Matters of the Heart

Our hearts beat at seventy two beats per minute

Our fingers throb with the weight of the hearts we were never meant to hold

Given to us by youth, before he learned

That our hands can break anything that they want to.

And as we grew older, older than the earth.

Our bodies become cathedrals of truth

A container with an inside and an outside

To hold in both ways the history of everything

And the honesty of the only heart we knew: the sun rising.

In the great river of silence

You will find the history of secrets

The origin of darkness,

And the place particles go when they’ve finished with this dimension.

Bodies once gathered around to drink here, remember.

Families and tribes came to live at the only well they knew

To sit in silence because all the words they could have said were drowned underneath the weight of the stars.

In those days, people would have complained about a certain heaviness of the heart

If only they had words to say so.

During the great romance, like the great war.

The poetic resistance of the heart grew weak.

We learned how to use words, then forsook them

Forgetting that words are a commodity of breathing

That will fade if you neglect them.

And love left those hearts, dripping with wine

Slurring their way through the shallow emotions of the skin.

And so the great romance ended,

Because people forgot how to tell others what their hearts were saying.

Now.

This is a breath of exhaustion.

The exhalation of love, battered and worn through the millennia of the heart,

Now I carry it softly.

I place it down to breathe, because somewhere along the line,

We forgot how to use love to aid it in our breath, to fix it to our lungs.

Now it lies on the dresser as we say of our beloved, that he took my breath away.

The residue of love, we leave on the tips of fingers and the backs of chairs.

But always wash ourselves clean,

Because we are not sure if, like Pilate, we really want to own it.

And so love faces once more the battle of the only life it has ever known.

Now this is the age of the word

That battle has brought to the sea

The formation of feeling into a sound
In the hollows of our mouths, our beings

An expanse in which to hold and to carry.

The carrying of love on ones breath,

To rest in the lungs of another.

In the lungs of trees that dwell in the woods between the worlds

Where to love is to live

So this is not poetry,

This is breathing.

This is the love that forces life into your lungs

That denies the expectation of history

In favour for the truth our ancestors once sought.

Before the great wars and romances

Before the silences that froze

Back to the fire of the heart

That knocks breath into every part of you, that teaches of the affair between the tongue and the heart.

So speak.