Ode To My Heart

 Ask a child to point to the heart. Ask a Zen master to point to the heart. Ask an indigenous shaman to point to the heart. They will all point here, to the pit in your chest.

This blood fruit, this beaten talisman of body: no new age meta-babble or theo-jargon about "the center of the will" or "being-ness." No hip-hop chakra jazz. Just this palpable lump of holy gristle.

Whoever thirsts for life knows heart means heart. It’s beauty lies in physiology, not metaphysics. My heart a meaty twin-chambered organ of dualities. Diastole and systole. Arterial in, venous out. Bright scarlet to deep blue.

My heart a rough shuddering blast-site of anxiety and yearning, rage and unspeakable sorrow, well of tears in love’s desert. A cosmos of nuclei in the darkest cavern of Adam's missing rib, physical as hell, yet radiating infra-red magnetic resonance to the lion in the zoo and the prisoner on death row.

My heart the reggae vibe of resonant fields outdistancing their form, yet deeply embodied in sacred mass. My heart a hologram where other hearts conspire, locus among bones, mingled rays of inter-galactic data. My heart a black hole in the beat generation of stars, alien races in my pulse, longing to become human.

My heart the sinew of sound in “Let there be light," "Ya hi or,” my heart a Word made flesh, portal to creation's core, the embryonic Son, floating in wombs of sea lymph and mother marrow, a mountain in a cloud. 

Organ of gore with a
spectrum of rainbows, celestial power rooted in the gravity of the microbiome, widening to the wild empyrean beyond the elements. The beat thing with no edges, no edges, no edges...

A drum without circumference makes a thunder without sound. It is my heart, r
inging with the quintessential music of the unstruck bell, chiming each proton out of a star. This hungering love, this open wound, this sacrament, my heart.

Painting by Catrin Welz-Stein

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