Just because you can say it with heart

Doesn’t make it true.

A true thing is still a mystery.

For example, as I write this very line,

There is fried chicken in my shoe:

A fallen morsel, hastily eaten as snow fell in our fair city. I know this is true, because it happened to me.

I can still feel it there, today.

Melting, or crumbling, or whatever the hell chicken-batter does when

Trapped between a sock and a shoe.

And right now, it feels more real to me than do a lot of things. Unless, this too, is a lie.

A friend says, “It’s ok”, after you canceled dinner a third time. A lover’s eyes become distant and stormy, and you say to her that

“life is temporal”.

Your child says, “I’m fine, dad”.

The heart is such a loud organ,

And like our stomachs, the two combined can make quite a ruckus, yes?

Most of what we need is divided up and conquered by them.

But we do not think enough about our quietest organs:

The spleen, the liver.

Thank you for this blood.

Thank you for turning this champagne into nepenthe. 

All of these poems and more can be found HERE in the anthology “A Cartographer”.