Corners

There is a darkness 

every corner leaves

When I am without you

And a kind of light that 

blinded windows 

sometimes filter through

So when I wake up

Time is more limited than love

We suffer so many

Deaths because of shoulds 

Watching the sunlit dust through the shadows of the blinds on the morning after I should have said

How much I love

Your words that walk

Around the path of my heart

And let the true spins web

The spider veins of your

Fingers, splayed across your 

Face, your eyes a tiny hidden

Smile behind the forefinger

Or the middle finger that both

Offends and invites me

To an admittedly imagined 

Space that allows me to say

I love you, with a specific

Punctuation on the love

We might have been 

When we woke up this morning

And dreamed hello.

Even As I Am

There was an accident in my heart somewhere tonight,

The phased-out evergreen of promise

Lit up like firelight 

And somehow or another died on the way.

 

This could freak you out,

But there are only two letters that differentiate

Purified from putrefied,

And somehow I’m left with this 

Substance of grief 

That allows me to explain the thing. 

 

So, that’s there, between us,

And now I’m left 

Capturing the wine of embarrassment,

As if the fruit of your lips 

Might allow me to contain forgiveness,

And suddenly allow me to say

I’m not worthy of your love,

Even as 

I am,

I am.

But for the light they hold onto

We share breath

As we swallow

Our Sunday exhalations

And the comic book news we

Spill over coffee 

viewing the Sunrise under clouds 

that you insist

Are pelicans, when I almost

Certainly would have named them

Jim or Gord 

After certain poets I have known,

Not for the shapes we observe

But for the light they hold onto,

The reflection of your eyes in 

The wine stem glass

Between thumb and forefinger,

Eyes interlocked as our

little fingers twist

the shape of promise. 

I’d Like an Empty Inbox

To start my day, I’d prefer nothing 

To grab my attention.

The lack of alarms.

An empty inbox.

To end this year

I’d prefer everything

To be emptied.

To awaken,

I’d love a hello from you,

Face to face,

The euro-kiss substantively inappropriate now,

And yet I yearn your lips

In whatever form they take shape.

Totem (revised)

The beasts within us are much worse than those we invent.

Reason and even prayer fail us,

results from each 

imperceptible or absent.

In the face of the incomprehensible we crumble and rebuild;

Camus’ irreverent stone made real.

Results themselves are our comfortable fiction.

We finally confront the bitter fruit of 

our first and only selves.

***

Contrary to popular belief,

perceptions are not reality but are more often presumptions. 

            

The bartender wears her myths in ink,

    (a canvas I admit I long to touch and to taste).

How is it I find ephemeral redemption

in the stray glance of a woman's eye

and certainly her smile?

        Make me a fool then, this is my shame,

        I wasted a lifetime and then some

        failing beauty. 

We may all die for 

lack of an appropriate yardstick

to measure our better selves. 

           

***

In the Bay of Fundy, 

    streams reverse their flows in the great tidal bores,

    not without some pain. 

    Even the slow breath of the earth must gasp.

There are shadows and scars on our souls.

There is no compelling evidence that

we are born with them. 

Sin is merely the first excuse. 

We cultivate our children, 

only to discover we have little influence 

and less control

over the eventual outcomes. 

Left to these fearful conclusions 

we can only rely on fragile love.

Things must be precisely as they are,

a view profoundly imponderable.

***

Sound does not travel in a vacuum

so the conundrum remains:

If the sun roars in its fire and there is 

no atmosphere to carry it,

no soul to listen, 

no soul to 

burn in its fires,

does it make a sound? 

We can spin on such questions endlessly,

then dinner must be prepared and the dogs let out to run.

***

Gravity requires a certain weight to be felt,

even more to master its substance.

The Greeks cast gods as fickle beings, 

then killed them in starlight.

The myths we persist in maintaining are 

no less surreal, but perhaps lack the poetry.

We all die in starlight.

Dreams contain the stray calculi of our experience,

the sum of which add up to something:

           

 Our first and only selves.

c. 2012, (revised 08.27.2020c) by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my collection, "Unlanguage"

Sighs Matter

Take note of the number 

of your sighs each day;

those in sadness,

in frustration, in anger, 

and dismantlement. 

Compare them to the sighs of 

sunrises witnessed,

sunset prayers,

the size of hearts met 

and gathered as life’s wheat. 

Witness your sighs 

because they are breath.

The breath revealed in late fall,

traced on car windows as a heart,

the opposite of inhaling the 

scent of spring,

your first love,

those later to come.

The opposite of startlement, 

the counter to your last breath.