined trees
and windshields
waiting to be scraped.

The earth has pulled
the covers up
around its neck,
wakes stiff and slow,
but stays in bed.

Cold's bony fingers
probe the old house
like burglars seeking
points of entry.

Still, the chill roads
point toward the
inevitable return
of warmth;
                  spring sits
silent as a cat waiting
for a door to open,
bidding its time
to counterattack.

Even on the most
algid morning
hope slumbers,
but never dies.

  ~mce
1.0k · Jul 2015
Allen Ginsberg
Mike Essig Jul 2015
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.
Happy Birthday, America.
1.0k · Jan 2016
Not Quite Gone
Mike Essig Jan 2016
Those lost in war
are mostly
gone for good,
but sometimes
their ghosts pry
my ears open
and softly
weep into them.
I can only listen
and wonder,
why not me?

  ~mce
1.0k · Oct 2015
Never Jump To Conclusions
Mike Essig Oct 2015
she firmly
runs her
wet hand
up and down
down and up
its slippery
length

before placing
the spatula
on the cloth
to dry

  ~mce
1.0k · Apr 2015
Jorge Luis Borges
Mike Essig Apr 2015
TWO ENGLISH POEMS For A Woman

I.
The useless dawn finds me in a deserted streetcorner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves: darkblue topheavy waves laden with all hues of deep spoil, laden with things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away, half withheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you.
The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with, music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for.
The big wave brought you.
Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words.
The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city.
Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to make your name, the lilt of your laughter: these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars of the dawn.
Your dark rich life…
I must get at you, somehow: I put away those illustrious toys you have left me, I want your hidden look, your real smile –that lonely, mocking smile your mirror knows.

II.
What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the ragged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghost that living men have honoured in marble: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow; my mother’s grandfather –just twentyfour- heading a charge of three hundred men in Perú, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow – the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
One of the greatest writers of this hemisphere and the world. Look for his other work.
1.0k · May 2015
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Mike Essig May 2015
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
1.0k · Apr 2015
An Epidemic Of Loneliness
Mike Essig Apr 2015
Be very careful.

You really don't
want
to catch this!

Could be fatal...

Certainly painful.
   ~mce
I recently read that there is an epidemic of loneliness in America because more people are living alone than ever in our history. Poems can come from anywhere.
1.0k · Apr 2015
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Mike Essig Apr 2015
Another day
to show up for.

Chores to do,
people to love,
choices to make:

nothing special.

Just what is,
just all that is,
just everything
that matters.
  - mce
"Chp Wood, Carry Water" comes from a Zen description of enlightenment
1.0k · Apr 2015
Jim Harrison
Mike Essig Apr 2015
7 from Geo-Bestiary

O that girl, only young men
dare to look at her directly
while I manage the most side-long of glances:
olive-skinned with a Modigliani throat,
lustrous obsidian hair, the narrowest
of waists and high french bottom, ample
******* she tries to hide in a loose blouse.
Though Latino her profile is from a Babylonian
frieze and when she walks with her small white dog
with brown spots she fairly floats along,
looking neither left nor right, meeting no one's
glance as if beauty was a curse. In the grocery
store when I drew close her scent was jacaranda,
the tropical flower that makes no excuses.
The geezer's heart swells stupidly to the dampish
promise. I walk too often in the cold shadow
of the mountain wall up in the arroyo behind the house.
Empty pages are dry ice, numbing the hands and heart.
If I weep I do so in the shower so that no one,
not even I can tell. To see her is to feel
time's cold machete against my grizzled neck,
puzzled that again beauty has found her home in threat.
Older man/younger woman (or even vice versa), in our culture we don't know what to make of this, so we laugh and mumble jokes about perverts, etc. But what is love and how can you be sure it will arrive in a matched set?
1.0k · Apr 2015
Mary Oliver
Mike Essig Apr 2015
The Journey**

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.
I know everyone knows this poem, but it is beautifully written and excellent advice: save the only life you can save, yours.
1.0k · Apr 2015
seeing is not Seeing
Mike Essig Apr 2015
Sunlight slants
on pale pink
cherry blossoms;

for exactly an instant,

I really See.

~mce
1.0k · Jan 2016
A Reply
Mike Essig Jan 2016
To the many readers, I ******* with my poem about Bukowski.

I don't loathe Bukowski. My point is that he is a cult writer. His cult seems to be made up of people who are ignorant of other much better writers of his time. If they read the Beats (in particular Gary Snyder) or others like Richard Brautigan, Jim Harrison, Wendell Berry and many others, they would see how poorly his writing stands up to comparison.

Bukowski's persona is what seems to attract people. He knew that and cultivated it. It was his meal ticket. The poor, drunken, uncouth, outsider, loser who was scorned by the literati of his time. In truth, he was a writer of pulp poetry. What he needed was a good editor. You could take all of his books of poems, cut out the rambling, self-serving, tedious, self-glorifying *******, and cut them down to maybe two books of decent poetry. His prose is better, but not that much.

Young people, lacking better poetry for comparison, are mainly attracted by this cult of personality. Young people are attracted to rebels, even bogus ones. He himself said he didn't write, he just typed. Some hero.

He portrays himself as a big, tough *** willing to fight the whole world. Actually, he was a fat drunk barely six feet tall. That's why I laughed at him when he threatened me. I was 20, just three weeks back from Vietnam. The thought of fighting an old drunk seemed pathetic to me. I could have easily killed him. Who goes to a poetry reading for that?

There was also his attitude toward women. I believe he really hated women. He saw them as receptacles for his *****, nothing more. He used his fame to **** a good many young admirers. He's not alone in having done that, but he was obsessive about it. Women were a perk, nothing more.

In the end, his cult status will remain, but he will never be taken seriously as a writer, because - by his own admission - he wasn't. There is much excellent poetry out there by better writers of his time. Do yourself a favor, read them, educate yourself. If you only read mediocre poetry, you'll only ever be a mediocre poet.

Even at his most unheroic, he is the hero of his stories and poems, always demanding the reader’s covert approval. That is why he is so easy to love, especially for novice readers with little experience of the genuine challenges of poetry; and why, for more demanding readers, he remains so hard to admire.

Please: Join in. Tell me why I am wrong or right.

Mike Essig
1.0k · May 2015
B B King
Mike Essig May 2015
"Nobody loves me but my mama baby
and you know she could be jiving too..."

Really nothing left to say.

~mced
A huge loss.
1.0k · Jan 2016
Mark This Page
Mike Essig Jan 2016
If I had $12 I'd
buy a bottle of whiskey
to ease the pain of poverty.
I don't.That is
exactly the definition
of poverty.

  ~mce
1.0k · Jan 2016
Poet's Handbook
Mike Essig Jan 2016
~for Rimbaud

The same rules
you lived out
still apply:

Drink too much.
Take drugs.
Sleep with
too many women.
Drink too much.
Be irresponsible.
Squander
your money.
Drink too much.
Hurt those
who love you.
Drive them away.
Drink too much.
Overdose on silence.
Drown in solitude.
Drink too much.
Ignore consequences
Go quite mad.
Drink too much.

And then,
of course,
die young.
  - mce
Mike Essig Jun 2015
1.  If the enemy is in range, so are you.

2.  Incoming fire has the right of way.

3.  Don't look conspicuous, it draws fire.

4.  There is always a way.

5.  The easy way is always mined.

6.  Try to look unimportant, they may be low on ammo.

7.  Professionals are predictable, it's the amateurs that are
    dangerous.

8.  The enemy invariably attacks on two occasions:

       a. When you're ready for them.
       b. When you're not ready for them.

9.  Teamwork is essential, it gives them someone else to shoot at.

10. If you can't remember, the claymore is pointed at you.

11. The enemy diversion you have been ignoring will be the main
    attack.

12. A "******* chest wound" is natures way of telling you to slow
    down.

13. If your attack is going well, you have walked into an ambush.

14. Never draw fire, it irritates everyone around you.

15. Anything you do can get you shot, including nothing.

16. Make it tough enough for the enemy to get in and you won't be
    able to get out.

17. Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than yourself.

18. If you are short of everything but the enemy, you are in a
    combat zone.

19. When you have secured an area, don't forget to tell the enemy.

20. Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder.  

21. Friendly Fire Isn't.

And Mike's Three Corollaries:

1, Keep your head down.

2. Never pick up anything off the ground.

3. Never, ever, trust the locals, especially children.



Compiled by mce
Funny, but all true.
1.0k · Sep 2015
Just A Peach Poem
Mike Essig Sep 2015
It is only a piece of fruit.
Take its fuzz in your hand
and make a vertical slice.
Seek that rift with your
hot and eager mouth.
Engulf it. Probe it gently
with your tongue and enter it
like a lover. **** hard and
take its sweet juices into
your mouth and enjoy them
dripping down over your chin,
sensuous, sticky moisture.
Lap at it until it is empty
and you are exhausted, spent,
fluidly full and fulfilled
with its satisfying succus.
After all, it is only a peach.

  ~mce
louise
1.0k · Apr 2015
Don't Mean Nothing
Mike Essig Apr 2015
~ for a friend dead of cancer at 48.

We are no more
than fragile meat puppets.
Decades ago, I saw men
blown to tiny, random
bits of flesh.
When that happened,
we had a saying, a chant:
Don"t mean nothing.
Didn't mean the comrade
meant nothing, just that
death means nothing,
only life matters.
We all have a bullet
looking for us.
Your's found you too soon.
Still, your life was good.
Don't mean nothing.
I'll miss you.
   ~mce
1.0k · May 2015
Demetrios Trifiatis
Mike Essig May 2015
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.
Had to get a Canadian poem in here. O Canada!
Mike Essig Aug 2016
Word salad. Everyone a poet. But use the correct fork.
Sometimes you’re the road sign, sometimes the weary traveler.
Woke up craving attention again. The cat was unimpressed.
Pay no attention to my browsing history. I’m a writer, not a serial killer.
Women never want much, only everything you are or will be or can’t.
He said he would stuff my taco unlike any man before him,
and boy did he! So full! I’ve always wanted a man who could cook.
Some day’s, you just know that the jail time was worth it.
Dementor support group meets Thursday evening at Starbucks.
Cows who give milk for free only meet lecherous farmers.
Australia’s Oldest Man Knits Tiny Sweaters For Injured Penguins
Relearn the dying art of thinking before you ******* speak.
I scream. You scream. We come. Police come. Awkward.
Jumpin’ jizzimy Jehoshaphat. Sticky patrol cars. Safety catches.
Thought it was a loofah, but it turned out to be steel wool.
A few moments of pleasure. A full year of skin grafts.
Onan’s Handy Man Service. No job too small. Try me.
Sixty is the new 40? Try getting your ***** to believe that.
Often lost but never alone. Handy to have a hand handy. True love.
You meet the love of your life and find out she puts ketchup on pizza.
I never flirt with danger but danger just keeps on insisting.
Life hits like a girl. Thing is, like a girl that hits really hard.
She almost put on ******* today, it was a clothes call.
She lost me at: Forgot the safe word? Excellent! Here we go.
Her ad slogan: my greatest satisfaction, awakening your passion.
She dumped me because I just stood there with my moves drooping.
Watching Internet *** is like ******* without arms.
I bet that pride of yours doesn’t enjoy snuggling like I do.
Sobriety, never as delicious as an exquisite bad lifestyle buffet.
Ask your doctor before beginning the ****** and whiskey diet.
You don’t have to be desperately lonely to tweet, but it helps.
Yep. Something is happening. But you won’t know what it is.
The only fact is that you’ll never understand anything at all.
***** anything you like. After all, only everyone will see it.
Sleep children. Sweet Dreams. Dreams of angry cassowaries.
Nanny will be here to sweep up the pieces in the morning.
1.0k · Jan 2016
The Smile Of Arousal
Mike Essig Jan 2016
Stroke her mind.
Caress her soul.
Touch her heart.
Pet her pride.
****** her dreams.
Cuddle her confidence.

Her body will
smile at you
without a
second thought.

  ~mce
1.0k · Aug 2015
Mornings
Mike Essig Aug 2015
Even after ten years
of living alone
the coal mine depth
of the morning silence
stuns me.
Time was, it could be
pierced by Mozart,
birdsong, poetry.
Now it has become
an impenetrable,
invisible wall
that I strain at
but cannot
hear through.
I accept that it
is permanent.
I know that when
the silence ends,
I will too.
1.0k · Mar 2017
Cycle Of Cruelty
Mike Essig Mar 2017
Step out of
your frigid bones.
Break into blossoms.
Snow-bells and crocuses.
Tentative daffodils.
Spring arrives
outlining a new world
and all that might imply.
1.0k · Apr 2015
Direct Action V 2.0
Mike Essig Apr 2015
I own a
black t-shirt
that proclaims
(on the back):

Disturbed Veteran
Do Not Approach


When I wear it,
mothers clutch
their children and
I am rarely jostled
in check out lines.
You'd think
I was a *****
asking to shake hands.
Mostly, they pretend
blindness and just
walk away as they
did long ago
when the war ended
*for them.
I love to mess with people. I have a t-shirt or bumper sticker to offend or frighten just about anyone. In this land of conformity, this brings me glee. I even have one that says: I Am Comfortable With Violence. That gets a look.
994 · Oct 2015
A Definition Of Irony
Mike Essig Oct 2015
I moved to this town
fifty-four years ago
to live in a house that
was a two and a half
bedroom half a double
with two parents and
six siblings in a
welter of tumultuous
chaos and disarray.

Being the oldest, I
hated the confused
congestion and constant
bickering and fled
at every opportunity
to the houses of
friends who had their
own rooms, enough to eat,
and even peace and quiet.

At seventeen, having
graduated from high school
(barely), I was out
the door in a heartbeat
and on to hippiedom,
Europe, the middle east
the draft, drugs, Vietnam,
marriage and my own life.

Now, forty-seven years
later, I live in a small
apartment in the other half
of that same double house
with only a cat.

My parents are departed.
Strangers own their half.

It is quiet and serene
and all mine.
                      Forty-seven
years of running to end up
a foot from where I began.

Even Odysseus couldn't
compete with that feat.

I enjoy living here now.

It is everything it
wasn't when I was a kid.

Still, the irony would
be apparent to an idiot.

Forty-seven years of
running in a circle.
Life, not so much a
journey as eternal return.

  ~mce
992 · Mar 2017
Burning Man
Mike Essig Mar 2017
The heart
of the wood
burns hottest;
the heart
of a living man,
as well.

Both consume
themselves
to produce
light and heat.

A life of fire.

In the end,
only ashes
remain.
Mike Essig Dec 2015
the constant of fluxation

truth merely a moving power
mortality merely mereness

a genuine body
sincere energy
a spiritual purpose

quarks, leptons, bosons, berryyawns. mesons
lead to electrons, electronic, electric, energy

this too is a syntax

letters, words, phrases, sentences & soforth

syntax added meaning unfolds
the human becomes

a life lived with intelligence, patience and whimsy

unfolding
like a lily

syntax sails a real world
but only one of many

mind without cause is a noisome thing
it is possible that your ears will bleed


meanings
        diverge
               for
                  different
                           readers


there is really only one sentence per reader

for each line only
one proper break
    or silly jabber
         becomes toxic tropes

     it can take days to understand one idea

I have never understood the
significance of garter belts

proceed with addition

let us go then you and I
out beneath the weeping sky
and attempt to make something new
from what has been

Allow the brain's raw edge
to blow away the fluff and
bore down to pure syntax
unadorned.

most ideas are only nostalgia

writing on the computer
an imaginary ribbon types back

purge the fluff

blow away the frills

what really remains?

Culture?

the moaning and bleating
of cattle from a
moving truck's ***
                   doomed

consider all poetry
               a Lost and Found of consciousness

plagiarism an invention of  
lady freshman English teachers
with withered ******* seeking job security

oh poets of the world
find your lines here
be glad they were chosen
no longer in old ink frozen

made new  made new  made new

Born Again!

(can i get an amen...)

the Poet appropriates and incorporates
making the old new

oh! bursting creation!

fresh fire from fallen twigs

make it new! make it new! make it new!
(old ez bombastic but on point)

everything you
imagine is possible

alphabet, words, syntax = narrative
narrative the only reality
and you are The Magus
with power to create

but this calls for courage

again it is an alphabet
making a word endowed
by syntax with meaning

meaning as always
just one of so many
possible realities

created out of lack of time

if there were world enough and time
you could embrace multitudes

you could spasm out
a plethora
of galaxies nebula planets

only cursed by time
is limitation introduced

know the silent voice of the gods made visible

find the Center of Self
just what is and no more
    sentence
            syntax
                  skein

unr­avelling back to the Source

we are more
than we can ever be

  ~mce
Mike Essig Jun 2015
At 4am you are as alone
as the last Tasmanian Tiger.
You are a bundle of screaming nerves
with no skin to protect them.
Absolutely nothing matters:
not women, not friends
not ***, not money, not poverty,
not friends, not lovers,
not the future, not the past,
nothing at all. All that exists
is the terrible freedom
of the insignificant
blob of protoplasm that you are.
You know in your soul
that there is a strong possibility
that nothing means anything.
So you go back to bed
and anticipate remembering
nothing of this in the morning.
The bliss of unknowing
is your only hope
in a world of hurt.
Try it. Perhaps it will work.
It never stays 4am forever.
Mike Essig May 2015
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--
Mike Essig May 2015
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
978 · Feb 2017
Souvenirs
Mike Essig Feb 2017
After the Big War,
his uncles came home
(some of them)
different men but
bearing souvenirs
of devastation.

One was a rifle,
a Karabiner-98,
with stains of death
on its wooden stock.

His uncle wouldn't say
just how he got it.

When his uncle died,
the weapon came to him.

It spoke to him
of glory and bravery.

He was proud to hold
that dead German's gun.

Not many years later,
he returned, shattered,
from his own war.

His only souvenirs
burned in his head.

One *** shrouded night
he tossed the rifle into
the Susquehanna River.

Never again did he
own another weapon.

Comes a time for the
circle to be broken.
978 · May 2015
Jane Hirshfield
Mike Essig May 2015
More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the  light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.
978 · Feb 2016
Son At Earring
Mike Essig Feb 2016
Enter only through the revolting door.
River running down sleep steeps to the sea.
A dearth of beer cans wish for so much more.
Content and coherence all plain to be.
Why were we made large to become so small?
Desperate succulents clinging to rocks.
Play what you will, by good, and pluck it all!
That bunch in the noose really rooked your socks.
Worlds woven with words wear quickly away.
Be grateful for just a line of knowing.
This weather appears to be hear to say.
Everything's gathered in tears a-flowing.
     Play with those sounds completely at your ease:
     No words were harmed in the making of these.
976 · Feb 2016
Gone Girl
Mike Essig Feb 2016
Divorce is the sign of knowledge is out times.* wcw

Empty chair. Sun frowning through blinds on lifeless rooms.
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
Singing now to only one. A history of the void. Hollow words.
Know the past. You were there. In everything done.
Boxed up kid's toys. Forgotten gifts. Solitary thoughts.
Echoes of children's voices. Fading to grown up.
No one knows what lurks down the road. Dead end.
Memories of the missing. One way conversations. Unsung songs.
Days without direction. Nights of nothing. Empty bed blues.
Ransacked nostalgia. Random recollections. Loneliness.
     You and I we're like water to the sea,
     What can one without the other be.


  ~mce
Mike Essig Jan 2016
1 - Sweep out the International Space Station.
2 - Eat Kale every day and like it.
3 - Learn to know and like a republican.
4 - Become a Mixed Martial Arts champion.
5 - Be kind to extinct wolverines.
6 - Develop at taste for Rap music.
7 - Explore gastronomic excess with you $16 in food stamps.
8 - Teach the cat how to vacuum and dust.
9 - Find the last person under 30 without a smartphone.
10 - Figure out why God created Twitter.
11 - Solve the riddle of what women really want.

12 - Give up on all the above by Ground Hog Day.

  ~mce
970 · Mar 2018
Escaping The Labyrinth
Mike Essig Mar 2018
"Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky." WHA

Easy to escape what you hate;
difficult to find what you love.

Handsomely equipped to fail,
we sail out into the world.

Disillusion follows disillusion
until disillusion becomes disillusion,
it's own gray Shade of life.

The old know they have failed.
They young suspect they will.

Take wing against the dead.
Craft waxen wings. Seek the sun.
Soar against all despair.

Better to tumble than not to try,
to fall far and furiously alive.

Try to breach that pure, Attic sky
where light and hope may reside,
once before you wither and die.
969 · Apr 2015
Shiva Dances In The Dark
Mike Essig Apr 2015
Bad karma bleeds
across centuries of hate;

one blind eye for another,
one scream of pain for another.

No escape from suffering.
Accept the world and move on.

Try to be the light
that you already are.

   ~mce
Don't bother fretting over the news. Just hold the revolution in your heart.
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