Preface To Heartbeat: A Sadness, Not In Verse

Briefly, then, we overlook the mammalian heart, to seek some sort of solace instead where the heart may beat more fierce, in smaller so-called lesser orders, where something called love is never the order of the day - the week, the month, the year, should we live so long - where, indeed, clothed far more ostensibly fragile in crumples & mossy armor, a heart concerns itself mainly with the day-to-day & not with lofty chemical pursuits, where hearts attack due to dysfunction & not self-inflicted misfunction, & there we stay, letting the level, amoral lessons of nature steel us in a kind of organic & counterintuitive resolve, not remaining long, though we long to stay, to be settled in the soup, sludge & dew of wayward ago, for it may slow down the relentless beating, not of heart, which we shall learn to ignore, or learn to respect for its tireless work, but the beating instead of our tumble-down thoughts, our frightening, pulse-racing imaginings, which we know are not real, but which afflict us as we could create phantoms to haunt & hurt us, but not here - never here - we shall not stay long enough here - just a trifling in the exhausting span of our unappreciated lives, but hopefully, like the mud on the soles of our feet or the dampness gathering around us as we breathe & sleep, maybe enough time to stay & absorb & forget, not asking why the broken heart is brought back at all, but asking why it keeps beating regardless, & knowing our love songs & our love stories & our jealousies & whimperings & our orgasmic exaltations & our deep sweaty nerves affect it only incidentally - till we understand truly what the heart beats for, & take that knowledge into our better years.