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Best Poems Written by Bernhard Bruhnke

Below are the all-time best Bernhard Bruhnke poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Bernhard Bruhnke Poem

We Are All Nameless

We are all Nameless

What else is there to do
but to tell you who I am,
but most of all,
what I wish to find.

I am not the cavalier of the sun,
but the caveat of phantasm.

I do not wish to live in the whispers of light,
nor to smuggle my aching mind in the vagrant rain.
I am nothing more than a plastered vibration
of miscalculated dream.

An ancient misery,
buffeted by the whims
of whatever fate or the long-winded sword of Tyrs
will convey.

I am not a poet,
not even a wandering wind.
Just a rag of symbols;
a puzzle on an endless stretch
of corner-less ideas.

I am not sad
like I used to be.
Yet my eyes do not breathe
with sacred intimacy,
they do not smile like they used to.

I'm right where I belong, wandering and exhausted.

I play with my various definitives
and massacred spectrums.
I untangle the
used synopsis of
my fellow paradigms.

Like them,
I too,
try to peal over the masks.
I too,
attempt the humble grazing for the necessity of skylight.

What I want is for it all to slow down.
What I want is to stop making it spin.
What I want is to acquiesce with the lords of atonement.
What I want is to spill my psalms to the mist of desire.

As you see me,
unmistakable and frail,
a tan light twirls over my body;
washing waves of gladden semblance
and forbidden musings.
In your eyes, I unlock the doors of my indifference.

But most of all,
in this timid dwelling, my sour bed,
in all honesty, a domicile that shadows
only a microcosm of my true possibilities,
I know as the world sweeps away the ashes of her former self, the world is essentially mine.

I always know the red button does exist.

It was my choice.
Was that my excuse?
Is it my choice?
Was that my weakness?
Inside of a choice,
was there a command?

I talk to myself
as the world folds
its arms behind me.

With every breath,
a new light opens,
with every stone,
she closes her auburn, savage eyes
and remorses for the lost sound of the evening waves.

I talk to myself
because God carries too many faces.
A face with no eyes,
A wordless companion,
A dream constantly dreaming;
making a new face;
patching together old shadows.

Why do I grow so tired?
Why, when I let go of my open windows
am I alone?

Why do I forget to make the question?
Why do questions mark?
Actually, what do questions mark?
What do they expose?
What do they leave stranded?

Where do they leave me,
but in their territory.

Phonetically this is just a symbol.
A line streamed over feathered stone.
It has no destiny or consequence,
but it creates one.

It begs to be known.

Like the arbitrary wind to the loathing night,
the page begs to be turned.

A new pattern to be read,
exposed,
queried,
accessed,
denied,
scampered,
feared,
disarrayed,
misinterpreted,
discarded,
buried,
forgotten,
alienated,
fathomed,
reborn.

Whether we give an evening space to breathe
leaves no real speculation.
It does not change the fact
that the dreams of our past
and the misguided avenues of our future
serve as a bathsodic form
of time travel.

A word too broad in its meaning.
(Whether it determines its measurement is pointless)

We are always here.
You are always gone.

I am dying,
no matter what the schematics of man
or the mausoleum of dogmatic regalia expatiate,
I know the night is disappearing.

Still....
there is so much missing.

Details | Bernhard Bruhnke Poem

A Pale Collection of Emptiness

One day I wish to know, 
as the scars of devils do, 
when your eyes, married to the auburn fox, 
will remove their pantheon of petrified ghosts
and lay with me once again.


Lay with me again in the cloaked whisper of circumstance, 
decorated in the buoyant chill of mist and 
youthful catastrophe 
that lingered over our breath 
in the sparrow of nights, 
in the timid shadow of the air.

A night carved in the handwriting of burning
exhales
drizzled in the forest 
of speckled darkness, 
as
the tear of electric saints
stained over our memories


Lay with me again in the frail midnight 
behind the moon's pondering gaze
and the congregation of cypress trees, 
humming the gospel of the night.

Your tender lips clasped to my shallow immensities
to collect every strained voice that collapsed between us.
It wasn't a moment, but a mythology we immersed our 
tender gravity to bloom.
Yet the creation of our myriad of thoughts were vagrant
and ravishing.
Only the steam of empty desire
would be our witness.


Lay with me again in our forlorn temple, 
pasted with the scars of a thought too true to be abandoned

Wilting in our cotton enigma, 
one muses 
if the past was meant to be certain.

You carried an empty look into me while playing
with my long, childish, hair
(I think I lost you the day I cut it all off) 
because your past was your keeper 
and you never let me know if the present could be your mad companion.

Did that moment wear a face? 
Did our time have a mouth and a taste? 


Lay with me again in our cavern of 
nomadic prophecies.
As the endless novella of encounters
embellished the 
ways we relinquished our 
every shattered fury into 
our carnal universe. 

I knew for a moment that
I found you.

And in the silk garments that 
cocooned our heated slumber
We looked into each other with a fragile innocence.
A haunted glance that forever bookmarked
within the simple opus 
we simmered through our shallow, insipid nights
to unveil.
A night most men give lifetimes to discover
A night, in its echo, most men pray to forget.


Lay with me again, for the last time, 
in the bruised veranda of our
quiet perfidy.

A hollow, desolate communion 
invigorated by the silent thrusts of denial, 
apathy became our passions, 
our dullard complexion of one another.

It was the obsequy of our elation.

We awoke with a fever for 
absence. 
A rapid depletion of time.
With the open door of the empty morning
our past escaped us.

We became what we always were.

A simple piece of light.

Details | Bernhard Bruhnke Poem

Untitled 412

This bed was never meant for conquest
or desire.

Just for the voice of the humble Sunday rain; 

watching every exquisite drop bubble and scatter across the sun-chiseled paint
of the window seal. 
A vision as comfortable as laughter.
A moment as humble as regret.

Each echo sighs across the weeping glass with a panegyrical glow of cream 
and juniper 
that melts through the ecru reflection of light onto the cool 
silence of our room. 
Where your voice of the evening phainopepla
would choir 
your golden flamenco, 
and saturate our every touch with a moonlight cavatina.

A voice that saturates my memories; begging to be re-created.

Only the air would quietly witness our thoughts unloosen
and nestle to the floor, 
wading, 
like a memory.
Like your auburn hair... 
rinsing 
down 
my body.

And as your eyes condone to their slumber, 
I lie watching each hollow whisper leave a kiss to the soaking
wind chime; 
leaving a shadow to grace the window, 
leaving an army of veils and serpents.


We sink into the sheets and a cocoon of blankets
melt over my simple legs, 
my furious feet.
Even at rest they never stop searching for the world.

My mammoth toes 
dancing with the lazy bronze strings of my grandmother's quilt
and its frontier of wool; 
dangling like the 
drowsy willow from its heavenly mast.

My poor exhausted pillows.
So many evenings holding my thoughts, 
my heavy dreams.
I stack them like sorrows, 
like a tower of clouds, 
dressed in horizontal streams and soft avenues of teal.

My timid face
buried in their aching cushion
while my mouth stumbles open, 
revealing the poem sleeping under my bottom lip.

And the dry wind churns through each room, 
throughout the rattled ingredients of night
to rise in the warm pastry of morning.
Crowded with memories, 
flaked with shadows.


This bed was never meant for conquest or desire, 
but for the drowsy sunrise
that stemmed through the fragile wooden blinds.

The cool spring mist that smuggled through the open window
and hushed in the smell of chrysanthemums and the evening fireplace.

You were still wearing my arms and a red blanket, 
as the day married your ivory face 
with a boquet of light.

My hands slowly navigating 
down your golden spine, 
while
your fingers were nibbling behind my silly ears.

And as your eyes began to harvest, 
your greet me with an immeasurable kiss.

A kiss that crumbles cities.
A kiss that evaporates the moon.
A kiss that turns men into hummingbirds.

Details | Bernhard Bruhnke Poem

Untitled 377

I did not wish to sleep with old gods 
that stand trying to evoke the grey skyline of modernity

That preach on hummingbird wires 
that murmur telemetry through echoed iconoclasts.

And as the aging blue repetition spatters on a new cosmetic smile 
that fades with its bedfellows in the eons of perfidy, 
despondent windows (oh so many will be seen in the unseen) , 
and the lost scribes of what needs to be forgotten 
(our oh so necessary important leeches) . 

I remember that this always relieves me of something.

Something

Such a natural and dissatisfying word. 
A word that reaches sadly for itself. 

That this now has a home. 
A breath, a birth. 
This moment lives somewhere. 
It did not ask me of anything. 
Only to discard memory for, again, something beautiful. 

Beautiful and forgotten. 
The last leaf that clings to its creator.

Details | Bernhard Bruhnke Poem

Past 3 Oclock For Bb King

There was so much rain in your voice. 
Daytimes that slept with shadows. 
Perfect perfidies piling 
your W.C. Handy eight-bar bravado 

I never knew your midnight, 
your pluck of broken glass. 
You told stories that left ash trays. 
Burning, 
burned, 
ashes of bruised door frames 
and sweaty bodies from emptying yourself 
in emptier women.

Too many Lucille’s, but only one fire. 
A slow burn 
that taught only one thing worth saving: 

nothing. 

You taught us white boys that crying ain’t got nothing to do with tears. 
That we can’t apologize for leaving our eyes in the alleyway. 
That you can’t slam every door 
without someone wanting to know 
why the wind will always resist it. 

Today is the first time the rain sounded soaked. 
Like an old man 
waiting for God to answer for his suffering. 
Why he gave us a voice, 
and why he made us weep for it. 

And we end again, 
that wilted sun of repetition. 

That ghost finally appears; 
that final E9 transuding through 
the heavy breath you shake loose. 

You undress every agony 
and loved her 
greater than pain. 

And the night gave you 
what God never grants us: 

nothing.