The heart is reckless mechanism. The heart is an essential worker. The heart won’t leave well enough alone. Carrying torches and keeping time. Beating the blood red, threading the sky through through the flesh, stitch by stitch a tuck and a tich. Holding the flame and carrying torches, spelunking through the wheezing depths of the soul’s long dark night. The heart climbs the mountain, the heart gazes into the distance past your disappearance, the horizon just another line. Something drawn in the sand, something visible from satellites, something that the map pretends while the sky washes away.
The day has flattened out, the light clinging with a strange disconnect from the source, the cumulus clouds fitted in curl and scrapings. Dusk comes strolling along well before the sun goes down, the weight of an effortless day surprisingly heavy in the heart. Nothing unexpected, nothing even a little new. An old man thick with stubborn insistence, missing a whole lot of lost. An old man made of mortal wounds and no tomorrows, missing long gone ladies of inconsistencies and fonder absences. The heart wants and wants, that’s what keeps the motor running. The heart plods on, despite all the bitter curses leveled against it.
Oh for the tender and the true. Oh for a little sweetness to take away the bitter’s bite. Living is okay for a certain type. Living goes on long into the epilogue, the common cruelties and the steady descent. The light goes out, the windows turn from mirrors with the advent of the night. The cold carries even on an unseasonably warm day. It works its way into the bones, it sings out in every lonely ache. Leave a light on to find your way around. Leave a light on so someone knows there’s somewhere to go. The joints go stiff, the fists grow hard, but the heart is caramel soft. Marshmallow fluff in these drear days of the growing alone. For all the tender taken away it should have turned to stone. The sundown comes without a fuss. The heart beats on, sticky with hurt and hope.
