The Ambivalent Heart

My heart is but an urchin left
to slosh within a mossy fen.
A narrow, beating loiterer
neither here nor there.
I peel myself like epidermis
scorched by ultraviolet;
a photograph within my mind,
clear with skin tones, cherry lips,
of my significant other.  Nay,
no more, no more.  Alas her
leaving was the day before,
that day of days (Valentine’s Day)
yet I know east and I know west
for I am not a beaten path
on which to dig a heel,
or gouge along as if a plow
yanked by a raging ox.
Her fragrance piques:
now loneliness, the pungency
of month old milk.
Barbed wire rakes across my arm
and blood drips to my thumb.
Hot and cold I will survive,
the murder of a million crows.
Quite wide awake
brass cymbals crash,
she’s off to find love
somewhere else.  Perhaps
love lives in silhouette
or in the shadow of the moon,
wherein the third dimension waits
for her to bleed as I now bleed,
and then with mirth sets to enslave
and crack a cat-o’-nine-tails swift,
to lacerate such tender flesh
until a metamorphosis leads to
callousness and solitaire.  Oh I know up
and I know down, and so I’ll face the
morning sky and laugh while
rain dilutes silk tears.


40 Lines
Writer’s Cramp 
2-12-16