This morning,
I saw a bird
that doesn’t exist.
It vibrated one
pregnant instant
in my fluttering head
and vanished;
by far the loveliest
I have never seen.

mce

Poetry is plunder. Ages provide words. Dig.
An immense temple to pillage. Random pieces. Mine.
Fit them to your hands. Create in you what is new.
Craft, not magic. Become a better maker, Strive.
Content created hound snaps. Only ignore. Cur.
What will you do with these little fragments. Frown.
Camels have seductive eyes but remain ugly.
Difficult metaphors in bow ties, black swans, duchesses.
Screaming trees fuse with sound. Crows. Funereal fowl.
Dancing butterflies darken sky. The chairs are leaving.
Piece together fragments against your ruin. Futility.
On other mornings, seek silence. You won't find it.
What you loveth well remains. Of the heart. Be.
You are an artist. Shut the **** up. Do your art.
     Most of the time you will fail,
     but sometimes, your poems will sail.

  ~mce

They all
want to hear you
sing of the light;
****** few
will listen
when the song
turns dark.
  - mce

I admit that
I have been
a fool for love.
I don't care.
It was worth it.
If you won't be
a fool for love,
you will always
be a fool.
  - mce

Did you hear
the round
that turned
your world
upside down?
Or was it but
a moment
of pain
and fumbling,
a silent
ecstasy
of tumbling?
Unscathed
myself,
I can
only wonder,
how it feels
to have
your flesh
torn asunder
and then,
how to live
and if
to forgive.
  - mce

So many lovely, young girls
brimming with despair and despondency.

Makes an old man sad.

You are like buds that can't blossom.

Casual ***, attempted suicide,
drugs, alcohol, broken hearts:
all accrue to the self-aware.

Self-awareness is a great gift,
but acutely painful
to the very young.

Never use a man to define yourself.
Only disappointment lives there.
Men aren't all that smart
or valuable, you know,
and can be easily replaced.
In 40 years, you won't remember
his name.

None of this is new.

The trick is to find
your way to survive
and do it no matter what.

On the other side of suffering
is life, and perhaps more suffering.

You don't need bunnies and rainbows,
you only need yourselves and time
and toughness and belief.

Go ahead and blossom.

Make an old geezer smile.

I want you.

Even if for
the briefest
moment of time;

even if the world
disapproves,
and it will;

even if our hellos
quickly become
good-byes;

None of that matters:

the world and time
mean nothing to me,

I see no rules
in your soft
green eyes.

I want you.

~mce

I have written
a dictionary
of universal
comprehension.

If you could
read it all
would be revealed.

Unfortunately,
it is out of print
and the remaining
copies burned.

You are not allowed,
even now,
to taste the fruit
of the tree of life.
  ~mce

I stole a copy
of The Back Country
when I was sixteen
and it set me
upon the Poet's Road.

You signed it
for my friend
while I was
far away at war.

After most
of a lifetime,
I have it still.

May your
mountains and rivers
never end.

  ~mce

I knew a woman
whose perfect ***
could send men
to die horrible
deaths, smiling.

  ~mce

So much
depends upon
a 1997 Saturn
firing up
when I turn
the key.
  - mce

I only wanted
what all men want:
to be thought worthy
by a lovely woman;
to hold her close
as a bundle of lilacs;
to inhale her
deep as a spring forest;
to undress her
with trembling fingers;
to touch her
like the skin of a saint;
to enter her
like a portal to life.

A woman is
sanctified by love;
her beauty is lifted
to the waiting sky.

She becomes:

wise and deep
as the falling peals
of church bells;
holier than Mecca,
Bethlehem and Jerusalem;
lovelier than the wildflowers
of a Tennessee spring;
lighter than
the gentlest breeze.

She does not fear lust,
for she has sacrificed
at that empty altar before
and has learned
from loss to make love
greater and more powerfully
than a whole generation
of Amazons.

And she manages
all these wonders
with a Mona Lisa smile.

But in the end,
you are still a woman
and I am still a man.

We will come
to understand
what to make
of each other.

Forgive me my desire;
it is all I can be.

I see you sitting
on the red bed
drinking Retsina
against the white wall
where we had
drawn hexagrams,
in your black slip
smiling up at me
in the pellucid
Greek light.

Since that moment,
Forty-five years
have dissolved
like tears
in a hurricane.

You are only a
ghost who smiles
in my memories.

I never thought
I would find another
woman like you,
strong and complete.

But I have travelled
far and long
and like magic,
here she is.

Thank you for saying
that one day
I would know love
because I was worthy.

And you went away,
and  she is here.

Ghosts always
tell the truth.

If you are patient.

You should
meet the Muse;
she'll wear
your *** out.

She never takes no
for an answer.

Sure, when
she comes
she screams
out poems.

That's fine, but
her demands
will leave you
limp and gasping.

It's not all
sighs and play.

Be careful what
you wish for.

Don't quit your
day job.

A Muse will
satisfy you
but she won't
buy groceries.
  - mce

The night you got shot
I pushed your scrambled remains
like a sack of red meat
onto the deck of the chopper.

I wonder what it felt like,
those bullets tearing through you?

It must have been quick,
but what is quick to the dead?

It's forty-three years later
and I am sixty-four
but you will always be nineteen.

Which of us was lucky?

Last night you appeared in a dream
all shot to pieces and gave me
an enormous, important hint
about my future which I forgot
as soon as I woke up.

Believe me, buddy, you haven't
missed much. The world is still all
****** up and don't mean nothing.

No one has learned a single ****** thing.

Would you have had a good life?
A happy life? A successful life.
All pretty much moot.

But at least, you would
have had a life.

The nervous afflictions
of poets drive
doctors to dismay;
it is difficult
and dangerous
to diagnose
a chameleon
in a thorn bush.

Integrity:

All these decades
thirsting in the wilderness
and still he refuses
to drink the kool-aid.

Delight:

He has lived alone
so long that
he has learned
to hug himself
and enjoy it.

Where is the illness
in either?

How I fear for you

(And I have heard
the bullets
whine and miss).

Youth is a necessary fiction
of light and hope,
but fiction nevertheless.

War, death, disease,
disappointment and dread
stalk that silver road
you imagine before you.

I hope you evade them all,
and anyway it is pointless
to tell you to be careful.

Your lives are your own.

May your dreams,
against all my experience,
be just as you imagine.

   mce

“I loved you long before you loved me. It's the only thing I have you beat at, and I'll bring it up every chance I get.”*

She was sitting on the beach
wearing the tiniest bikini
staring out at the perfect Adriatic.

She sat alone, which considering
her beauty and elegance
seemed some cosmically bad joke.

Unlike myself, I approached her,
flashed my guileless 17-year-old smile,
and said hello, fully expecting
a giant older brother or even
Poseidon himself to appear
from nowhere and ****** me.

She spoke a lilting English
with an accent I could not name.
She said her name was Marisa
and she was twenty-one.

Next morning, in my two dollar room,
after an exhausting night of abandon
during which she moaned and peaked
three times, she dressed as I lay
shrivelled and worn out
as a mummified banana.

She told me she had come here
to be alone a little because
next week she must marry
an older man whom she did not love
chosen as was custom by her parents.

She said she would remember me
as the last morsel of passion
she would ever know in this world.

She kissed my forehead and left.

I had no words.

I never knew her last name
nor ever saw her again.

The Wheel spins, the particles dance,
we can never know the trajectories
that chance encounter can engender
nor what shapes the next round brings.

The next day I left for Greece
uncertain of what had even happened.

I still don't know. I never will.

But I think I may have met her again...

  ~mce

I have always believed
that every woman
deserves a poem.

If you have never
read those words

(though doubtless
you deserve better)

accept these words
until your own
arrive.

   ~mce

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

Twenty or twenty-one. All volunteers. Barely women.
Straight from school in a thousand small towns.
Straight into the mud and blood and madness.
We dragged our dying to their open arms.
Twelve hours shifts; often more. Wreckage of violence.
Round eyes. Smiles that healed. Hearts that broke.
Girls treating boys. Telling the necessary lies.
You're OK. You're fine. You're going home.
Valor danced in their faces. Lips that spoke hope.
Old now or dead. But forever young and alive
in the memories of 150,000 wounded soldiers
they saved and sent back to the world.
   ~mce

Consider:
every time you think
you have met the One,
he is probably
just One more
before the Next One.

   ~mce

Nouns and verbs swirls. Word anarchy. Everyone a poet.

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.
He said he would stuff my taco unlike any man before him,
and boy did he! I've always wanted a man who could cook.
Someday's you just know that the jail time was worth it.
Cows who give milk for free never know what a respectable farmer is.
Relearn the dying art of thinking before you ******* speak.
I scream. You scream. We come.  Police come. Awkward.
Thought it was a loofah but it turned out to be steel wool.
Sixty is the new 40. Try getting your ***** to believe that.
The only fact is that you'll never understand anything at all.
I never flirt with danger but danger just insists on it.
He lost me at: Do you prefer the ropes really, really tight?
She dumped me because I just stood there with my moves unbusted.
Watching internet *** is like ******* without arms.
I bet that pride of yours doesn't enjoy snuggling like I do.
You don't have to be desperately lonely to tweet, but it helps.

Say anything you like. After all, only everyone will see it.

The days piled up too high and then collapsed.
Everything was sadder than it used to be.
What we are concerned with here is unhappiness.
It is not a question of enlightenment, but recognition,
that chameleon of vapid disinterested change.
What does it all come down to in the end?
Feeling furtive needs isn't living;
you weary of feeding your needy, mammal body.
We must extricate ourselves from this repugnant spectacle.
The gates of the world open and close to no end.
The cosmos uses your own voice to complain.
The summit sings what is spoken in the depths.
The boulevards of your brain become smaller.
The wars are far away and oddly peaceful.
The lamps we light at dusk are for nothing.
I found this poem in the flea market of old words,
paid for it with the sorry shards of my memories,
and offer it to oblivion with whatever else I have stolen.
Consider it a final toast to everything that didn't happen.

  ~mce

...in all this imperfection i seek the perfect tone the lost chord the forgotten lyrics that call the lord to action when last we made love i built a pyre of your clothes and burned them because i wanted to make an offering and to hold you perfect and naked forever but you were only chilly and distant like god well who knows what successful supplication requires so now i light many candles against the gloom lace my morning coffee with bourbon ply the fire how many shades of gray does the world contain i have tried to count them and failed perhaps you know tell me love what is the spark that sets alight and where is the fire that breaks the night i want to take you violently from behind deep and without remorse like a centaur mounting a greek maiden on a perfect frozen vase i am praying hard for redemption and more whiskey perhaps a smile but darkness swirls in my brain an old friend whispering me toward the abyss saying it's ok just a few more steps and silence shall reign so what is the sound of one synapse firing why did the golden rule tarnish where have the indigo buntings fled the squirrels in my walls are scratching out messages in code if i can decrypt them and expose the international rodent conspiracy will i become famous and rich will lovely women fling their lingerie at me like silken boomerangs and ride me like a trojan horse or will the masters find me first and sequester me and my waterfalls of words in the madhouse of obscurity and is this a chance worth taking that those who care not should know the truth i know i am a river but where am i running the words pour the words rain it is hard to know what all this means and yet it must mean...
  - mce

Intro - by Warren Zevon (thanks Warren.)

"I don't want to grow old gracefully
I don't want to go 'til it's too late
I'll be some old man in the road somewhere
Kneeling down in the dust by the side of the Interstate

I am a renegade
I've been a rebel all my days
I am a renegade
I've been a rebel all my days"

/////

Resistance is not futile;
resistance is life.
Am I contrary?
Very well then,
I am contrary.
I am vast; I contain
multitudes
of contrariness.
I revel in it!
It is the heart
of all I am.

////

A nearly illiterate Black Zen Drill Sergeant told me when I was 19:

"You born wid a bullet wid yer name on it boy. We all is. You jest outrunit fo as long as you ken. Theys only two kinds a folks, the quick and the daid. You run fast an smart, mebbe you live a long long time."

/////

“I am not young enough to know everything.”  - Oscar Wilde

/////

The very young believe
that suicide must be better
than wrinkles, illness,
menopause and grey hair.

Of course, they are very young
and understand so very little.

Your life is the only thing
the Universe ever gives you.

Life is not a game to play,
but a war to be fought;
only a war of joy that
you are lucky to be chosen for.
Use the weapons you are given:
smile, fight hard, live long.

There is no shotgun to ****
or strychnine to swallow
waiting for me:

I will fall on the day
when that bullet
cast at birth
and engraved
with my name
finally catches up.

Besides, I love my stories
and can't miss next week's
episode of my life.

Who know? Maybe something
             miraculous
will happen yet.

/////

Thanks to everyone
who has loved me,
hated me, helped me,
hurt me, struck me,
held me, touched me,
kissed me or cursed me.

I am the vessel made
from the clay that
you molded and shaped.

Good or bad, without
your hugs and slugs
there would be no me.

/////

And a special shout out
to all the NVA soldiers
who were such bad shots.
Your lack of skill
made all this possible.

/////

This birthday,
nothing more
than a
temporary
placeholder
in the book
of eternity.

Each day,
a prophecy;
each day
a reward.

Each day,
I delight
in the
fragile wisdom
of things.

Each day,
I wonder
at the
incomprehensible
mystery
of people.

And thus
I will
continue
to marvel

at the near
that overcomes
the distant

until the end
of (my) days.

/////

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional."

However weird I may be
I am a professional human being;
And it's a job I plan to hold
for just as long as possible.

/////

Namaste...

    ~mce

The Day Lady Died**

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton  
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun  
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets  
in Ghana are doing these days
                                                        I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)  
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life  
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine  
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do  
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or  
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and  
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue  
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and  
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Seriously*

15 ways to wake up in the morning alive.
7 ways to enjoy and be productive at your ****** job.
52 start-up ideas that will leave you starving.
72 products that no one wants or cares about.
100 services that don't matter and no one needs.
16 hints for moving out of your parents' house.
11 methods for reading things longer than paragraphs.
42 reasons why you will never, ever get a real job.
97 hacks for surviving without a phone for 10 minutes.
26 things to do about tattoos that will haunt you.
33 ways to publish content and never get paid.
63 reasons the world is just not that into you.
One million ways to write an article that is not a list.
Show that entrepreneurial spirit. I believe in you.

  ~mce

In retrospect, she was the time's type:
nothing special, really;
nice smile, a decent body,
the obligatory long hair,
almost pretty, but not quite,
seventeen and on her own,
willing to trade her body
for a place to crash, to get high,
maybe a little food.
Nothing personal about it.
I provided her three night's lodging.
She paid in full and moved on.
I can't remember her name.
Those were the sixties.

   - mce

Properly nurtured, it alone will last;
enduring blossom of the wilted past.
   - mce

As a teacher,
you must always ask yourself:
do I really believe
this drivel I am vomiting?
If not, have the guts
to shut the **** up.
   ~mce

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart's not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine
You'd get it and be right here.
     ~ trans. Gary Snyder

Trans. Elaine Pagels


Jesus said:

If you bring forth
what is within you,
what you bring forth
will save you.
If you do not bring forth
what is within you,
what you do not bring forth
will destroy you.

Once on a miserably
hot, humid day
cruising above
a silent jungle,
I watched
a twenty-two year old
Cobra pilot
clear his machine guns
on an ancient,
abandoned,
Buddhist temple.

All the hubris
of western civilization
explicated
in one burst.

Homer, who best
knew the hearts
of men at war,
could not
have sung it better.
- mce

My ancient cell phone died.
Had to replace it with a smart-phone.
Samsung Galaxy. No Choice.

Smart-phone my ***;
nothing but a hassle
since I got it.

Phones should
make phone calls.

I don't want the weather
in Ukraine.

I don't want people
texting me.

(What the hell is texting?
***, LOL. IMHO.)

Don't want to play games
or listen to music.

Sure as hell don't want
to watch movies.

What kind of *****
watches movies on a phone?

Ned Ludd where are you?

Call me if your phone works.

We need to make some plans.
   ~mce

At four AM,
the hour of the Blues,
you will think
you want to escape
from the world.

By dawn
you will know
you must escape
into it.

Where shall you go?

Wherever your
heart leads.

Listen to it
and be on your way.

  ~mce

The moon has poured
a welcome mat
of light before
my bed.
      Wipe your feet
in radiance
before you join me,
lover.
       We will
merge in incandescent
ecstasy and glow
white hot with
the night's fervid,
perfect photons,
one where once
there was two.

   ~mce

alabaster
ivory
white
creamy
eggshell
and just
the size
of a woman's
thigh.

(N) Everything pleasant
you can do with your tongue
that doesn't involve ***.

  ~mce

Nature contains
the necessary
elements;

where nothing
is forbidden,
beauty blossoms.

The world exists
because it
sounds and shines.

The Vortex
remains
and reappears
unbidden.

Part your thighs;
open your mind:

the numinous
exists to find.
  - mce

If only I could
    plant myself
deep in the
    perfect earth
of your body
    and grow us
a new life
    together.
  - mce

I only want to be
a flower in your garden;
I would never dare
to dream of being the garden.
Only a perfect man
would hazard that.
   ~mce

How Poetry Comes To Me**

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

There Are Those Who Love To Get *******

There are those who love to get *****
and fix things.
They drink coffee at dawn,
beer after work,

And those who stay clean,
just appreciate things,
At breakfast they have milk
and juice at night.

There are those who do both,
they drink tea.

After Work**

The shack and a few trees
float in the blowing fog

I pull out your blouse,
warm my cold hands
     on your *******.
you laugh and shudder
peeling garlic by the
     hot iron stove.
bring in the axe, the rake,
the wood

we'll lean on the wall
against each other
stew simmering on the fire
as it grows dark
            drinking wine.

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.

How Poetry Comes to Me**

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

****,
I am cold,
and I want
to hibernate
for a very
long time.
Maybe even
forever.

Nothing taunts
a geezer so much
as the life unlived,
so if you are young
and still breathing,
get out and live it.

  ~mce