Heart.
Heartbeat.
Beat.
Beat heart.
Small God of my chest.
You keep time better than any clock.
Mark the moments of a being in soft thrum through veins and organs.
Yet, you are more than this mere giver of life.
You are the thing that whispers love in my ears.
Guides me in the direction of whom or what to love and when and for how long.
Thinnest tongue of truth cleverly hanging in your thoracic cage behind sternum’s shield.
When I listen to you not, I suffer.
May as well bleed rivers onto the sidewalk.
Heart.
Heartbeat.
Beat.
Beat Heart.
I once tore my life up by its roots at your behest.
Obeyed your call to severe and cut and run blades through everything.
Until I was unfettered and free, as the day I was born into this skin world.
Naked and suspended by hands foreign, yet friendly to me.
Now you are calling for me to split and shatter my existence again,
so something new might bloom.
A thing you whisper of obliquely, with no clear promises.
Only soft dropped hints of something more.
Sweet temptation rolling off your silvered red tongue.
Blind trust a prerequisite to proceed.
Heart.
Heartbeat.
Beat.
Beat heart.
I am your weary warrior.
Staggering and disheveled.
Would rest, yet you scream run.
So I gather up my aching bones and propel them into motion.
Because I trust the whispers.
Heed your instinct toward my truest North.
Promise to wander for eternity if you ask because I know you better than anything.
Not once have you steered me wrong when I’ve taken the time to understand.
When I’ve managed to resist rushing off half-cocked.
Heart.
Heartbeat.
Beat.
Beat heart.
Happy is the color of your stillness.
Grace, the meat you feed me by tender spoonfuls until I grow round and fat.
Love, the slippers you shelter my feet inside as I wander your path.
Ease patterns every garment you drape upon my body.
Fear, you beat back with bamboo and spiky bramble.
Driving it into submission so that I might flow like an atmospheric river.
Rising and shifting across the landscape of all that I Am.
This is how it is with us. You lead. I follow.
I follow. I follow.
Heartbeat. Beat. Heart.
previously published on The Urban Howl, March 2017