Hard frost and treacherous footing.
Nobody wanting to admit
that the new year
tastes an awful lot
like the old year.

None of our heroes
have been supernaturally resurrected.
There's the same
rank toxicity to our fears.
The jaunty carnival of ****** and maiming
continues unabated.
Death remains as senseless.
The corridors of power
are still slippery with slug trails and viscera,
and all the janitors have been
indefinitely furloughed.
It's cold, and
the bus is late again.

Still we persist in believing that
today will be different to yesterday,
that all those wrongs will be righted,
that the proper order - as we each individually, as
thin-skinned gods of our own personal
nuclear universes, perceive it -
will be perennially restored,
the buses will all
run on time,
and no one good
will ever die again.

But the truth is, this year
tastes an awful lot like
the old year.
I could be wrong, I guess.
Maybe everything will
turn out
fine.

It all began with a cry in the night,
a slap on the ***, a blast of bright light.
The world unfolded like a dying rose,
a palette of joys, a whisper of woes.
The years slipped by, they crawled so fast
until you found yourself old at last.
A man with a cat in a silent room,
who’d laughed at death and courted doom.
The piles of drugs, the nights of loss,
the laughter, the money and all the dross,
that led you to this lonely place,
this weary body, this sagging face;
the years spent longing for a rainbow sign,
the nights of lovers, the nights of wine.
And what can you do now it's come to this?
Keep hoping for the holy kiss
that might redeem your broken soul,
and make you wise, and make you whole.
You've left everything that you ever knew,
listening for trumpets that never blew.
Now life has come down to this lonely place
with mirrors of memories and that sagging face,
and no real hope that anything more
than the life you've lived remains in store.
Forget the future, it's fled at last,
your days run backwards toward the past,
until you let out a cry in the night
and accept the dying of the light.

Post-truth.
Post-satire.
Monsters celebrated as saviours.
Wide-open, screaming ******
committed during every ad break.
A dynamic new plan to power the national grid
using snake oil.
Hosts of remote-controlled, cybernetic angels
raining down weapons-grade holy fire.
Eternal peace declared
between Eurasia and Eastasia.
The trenches full up with
poetic corpses.
*** doll mouths breaking
bad news to the bereaved.
The orgiastic scarification
of our own democracies.
Blood sacrifices to the Black Friday Gods.
The enactment of nursery rhyme into law.
The Disneyfication of the human heart.
Love only as legislated.
Hate as currency and
everyone a broker.
Strange, reptile creatures
ballroom dancing through
the sludge-filled annals of imminent history.
Endless war
between Eastasia and Eurasia.
A thousand candles
lit in memory
to all the moths that
burnt to death.

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?

Most folks
live in small yards,
their vision
curtailed by walls;
eventually the walls
become reality.

This is also
known as death.

I recently had the great privilege of editing Mike Essig's latest poetry collection, THE BIOLOGY OF STRANGENESS, and I'm honoured to have been entrusted with such fantastic material. Putting together a book like this is every poetry geek's dream.

It's a beautifully textured assortment of poems, earthy yet lyrical, narrated by a voice that's uniquely grained with experience. There are pieces that will make you smile, think, wince; there are pieces that hit you in the gut out of nowhere; there are pieces that welcome you into them like old, worn-in shoes; there are pieces you will remember late some night when you're by yourself, and remembering them will make you feel less alone.

This collection of poetry makes you look at the banal and the everyday afresh; it finds magic and mystery in the mundane, and even Hawaiian shirts are poem-worthy when Mike Essig's writing about them.

The Kindle version is already available through Amazon.

A paperback edition is due out next month, and I can't wait to have a copy of this book on my shelf as well as on my e-reader.

Mike's previous poetry books, Never Forgotten and Huck Finn Is Dead are also available through Amazon and are excellent.  

From his author profile on B Star Kitty Press:

"Mike Essig is a veteran of Vietnam and a retired English teacher. He’s also been recruited by the muse as a poet, like he hadn’t already been through enough."

Sample poems, links to sales pages and more info can be found at the B Star Kitty Press website.  www(dot)bstarkittypress(dot)com.

Please do support this very talented indie author.