Totem

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

Reason and even prayer fails 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 sometimes 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.

           

I still persist in the attempt.

***

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, by Martin A. Bartels (working draft)

Part of my new collection, "Unlanguage"