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"
