March 2, 2017 - 09:47
Pull my heart out, that beating pulsating mound of flesh, that bundle of functions that pounds and pours, that circulates the blood. This is blood which powers systems, which allows for movement, which allows for tyrants and leaders and rulers and kings. This is the blood which flows past nerves and through arteries and fights disease and death. This is the system which fails, which leads hearts to give out with weak breaths, to stutter and stammer and slow to a stop.
This is the system that, when it fails, can be revived like a zombie through methods that are not natural, through lightening that channels through a body, reanimating it like a zombie of Frankenstein’s creation, a corpse full of stories on a cold slab. This is the body which refuses, which stagnates and decomposes, which cuts off energy and motion to a brain that thinks and then no longer does, which sends out pulses that rival the heart and challenge it.
This is the body which we read as a mass of skin and hair and blood and rarely dive underneath, where strange looks and pretty faces read our literacy of beauty, and veins, beautiful delicate veins, run underneath with gentle care. They are simply to be displaced by the increased heartbeat of a child sent into tears by an unkind word, a discounting of their heritage, and sucker punch of words calculated to hit him with his lack of the same.
The fingertips run ragged with the repeated push of a pencil over paper, an exercise of repeated repetition that he doesn’t quite get but does any way, again and again, until he is covered in the charcoal, like a chimney sweep trying to find a lost broom in a fireplace. This fire, this want, this incomplete knowledge, representing like a fever- cold and clammy, labored breathing, words in other languages deemed unneeded by his foreign beautiful tongue.
His heart, her heart, in a pile of hearts, indistinguishable as different, all dying, all beating, all breathing like the circuit board of the universe, the hearts that power the stopping of hearts, the stopping of everyone, the stopping of everything.
I cannot hear them. I cannot read them. I think I must have forgotten. Have you?