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Marcella Barnes Feb 2012
All that you are is potential
And really, all that that is, is my willing suspension of disbelief
But I am the actress, not the audience
And when you know how the trick is performed
It becomes difficult to believe in the magic
Marcella Barnes Feb 2012
We walk backwards through this life
thus seeing clearly in hindsight.
Here I drop your hand from mine
though love you I do still.
The liquid leaking from my eyes takes two forms I recognize.

If once you read this, and you will
Remember how my breast did feel
wrapped in your palm, knees at a kneel
tucked in the curve of time.
The price has faded on the bill, we both are freed our hearts to heal.  

Unspoken as you once were mine
abandoned path, now out of line,
vague in hopes to be entwined
should we meet again.
With fearful fretful heave of sigh, I turn mine eyes away from thine.

Whispered smiles will bring then
echoes and dreams remembered when
the mouth I loved spread with a grin—
I dreamt I’d be a wife.
Then put to sleep these dreams and sins, or let them lie awake within.

If later in deep look and flight
returns me to this quiet night,
then with my hand I will try
again your hand to hold.
Freely falling from great heights, we’ll drop together through this life.
Marcella Barnes Feb 2012
Black is the color of my “true” love’s hair.
His nose a beak,
His chin, and aspects of his character, weak.
Why then, do I bother?
Well, I read once, that, “there are places in the heart that do not exist;
Suffering has to enter for them to come to be.”
And I’ve always been told to be wholehearted.

My blue eyed-devil suffered
From different variations of the same flaw
Or did I suffer him?
Or did I suffer, and in suffering, bring new flawed places to life?
If that is the case, then I should be called creator
God. Almighty in my abilities to generate where nothing was before.
And if I am so bold, so audacious, then wholehearted isn’t he?

I read again once, once again
That each time a heart breaks
There is more pain than the time before.
Medically this doesn’t make sense—
Shouldn’t the fractures be slightly more vulnerable, easier
To crack? Or is it that new compounds emerge—fresh and sharp
while ghost aches, echoes, and wind still haunt their ancestry?

Perhaps it is neither.
Perhaps, instead, it is not even a matter of the living and the dead,
But of the young and the elder,
And these wounded heart bones
Are simultaneously living new aches and old pains.
After all, I’ve also heard, that, “time is a white
man’s construct,” only serving as the bleached skeletal frame for our selves.

Picture that then,
The hollow-eyed skull of the universe
Watching as we give bits of ourselves away to time
So that we may under and stand existence—
Create those “new” places with the patches and sewing
Of our old hurts, and the stretching and tearing of new.
We become wholehearted.
Marcella Barnes Feb 2012
My heart beat’s strong
A medallion, rat-ta-tat-tating tattoo
With the scent of voodoo in the air
Skipping a beat or two

If I am a lingering thought
Let me be the old cookie factory on Columbia
Women in hair nets and aerosoles
And that clinging smell so sweet.

Today is not the end of the story,
But it’s always a good day to die

Parachutes in gym class
Candy man sweet songs
Thinking back I’m golden stars
Recollections and days gone

There is the path I will not walk again
Paved in road **** and litter
These are the things that I have done
The children that I have delivered.
Marcella Barnes Feb 2012
Sacred Spaces come to exist
When breathless lovers
Look into one another
And see their souls reflected*

On Saturday night I drove out in the dark hoping to return to ours
Kept company in the empty seat beside me
By your phantom presence

I guess the route I took though
was not the one we had gone together
and it wasn’t so much return
As reclamation

Strange, I noticed, that where once was holy, hushed and waiting
Was now bathed in industrial light
Had become abandoned amber
that, if we’re being honest, reprimanded me.
This was not the place where we stopped to rest.

I suppose alone I was the trespasser
On a way that opened only for the two of us.
Marcella Barnes Feb 2012
The chunk of heart I gave you was one of my favorites
It was muscled and strong
Youthful, oxygenated and proud
It glistened with a healthy sheen
And radiated wholeness
Despite being just one portion of an *****

There are other pieces.
So you can keep that one.
But please take care of it,
And sometimes pull it out to admire
What a shining example it is.
What a perfect specimen
And how worthy.
Marcella Barnes Feb 2012
I dreamt you said I love you.
This was after I had ‘killed’ our test baby.
It was small, and fake,
And they had taken our real one away from me.

There are two things that inspire me:
You. And native quotes.
So when you quote of love
I clearly must write a poem.

When you walk away from me
I will watch you go,
Then I will turn and walk the other way
And wonder if, like his dark materials, our atoms will find each other’s somewhere down the road.

They say that as Geronimo died
He said, I should never have surrendered.
I should have fought until I was the last man alive.
Fortunately, I have never been the type to enjoy watching things burn.
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