Just because you can say it with the heart

Doesn’t make it true. 

A true thing is only a mystery if you allow it to be such.

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 city; while these words were

Playing in my head. 

I know this is true because it happened to me. 

I can still feel it there, 

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

Trapped between a sock and an insole. 

And right now it feels more real than do a lot of things I’ve proclaimed,

or heard proclaimed

And I am somehow comforted by this,

Unless, this is a lie, too. 

A friend says “It’s ok” after you canceled for the third time,

a lover’s eyes become distant and stormy,

and you say to yourself that “life is temporal”, or your child says “I’m fine dad”. 

Our hearts are such loud organs, 

And like our stomachs, the two together can make a ruckus, Yes?

And most of what we think we need is divided up and conquered by them. 

We do not think enough about our quiet organs: the spleen, the liver. 

Thank you for this blood. 

Thank you for turning this champagne into nepenthe.  

But  most of all, it is our brain that we should admire most,

For it is where we find the truth, 

Even when it settles on us slowly as a dying fish, 

Or crashes into us like a broken bottle. 

From here is where we find facts veritable enough to anchor our hope,

and corporal Enough to dream-up the starry-eyed mess,

dancing behind our eyelids: a galactic center, turning eternal,

festering with stars, and planets, waterfalls, glaciers,  and burn of  whiskey,

and the love of loves, and crumbs in this poet’s shoe.