See how it all returns. Circling vultures.
Grief like a dull blade hacking.
Rend ourselves apart. Dingy heartbreaks.
Delicate stringency of stale perfume.
Dead kisses. Final whimpers of regret.
Quicksilver of light turns to sheets of lead.
Gunmetal pall falls across the bed.
Whispered passion breaks against life.
Night sighs succumb to bleak morning.
Time to turn the page to emptiness.
Gray days of walking away. Lonely streets.
You know this will all happen again,
men full of anger and women of pain.
Where do you walk to when you walk away?
You walk out of yesterday into today.

mce

Sneaks up like a VC assassin
quick, invisible, deadly
the knife slides into your ribs
while you are thinking far away.

A sharp, sudden pain
and then sudden falling away
into a world of hurt.

Emptiness floods your body,
frozen and stuttering
in incertitude.

Ice enters your stunned heart.

It lasts a second, a minute,
an hour, a day a week, a year.

For that interval you gasp
with the hopelessness of life.

You do not want to die,
you only want to feel nothing,
to escape into nothingness.

And then it departs suddenly
and the earth returns to view.

Birds sing and women are beautiful,
the sun winks and you are saved.

Until the next time when
the unseen blade again finds
your soul and chaos blinds
you to life.

Although I want your body
what I need is to make love
to every piece of your soul.

Your body is the icing;
your soul is the cake.

I want to lick the icing,
but I need to eat the cake.
  ~mce

Entropy hunts you down;
until around 60,
this remains abstract.
Then, it becomes fact.
"Things fall apart;"
bodies are things.
Hearts and souls
improve with age.
Minds and flesh do not.
Fight the good fight.
You can only delay
inevitable decrepitude.
Every day, a battle
against the inevitable.
War with a grim enemy
that can never give up.
Entropy will hunt you down
Until your walls collapse
and death, relentless,
roars through the breach.

by Terrell Morrow**

Motown tune harboring,
Automobile industrial base vicarious drive,
Downtown city lighting life-giver of struggling spirit,
Red-winged-angel-singing city I call home.
They tell me we can’t keep it together,
I fight for your honor trying to ignore the families I’ve seen ripped apart
Through the pressure of financial stress that weighs down the strength
Of even the toughest of Pistons.
Even though I’ve seen the happiness of children ripped away
Transcending from that signing purple colored dinosaur
To the morning sounds of hums,
I’ve heard a remembrance of the happiness of people ripped away
By purple colored gangbangers.
I say to those who don’t see the fury in our eyes,
That burns with the blaze of a 1967 riot,
Is the truth of our history:
Our city, our home, our tears,
From the very moment you set foot on that Riverwalk
And see the Princess set sail to a dream on a bank of beauty
As the waters part like Moses’ path.
We are but mere underdogs with the purest of waters.
The product for which they lust for the thirst in which we quench
An essence for which we must for the fist in which we clench
As we fight our endless battles and the Hells we’ve created in Paradise Vallies
As we walk through the valley of the shadow of death-toll population
Hand-in-hand generations that shine like sons of the son.
Yo, show me a city that’s aware of its oblivion,
And simply relaxes like my hometown,
Detroit.

i know you are out there

waiting for me
to shift
your transmission
into desire

to release the brake
on your inhibitions

to ride you with
a deep throaty growl
all the way to ******,

Michigan.

    ~mce

~ menu fixe for Chez Revanche

Anxious Anaconda Antipasto.
Mega Shark Soup.
Grinning Crocodile Fillets.
Prodigious Python Pie.

All served up like revenge,
appropriately cold.

Presentation is everything.

Tuck in, before they do.

   _ mce

An Exercise in Love*
     ~for Jackson Allen*

My friend wears my scarf at his waist
I give him moonstones
He gives me shell & seaweeds
He comes from a distant city & I meet him
We will plant eggplants & celery together
He weaves me cloth

                   Many have brought the gifts
                   I use for his pleasure
                   silk, & green hills
                   & heron the color of dawn

My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind
He backlights my dreams
He has built altars beside my bed
I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember
his name, or my own.

Sestina From The Home Gardener**

These dried-out paint brushes which fell from my lips have been removed
with your departure; they are such minute losses
compared with the light bulb gone from my brain, the sections
of chicken wire from my liver, the precise
silver hammers in my ankles, which delicately banged and pointed
magnetically to you. Love has become unfamiliar

and plenty of time to tend the paint brushes now. Once unfamiliar
with my processes. Once removed
from that sizzling sun, the ego, to burn my poet shadow to the wall, I pointed,
I suppose, only to your own losses,
which made you hate that 200 pound fish called marriage. Precise-
ly, I hate my life, hate its freedom, hate the sections

of fence stripped away, hate the time for endless painting, hate the sections
of my darkened brain that wait for children to snap on the light, the unfamiliar
corridors of my heart with strangers running in them, shouting. The precise
incisions in my hip to extract an image, a dripping pickaxe or palm tree removed,
and each day my paint brushes get softer and cleaner – better tools, and losses
cease to mean loss. Beauty, to each eye, differently pointed.

I admire sign painters and carpenters. I like that black hand pointed
up a drive-way whispering to me, “The Washingtons live in these sections,”
and I explain autobiographically that George Washington is sympathetic to my losses;
His face or name is everywhere. No one is unfamiliar
with the American dollar, and since you’ve been removed
from my life, I can think of nothing else. A precise

replacement for love can’t be found. But art and money are precise-
ly for distraction. The stars popping out of my blood are pointed
nowhere. I have removed
my ankles so that I cannot travel. There are sections
of my brain growing teeth and unfamiliar
hands tie strings through my eyes. But there are losses

of the spirit like vanished bicycle tires and losses
of the body, like the whole bike, every precise
bearing, spoke, gear, even the unfamiliar
handbrakes, vanished. I have pointed
myself in every direction, tried sections
of every map. It’s no use. The real body has been removed.

Removed by the ice tongs. If a puddle remains, what losses
can those sections of glacier be? Perhaps a precise
count of drops will substitute the pointed mountain, far away, unfamiliar?

Blue Monday**
BY DIANE WAKOSKI
Blue of the heaps of beads poured into her *******  
and clacking together in her elbows;
blue of the silk
that covers lily-town at night;
blue of her teeth
that bite cold toast
and shatter on the streets;
blue of the dyed flower petals with gold stamens  
hanging like tongues
over the fence of her dress
at the opera/opals clasped under her lips
and the moon breaking over her head a
gush of blood-red lizards.

Blue Monday. Monday at 3:00 and
Monday at 5. Monday at 7:30 and
Monday at 10:00. Monday passed under the rippling  
California fountain. Monday alone
a shark in the cold blue waters.

                     You are dead: wound round like a paisley shawl.  
                     I cannot shake you out of the sheets. Your name  
                     is still wedged in every corner of the sofa.

                     Monday is the first of the week,  
                     and I think of you all week.  
                     I beg Monday not to come  
                     so that I will not think of you  
                     all week.

You paint my body blue. On the balcony
in the softy muddy night, you paint me
with bat wings and the crystal
the crystal  
the crystal
the crystal in your arm cuts away
the night, folds back ebony whale skin  
and my face, the blue of new rifles,  
and my neck, the blue of Egypt,  
and my *******, the blue of sand,  
and my arms, bass-blue,
and my stomach, arsenic;

there is electricity dripping from me like cream;
there is love dripping from me I cannot use—like acacia or  
jacaranda—fallen blue and gold flowers, crushed into the street.

                         Love passed me in a blue business suit
                         and fedora.
                         His glass cane, hollow and filled with
                         sharks and whales ...  
                         He wore black
                         patent leather shoes
                         and had a mustache. His hair was so black
                         it was almost blue.

                         “Love,” I said.
                         “I beg your pardon,” he said.  
                         “Mr. Love,” I said.
                         “I beg your pardon,” he said.

                         So I saw there was no use bothering him on the street

                         Love passed me on the street in a blue  
                         business suit. He was a banker  
                         I could tell.

So blue trains rush by in my sleep.  
Blue herons fly overhead.
Blue paint cracks in my
arteries and sends titanium
floating into my bones.  
Blue liquid pours down
my poisoned throat and blue veins
rip open my breast. Blue daggers tip
and are juggled on my palms.
Blue death lives in my fingernails.

If I could sing one last song
with water bubbling through my lips
I would sing with my throat torn open,
the blue jugular spouting that black shadow pulse,  
and on my lips
I would balance volcanic rock
emptied out of my veins. At last
my children strained out
of my body. At last my blood
solidified and tumbling into the ocean.
It is blue.  
It is blue.  
It is blue.

Obviously,
the human heart
can subsist
on hope alone;
the question is:
how long before
hope turns bitter?
  - mce

the night of the day
   before tomorrow
      becomes today

he tries to imagine
   ways beyond that

but loses the path

mired in the boggy
   random darkness
      of his own muddy soul
   ~mce

It is so hard to know what
comes next because
the world is round and it's
hard to see around the corners.

  ~MCE

Just once,
I would like
to make love
in a joyfully
tended garden
on a promisingly
hot spring day.
Sun warmth,
soil warmth,
woman warmth:
the best meaning
of back to the earth.

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

for John Berryman*

How many poets,
by alcohol and despair,
choose to depart
this living air?

The Muse can be
an evil *****:
she'll **** your brain,
she'll make you twitch.

With her it's not
a casual roll,
she wants your *****,
she'll eat you whole.

You strive to strike
the head of the nail;
one blow comes home,
but a dozen others fail.

Soon you despair
to ever succeed:
you open your veins,
commence to bleed.

You give to her,
and give and give,
until it's just
too hard to live.

Then in the bottle
you sadly seek
another day,
another week.

It isn't pretty,
it isn't fair,
and so you depart
down the dying air.
  - mce

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.

It is usually best to avoid
crushing hopelessness, to swerve
and defer disaster, but even so
the world is well and truly ****** up.

Seek solutions to this conundrum.

Try to avoid curiosity, a pernicious
strain of insanity that conjures up
irrational fears of orangutangs
with meat cleavers, lethally ascetic
Tibetan monks, bathroom carpets
of abandoned razors or Big Macs
rife with E. Coli.

Avoid metaphysical musings that lead
to questions of coleslaw, vegan
water parks, the Team Quadraplegic
Gymnastics squad and the horrors
of the Hilary Clinton Naked Network.

Seek refuge in the present tense to
escape the interrogation of mirrors,
the crafted answer, dacryphilia,
remedial rage, landslides of therapy
and memorizing each month's horoscope.

Consider that mercy is on back order from God.
Remember the best lines of an unread book.
Nap on a battlefield; haggle over imaginary debts.
Set fire to the umbrellas of passing strangers.
Stop to watch the loudness and burn the recovered dead.

Call up new magic for a dying world.
Find beauty in the irradiated glow of burning cities.
Try not to bounce existential checks or notice
the crumbling of distant walls, ruined outhouses,
and the immense bleakness of forever and ever.

Take up training small rodents and lighting holy fires.
Ignore the broken stars, long dead and beyond grief.
Discover the pleasure in erasure, enjoy the biology
of strangeness. Walk many miles without a map
beneath innumerable ladders carefully detouring
around immense flocks of rabid cassowaries.
Throttle the recalcitrant blue sky's silent throat.

Listen to the melody of car wrecks and smashed guitars.
Abandon assumed corpses to dreams of endless cold.
Appreciate futures you cannot believe in but never visit them.
Learn to diagram sentences in Esperanto then speak with toads.
Ignore the slot machine odds against your deepest desires.
Hide beneath the ravenous trees from time's famished maw.
Seek sanctuary in toothy optimism and complete amnesia.

Follow these impossible instructions to the letter
and you will become non-valent, invisible, immune
and no longer notice the world is ****** up
beyond redemption. Go on, give it a try.

  ~mce

You do your best.

You fail.

You try again
hoping you
have learned
something,
intending
to do better.

The merciless
world does not
care for your
intentions.

Try, fail
and on it goes.

In this case
mere facts
are not
instructive.

What must a man
do to be at home
in the world?

  ~mce

or, a few reasons I left Facebook*

Sick of: conflict, bigotry,
inanity, politics
(of all persuasions);
cat memes, dog memes,
memes in general;
kids and grandkids
I don’t even know;
people who prefer
animals to people;
delight in ignorance,
people who won’t,
or can’t, read anything
longer than five lines;
having to consider
everyone’s feelings
all the time, which
is just another form
of self-censorship;
losing friends in
the real world over
mere comments
in the virtual world;
increasingly intrusive ads,
and the fact that I hate
punk, puke billionaires
like Mark Zuckerberg.
I could go on but
everyone has their
own, personal lists
so why bother?

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

A reading at Kenneth Rexroth's bookstore,
Union Street in San Francisco, 1971.

He was incoherently drunk, slurred his poems,
insulted the host, insulted the audience,
hit on the awestricken hippie girls,
delivered every kind of obnoxious possible.

Fortunately, I had read his poems
and arrived prepared to witness his act.

I'd thought his poems were overrated,
I found his persona to be spot on.

At the reception, I drank a beer beside him.
He glanced up, called me a *****
and said he ought to kick my ***.

Three weeks back for Vietnam,
I laughed directly into his face.
He turned onto another potential victim.

Instead of some street smart poet,
I saw him as just the flip side
of the New York pretentiousness
he professed to despise.

But everybody loved the clown.
Entire younger generations still do.

Still, I'm sticking to my first impressions.
Only toddlers beg to be worshiped.

Sometimes it feels good to be the odd man out.

  ~mce

we all enjoy
being birds
of brilliant
plumage
perched
prominently
on wires
in the wind

especially
when watchers
ohh and ahh
at us

but somehow
we never stop
imagining

a better wire
exists...
somewhere

  ~mce

Music hath charms...*

Our heart’s fingers
were never made
to play but one tune.

And so
we practice
songs of
joy, hate,
envy, jealousy,
empathy and
affection.

Wonderful and
terrible compositions.

Harmonic
intention
crashes into
dissonance.

Scores of love
and
scores to settle.

He stroked
the air
where she
might have
been.

  ~mce

The miles between us
are like sewing needles
each with a thread
the exact color of sadness.
  ~mce

Lasciviously
as the wind
blown from afar,
you arouse
my insatiable
eagerness:
a gentle breeze
across bare skin,
naked desire flares.

  ~mce

god made stars
for starving poets

when they look up
they forget
how hungry they are

    ~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.

for my ex, on her birthday*

I have rarely written of it;
I barely think of it.

Now, ten years separate us.

But your heart can not skip
lightly away from thirty years.

When I do remember it punches
me hard in the solar plexus,
like the scenes from that
long ago and far away war.

It took the wind out of my sails;
a chunk out of my life;
more than a little piece of my heart...

so many cliches and all so true.

We have moved on,
as another cliche goes.

It is not the wife I miss,
but the very human person
and the life we made together.

Thirty years does not make
a life sentence, but a long one.

What you think will be
and what becomes,
conjoin and diverge.

Love is like the daily weather;
it arrives and then it departs.

Some storms cannot be survived,
but nothing is really ever lost.

   ~mce

We still meet
as friends
in rooms, but
not the home
we shared for
thirty years.
My sadness
is not for
what we lost.
My sadness
is for what we
might have been
and won’t.

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.

Do not think you are free
because you have nice clothes,
plenty to eat and a mortgage.
Do not think yourself free
because you attend a good college,
and get to party and have fun
before the student loans hit.
Do not think yourself free
because you are white
and consider yourself a good citizen
while those others cause trouble.
It takes a lifetime to free your head
and that doesn't begin to guarantee
that your body and words will remain free.
We have forgotten that freedom
is never just about stuff.
Stuff is the drug they use to lock you up.
It is the new ***** of the masses.
Only those who can proudly walk naked
cradling the Revolution in their hearts,
willing to pick up their guns
and die for that Revolution,
can ever be well and truly really free.
   ~mce

Happiness is an ice cream shop
with a thousand flavors.

You can't visit every day,
but when you do, how delicious!

Choose, slurp, and smile;
delight and be satisfied.

You'll be back soon enough.

  ~mce

There is
no such thing
as lost love.

Old loves
do not
simply vanish.

They always
reappear
in disguise
as new lovers.

  ~mce

I tell people in poems or speech
that I do not fear death.
They scoff and say that everyone does.
There is no convincing. I am quiet.
But to myself I think: I don't believe
that death can hurt me more than life did.
Oh, I stood it like a man and gave some back
But Hurt after hurt until pain became balm.
Life or death, what reason to fear eternity,
at its worst only brings more of the same.

True Love
All the lost loves
of my life
have prepared me
for you.
Isn't it about time
you show up?
- mce

~ 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

Blossoms
are god's kisses
made visible
on the face
of creation.

  ~mce

The doors
of the world
are surprisingly
open unless
you lock them
yourself.

   ~mce

Resumé'**

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

The Iraq War cost
three trillion dollars.

Tonight a mother
and her  two children
sleep in an
abandoned car
in Detroit.

Something doesn't
add up.
  ~mce

I know the dealer
at the Game of Love.
He smirks as I sit down.
We go way back.
He has dealt me in
more than a few times.
I know his sticky fingers,
his devious, crooked smile
radiating amused certainty.
I know his game is rigged,
he knows I know it too,
but it's the only one in town.
I have never held
a winning hand
at his corrupt table,
never even won a game.
I thought that was all
in the bitter past.
But here I sit again.
He shuffles and sneers.
He knows a sucker
when he sees one
and I am surely marked.
With a smug look
that says he knew
I would be back,
his eyebrows arch
a cynical question.
He knows I am too old
for this impossible game,
but he knows how much
I want to play.
I nod toward him,
but he insists I speak
the invocation out loud.
“Deal me in,” I say
and the cards begin to fly.
I know this dealer
at the Game of Love
and he knows I must try.
   ~mce

It is hard
on your soul
to admit
how often
you have
been full
of ****.

Souls that have kissed
cannot be separated.
This life or the next;
time after time;
everything turns
and returns.
When we meet again,
I will know you.
  - mce

I could never
be married
to myself.
We just aren't
that compatible.

  ~mce

and how they did:

nine choppers
in perfect formation,

gracefully deadly dancers
in a choreographed ballet
of death.

yet even as you
puked and prayed,

for that suspended moment
you briefly knew
a floating sensation
of mortal beauty,

a brilliant amalgam
of expiry,
elegance
and vitality

never felt since.

    mce

She writhes
         in a slither
                of dyed silk
rending
         the darkness
                with her sighs.
   - mce

I dreamed you
were a poem
and woke up
inside a poem
inside you.

  ~mce

The weather guessers
are calling for
severe thunder storms
tonight.
That's the job for me.
Get it right half the time
and still get paid.
   ~mce