3:32am August 14, 2014

Heartless

When artists die people take their hearts out.
They handle them until the oil erodes the colors

They take them out of order and tell a story.

This painting, that commemorated the flowers she was given
On her birthday, her first flowers,
They touch it reverently and say that it’s a commentary on death
And life. That terminal strife.

The flowers we bring to funerals
The flowers we bring to birthdays.

They were only flowers and they had only made her smile.

There was a madman who loved cats. Cats
Made their way onto his canvases, poised cats
Cats curled in slumber, the smooth curve from head
To shoulder to back a recurring shape in his work.

People took them and rearranged them and said

“This is his spiral into madness. Look how the cats transform.”

But the fiery spectrum cats with spinning eyes
Were born the same time as the modest house cats
And he was just a madman who loved cats.

I can already hear echoes of the stories that will emerge when I die,
If people speak of me at all. I hear the words “failure to overcome,”
“Mental illness,” “suffering.”

And they will not know the shape of my life
Or notice the way I was cornered and quarantined
By words like those. By the dumb, numb, stinging tongues
That daily delivered their blows.

They will know nothing of my love or what I saw
When I dreamed that I was safe.
And I’m writing it down here anyway.

What I want to know is,
When they come for my heart like an artifact,
Where will all my anger go with no body to hold it tight?