Darkness and cold
press like death
upon my windows.
Each year,
harder and harder
to fend them off.
Slowly, surely,
each winter,
they creep deeper
into my soul.
Light and warmth,
only fading memories
of spring, youth
and you.

Disappointments and delusions
make time scream by so fast
our pasts, so full of freedom,
seem to have belonged to others.
If only time's roaring train
could be slowed a bit,
we might enjoy our complete lives
the way lovers enjoy every inch
of each other's bodies.

The fake blond
with low standards
sits on the bar stool
in a dress so short
it immodestly
screams take me home,
but I think she would
really rather have
a home of her own
and not have to hunt
a new man each night.

Sometimes words
cease to be a joy
and become a burden.
Sometimes you
must set them down
and take a rest.
The poet is a mailman
lugging a load of life,
carrying bundles
that most people
don't even want
to think about:
heavy thoughts
on weighty subjects.
Occasionally, even a
metaphorical mailman
needs a holiday.
  - mce

Axis**

Through the conduits of blood
my body in your body
spring of night
my tongue of sun in your forest
your body a kneading trough
I red wheat
Through conduits of bone
I night I water
I forest that moves forward
I tongue
I body
I sun-bone
Through the conduits of night
spring of bodies
You night of wheat
you forest in the sun
you waiting water
you kneading trough of bones
Through the conduits of sun
my night in your night
my sun in your sun
my wheat in your kneading trough
your forest in my tongue
Through the conduits of the body
water in the night
your body in my body
Spring of bones
Spring of suns

the sound of a
helicopter above
a small
Pennsylvania
town in the
October dawn

time vanishes

once again
you swoop
above the
jungle in
terror

years pass
people die

your fears
cold and
sharp as

a knife

stick in you
forever

some wars
never end

  ~mce

Like some antique schooner,
his heart vanished
into the Bermuda Triangle
of her eyes' green oceans.

    ~mce

So many
empty days,
lost faces,
frozen dreams
empty beds;
soon:
spring breezes,
the asphalt seas,
another voyage
in search of
Argos,
Ithaca,
Penelope,
peace.
- mce

Clocks like feral vultures open wounds with fatal, ticking beaks. Their hands take you by the throat, choking off thought. Clocks tell many lies: no time to lose, time heals all, time will tell and, most despicable, time is money. Time isn't money. Time is your soul bleeding out onto your socks. Money is just an inferior brand of toilet paper. Use it for what it's worth. Middle-class zombies buy these lies, confusing time with tempo. The measure it out like expensive coffee: four years of college, forty hours a week, thirty years of mortgage, five years of car loan. They buy their lives on time. The usurers have propagandized them to equate payments with ownership, success with things. This keeps them too busy to ask questions. When time runs out they die, ignorant of having lived a lie. Time laughs last. Always.
  - mce

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.

A self-portrait.*

Gaze into the mirrored face
of the drunk man. See the
blurred innocence of
the departed boy. There are
no worlds but this world.
War, women and whiskey
do their destruction.
A man becomes what
a man does, but sometimes
that can’t be helped.
Perhaps a thousand more
lives must be lived
to undo the doing, to
break the bonds of Karma,
to find the arms of peace.
Every day a good day to die.

  ~mce

All that's left of me...*

Cross-legged in meditation at four AM.
Sitting in a provincial burg. Alone.
Completely comfortable with obscurity.
Ambition dead as ashes of embers.
Swallow emptiness as it swallows you.

This world holds no prizes worth winning.

Youth: dream dreams and lust.
Prime: chase success and love.
Age: write poems and be quiet.

What can a dead cat do but bounce?

You've done all you can for your fellow man.

Action is the province of the young;
there are reasons soldiers are only twenty.

People say go for it, time remains.
You know, you know, there's nowhere to go.

Everything important ends before it begins.

If all your words turned suddenly to gold,
at your core you would still be poor.

The things men chase: money, women, fame;
no longer matter at the end of the game.

Grab those pillows, sit down and see:
already all that you need to be.

If you can't learn
to make a friend
of your suffering,
you will lead
a very lonely life.
  - mce

Each lover
helps
the other
to live
and finally
helps
the other
to die.
Gift after
gift.

  ~mce

He smells like his life:

weary smells of
whiskey and leather,
the dead stink of
too many cigarettes,
the mingled perfumes
of many lovely women,
the dark, sticky
whiff of lust and ***,
the acrid stench of
cordite and ******,
the copper reek of blood,
the honest sweat of work,
with just a hint of ink
and **** thrown in.

This effluvium may not
be sweetly attractive
or call to butterflies
and hummingbirds,

but it is the aroma
of a life lived alive.

   ~mce

Only the dead
       know the end of war.*

Sit abruptly upright
into shivering darkness.
Nothingness shimmers
before your eyes.
A whiff of cordite.
Echoes of screams.
Distinct feel of falling.
War holds on tight,
even in dreams.
Blessed absence of details,
although the stink
of fear remains.
Remember when you are.
Try to go back to sleep.
The past has passed.
The future will keep.

I slept poorly last night,
a night of tremulous dreams
and not much rest.

Poorly, an odd adverb.
The old sleep poorly.
How strange to be that old
and dream young dreams.

I dreamt I was alone
on the floor of the Dojo,
failing my next belt test.

My fading body would not flow:
it stumbled, faltered and forgot.

Beneath my teacher's gaze,
I tasted my failure as if a kid.

I have not feared failure
in the decades since I became one.

But again I knew the metallic
panic of inadequacy,
like the stricken adolescent
who prefers stillness to misstep.

I miscarried and once more
knew the terror of it,
as if I were fourteen,
at a school dance,
wearing the wrong shoes.

Where do these
stabbing visions
originate?
How does fear
stop our hearts?

I do not know these answers,
only that I slept poorly last night
and had not much rest.

  ~mce

I cannot not how you smell
so I project my own desire
onto your unknown skin.

Patchouli. A scent that
makes him instantly goofy
and transports me at once
to the decade before
you even drew breath.

Even now that scent
on a crowded street
turns my head in wonder.

Scent, taste and touch:  
our first mammalian memories.

Do not be troubled lover,
I will love and linger
on any olfactory lingerie
you care to wear or none.

My second favorite is just
sunshine on bare skin.

But any whiff of you will
become part of my heart
and I will inhale you
deep into my soul.

~mce

Two Turkey
Buzzards sit on
the utility wire;
another glides
in to join them.
they appear to be
considering me,
but I'm hoping
they are early.

   ~MCE

Odd that Auden
who never heard
a shot fired in anger
wrote the best poem
about the coming of WWII.
This only proves
that you don't have
to be a warrior
to understand war.
War is a corruption
in the hearts of men.
If you know the human heart,
if you understand
that infection,
you know all you need
to know about war.

by Po Chu-i**

–Confucius said that it was not till sixty that "his ears obeyed him".

Between thirty and forty, one is distracted by the Five Lusts;
Between seventy and eighty, one is prey to a hundred diseases.
But from fifty to sixty one is free from all ills;
Calm and still–the heart enjoys rest.
I have put behind me Love and Greed; I have done with Profit and Fame;
I am still short of illness and decay and far from decrepit age.
Strength of limb I still possess to seek the rivers and hills;
Still my heart has spirit enough to listen to flutes and strings.
At leisure I open new wine and taste several cups;
Drunken I recall old poems and sing a whole volume.
Meng-te has asked for a poem and herewith I exhort him
Not to complain of three-score, "the time of obedient ears."


                                                      Chinese; trans. Arthur Waley

Be sure to secure your own mask
before helping others with theirs.
Droll instruction, but essential.
Wise advice for all in transit.
In a world of facile familiarity
you will need to clamp it on tight
to make sure it never slips.
Knowing who you truly are
does not mean that others should.
Join in the necessary Kabuki dance.
Let them guess what lurks behind.
They will anyway and usually wrong.
You are so much more and so much less.
Make every day of your every day
a safe and mysterious trick or treat.
Be sure to secure your own mask
before helping others with theirs.

"Once I was a young man and all I thought I had to do was smile."*

Generally he was
one part bourbon,
two parts charm,
greeting the world
with a handful
of **** ups
and a mouthful
of apologies
which were
usually accepted
because wit and
a smile will
take a young man
farther than
you might think.

  ~mce

Most men
do not require
poetry.
They can
take it
or leave it.

But women are poetry
and very interesting
to read.
~mce

You can find The Biology Of Strangeness  and my other books at my Amazon Author’s Page: www.amazon.com/author/mikeessig. You can get print or ebook. Read for free with Amazon Prime.

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Here is a chance to feed a poet’s starving cat. Not as much fun as sleeping with the poet, but more important.

Off to Minnesota to my God Son’s wedding. See you on Thursday. :) Mike

How do you separate
the **** from the *******...

  ~mce

Let that lovely gown
slid to your perfect ankles.
Kick it off those cowboy boots.
Step into my arms.
We will meld into
a journey only we can take.
I don't know where will we go.
But if living flesh can kiss
and become one,
it will be a holy trip
to a divinely private world.

   ~mce

****!
I think I'm
a Cylon...
- mce

She felt she was a writer
and therefore she was privileged
to edit the world.

  ~mce

You make me want
to be more:

An unlikely knight
unpacking my shining armor,
smiling at dragons
as yet unslain,

fearless before your eyes.

How rare to truly hear
what another person
is actually saying,
caught up, as we must be,
in the imagined resonances
of our own perceptions.
Do I hear you or do I
hear me hearing you?
By no means the same thing.
  - mce

All languages are a vague, uncertain codes.
Misunderstanding is rampant and hurtful,
probably the most common feature of communication.
We talk and talk, but don't often hear.
We think we are listening, but mostly
we are just using the time to work out
how to respond to what we think we heard.
Precision and effort can make things better.
But until we can hear each other's thoughts,
true connection will remain nearly impossible.
Still, we must continue to try and get better,
knowing that better and perfect are not the same.

  ~mce

He told me once,
at seventeen,
in my parents' attic,
that he would be a star,
remake the world
in his own image,
forge his life
by his own hand
with his own tools.

It would all happen,
he assured me,
through his own will
and determination.

Other people
were unnecessary;
fate, destiny, karma
and bad luck
only existed
in the heads
of losers,
not for him.

He was exempt.

Nothing could stop him.

He declared
himself
invincible,
(he had been reading
Ayn Rand)
and smiled
patronizingly
at my own
pathetic hippie
lack of ambition.

Now,
forty years gone,
divorced, broke
and unemployed,
he bums a cigarette
and whines
about the economy.

Apparently
the world
had other plans.
- mce

"The only questions that really matter
are the ones you ask yourself."
- Ursula K. Le Guin

For some of us
the universe
provides
a long list
of questions
and a short list
of answers.

Our work,
the real work,
the only work
that matters,
is filling
in those blanks.

A hard blessing,
but a blessing,
still.
- mce

The hardest life to bear
is the one you didn't live,
but should have.
  - 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.

riverrun, past Eve and Adams*

in the end there is a beginning
that must never end.
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

The sun went down on me
right when you went down on me.

Sweetness explodes
when the planets align.

I did not know
that sunsets could scream.

  ~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

odd, how an
ordinary evening
can turn
miraculous
when you've had
a bit too much
to drink
and your woman
is very beautiful
poised against
the unexpected snow
that makes
everything shine

   ~mce

Take an ancient iPod
(click wheel!),
splash a few words
on Craigslist,
wait a short while
and it transforms
into fifty dollars
which morph into
a bottle of fine
Tennessee whiskey,
a haircut, cigarettes
and change.

Economists call these
transactions.
Alchemists called them
transmutations.

I call them proof
that miracles
still exist
in the ordinary.

I will now
have a drink,
light a smoke
and luxuriate
in just what is...

   ~mce

Sometimes the silence
in my life
whispers, you're lucky.
Sometimes the silence
in my life
whimpers, you're lonely.
From moment to moment
I never know
which voice it will be.
- mce

this morning
my lips
are blistered

too many bites
of hard life

i guess

  ~mce

Love, you make
me tremble.

There is marvel
in that movement.

I do not ever wish
to be merely still
in the presence
of your body, your spirit.

Stir me and wake me;
raise me to a new state
of feeling and knowing,
both scary and lovely.

Allow me the pleasure
of our souls touching,
quivering, merging,
one from two,
two in one.

When I am near you,
I want to become
a holy, knight-errant
slaying impossible dragons
only because you are
in the world
for me to please,
only because
you make me tremble.
- mce

We shall need

a very private
language for this.

Let us create it.

A language
for lovers,
not strangers.

We are those lovers,
supplicants at this altar.

These syllables
will bind us
in lovers knots.

The ceremony begins.

We shelter
in our bodies
holy flesh
steadily chanting
this communion.

Slowly touching,
slowly turning,
slowly burning,

we begin the dance.

We whirl
until we merge

and the magic
takes hold

as we pronounce

in sounds never
heard before,

the incantation
of a spell
that begins
with words,

but ends
in ecstasy.
   ~mce

The holocausts
of personal tragedy
are an absolute necessity:
our egos are forged
of coldest steel,
only the fire of pain
renders us malleable.

  ~mce

You know it is over.
Your shoes walk away.
Your phone dives into
the pit of despair.
Your cigarettes
have become healthy.
Your knees no longer
knock, but clap.
The chipmunks are silent.
Wolverines arrange
mass suicide pacts.
Chameleons permanently
turn invisible.
Everything transforms
into Other.
You are a stranger
becoming stranger
day by day.
You know it is over.
Ten Four good buddy.

Death is an
old war buddy
of mine.
I have seen
him work
up close.
He is very,
very good.
But only at
taking lives,
not souls.
  ~mce

You know it's over.
Your shoes have walked away.
Your phone dives
into the pit of despair.
Cigarettes have become healthy.
Your knees don't knock, but clap.
The chipmunks have fallen silent.
All the chameleons are gray.
The cat dismisses you and leaves.
Bullets pass through you like prunes.
Love is a forgotten memory.
Everything transforms into other.
You are a stranger growing
stranger by the day.
Over and out good buddy.
You know it's over.

At three AM, on the deck
gathering stove wood,
the air is as cold
as an ex-wife's heart,
the looming full moon
drips luminescence
through stark black branches
onto perfect new snow,
and the only sound
is one lonely owl
asking his eternal question.
  - mce