176. Opera Heart Surgery

Apparatus of body
can open right up:
the gears of bone
and spinning blood,
sinews strapped
across the motor,
and spitting blood,
and spitting blood.

Eyes as a theory
of seeing without
oneself or separate,
set on a plane tilted
to allow moisture
to drain off it and
titled to make it
known as it is.

Lassitude without
young women is a
travesty of punning,
locking every figment
into a deep lake
as security against
forming a memory of
what never happened.

Tontine is my brother’s
drum, and drumming’s
what’s keeping him
alive until someone is
the last one left and
takes a hammer to a
piggy bank to dig the
last silver quarter out.

Alphabet of escape forms
a sense of assimilation
into the whole, blood
on the doctor’s hands,
blood on his gloves,
holding a beating heart
as a butcher holds a
rabbit before the chop.

White rabbit, white gown,
white sheet on the operating
table, and the blood is
pumping onto the floor, and
the heart is well and pumping,
pumping blood right onto
the floor—so much slipping
of the surgeons into puns.

Weary for a slip on blood,
or a sipping of it, weary for
a sense of her slip and
the blood at the crotch, or
blood on my cock from
fucking through the blood,
and rising simultaneous
with the beats of the heart.

Tie the ribcage back in place
to trap the heart within
the body, tie the sternum
sawn open back together
with stiff wires, hold the body
whole and in place, and say,
“No-one was ever here, and
no-one was ever there either.”

I hear in the air the sound
of the words of the beating
heart, I hear in the air the
sound of the heart itself
beating, the heart so full of
desire, so full of desire to
squeeze the blood through
the body, thru the veins.

A song comes beating from
the chest and out through
the mouth, a song comes
beating for you, the heart
comes beating as if alive and
huge and walking the halls of
this house, and wandering
the neighborhood for blood.