Hungry Heart

poetry

Photo by Fons Heijnsbroek on Unsplash

Hungry Heart


Molasses and mudpies, 
biscuits in the oven, 
biscuits on the rise,
fried ham, vidalia onions
your praline in mine.

Whoever said the heart’s not 
a part of the digestive system
never had love for breakfast
after scrounging long nights
in an inhospitable desert.

If it were true, you’d never thrown
that plate of pasta against the wall
with the proclamation “We’re done.”
Leaving me to decipher
these corpuscular patterns

Searching for the connections
where blood and sauce,
light and noodles, paint 
and skin, converge in 
a found Pollack painting.

But all I can see is the face 
of Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal
free after 25 years in a French 
mental institution, on a park 
bench taking interviews.

“Do you think you’ll ever eat again?”
“I don’t think so.  It was disappointing.
Besides they pay me good money
to go down on a young women
at the Porno in the Wall station.”

And then your cackling face
followed by the teeth and claws
of Manatore, Roy’s pet tiger,
jumping to maul his visage
while Siegfried watches. 

The heart is the main organ 
of digestion, not just a lonely 
hunter but a ravenous animal 
the stomach fills while 
the heart gets hungrier.

If Beethoven and Rilke’s 
desires had been consummated
the moon would not be a sonata,
the sun would not be a sonnet.

You would not be running
in your kimono and slippers
I would not be racing monkeys
swinging from limb to limb  
searching for more, more.