I wish I had two hearts:
One that I could give when it was needed,
A bird-wing song beating fast and bright against the cage of my back pocket,
and another that would just keep ticking
every time
the first one broke.
No fanfare. Just the rhythm of a rubber stamp
on paper
in the empty marble stomach
of a bank at 3:02pm.
But two hearts is wishful thinking.
Or terrible planning.
One is hard enough.
One is
heavy enough.
Only a mad mind or an idiot,
or worse, an optimist
Asks for more of the same weight,
as though more to carry in this life, will make it lighter.
It is never lighter.
Hearts feel everything,
and when mine is in disrepair, it feels
More.
I need a rest from it. All this feeling.
I'm so tired: a tightrope walker
with no faith left in the wire
And exhausted in the places I used to feel lightning.
I wish I had two hearts,
so at least then, somewhere
in the house of who I am, there'd be room
for a small shelf, up high, where I could place
These thin, iridescent shards of the life I thought I might have led once,
Somewhere they can occasionally catch the sun,
even while they're gathering dust.
I don't want to put them entirely away.
I want their sharp edges and impossible colours.
Still.
I turn them over inside myself.
In the dusty quiet,
pearlescent thoughts aching
in the bright ruby palms of my mind.
There's too many of them.
Too many intimate reminders
that I can still dream thunderous dreams
of planets between stars
and planter boxes on porches.
I wish I had two hearts,
so at least one of them could live
in the permanent, ignorant bliss
of paper-thin possibilities, while the other,
Like the heel of a soldier's boot, just kept marching
Onward, pragmatic and pausing only
to frame the silence it scoops out of the river
and does not fear.
I wish I had two hearts.
Or maybe I wish I had none.
© Erin Brown, 2023