The Mirror Poem by Bernhard Emil Bruhnke III

We have so many breaths that we have collected,
calculated,
queried,
placed into the caverns of our eyes,
placed into our avenues of miscalculated dream.

What I have is a collection of your breathes.

The countless eons of life conquering life.
Shamelessly ignoring death.
The vacant tempest of uncertainty.

What certainty lives, lives in your breaths.

Every quiet exhale,
angry fume,
crying whimper,
terrified pant,
orgasmic storm,
every dream you have given me.

A time beyond time.
A life beyond calculation.

Every breath awakens me to you.
A soft harvest of sound that lives,
like the riddle of this mirror,

between visions.

Here, there are two visions that laugh at my sad grip of you,
my yellow eternity.


I can never tire of failing at saying I love you.

I can never tire of failing at saying that you are what life was mean't to discover.

I can never tire at failing at saying death envies you and what you give the rest of us.

Breath.

A reason to admire our exhales.
A reason to stand in the crystallized cold and see your ivory hand escape and re-enter our existence.

In this simple stroke,
contemplation,
condensation of my shaking hands attempting to explain you.

I tremble at every thing you make me.

A lost vessel of Sinai, you command me.
I age in you.

To tell is more than some feeble puzzle of words and empty diatribes.
It is the breath of you in the frail birth of your new morning.
The frail breath of stars weeping a new destiny in to us.
The humble universe that is warmed in you,
your strength,
your immeasurable eyes.

Your eyes..

The great transmundane springs that kiss us into existence.
They remind me why there is a reason to feel.
We simple mortals
in the temple of your being
with ropes tied,
prepared for the great death that is your awe.


Because everything you are is missing from me.
Even now,
the neanderthal chiseling at the thought of you,
the gods of our past and futures.

I awe at you
the testament of your every moment,
the communion of your body,
and always,

the rapture of your eyes.

Epiphanies ponder how such dreams could weep.

As now I kneel to you,
my holy temple, the one true shape of the divine.
You, my great unbeliever,
are the reason I hold onto belief.

You, my bare-breasted prayer,
my divine touch into countless eternities.

You are why death is the great lie.
Death is conquered in your existence.

You, my perennial illumination,
the saffron light of truth
with the green forest that grows into
the black diamond at the center of your covenants of truth.


I have seen the great scrolls in your eyes.
The wild destinies
(the irony of destiny is that we have and will create so many destinies) ,

that wildfire,
the mad lilies of your gaze.
I lie toward the bottom of this mirror,
as I do your every presence;
constantly humbled,
overhwhelmed.

My eyes, washing at the feet of your radiance.
The new sun. The light that knows no shadows.

I only wish this poor scripture,
like the sad fates of lesser gods,
gave the world what I find in you.

Yet, perhaps the beauty of faith is in its failure.
The act of dying and rising and dying again.

You, the great flamed sword of truth,
my temptation and salvation.

My serpent and my nudity.
I need all of you.
My perennial prayer.
My gospel of laughter and darkness.

There is no hell. Only your distance.

There is no heaven. Only your arrival.

You are the great mirror my love.
The words behind the words.
The great miracle between the words,
between the dust.

Between these words, I see you.