Heart's Blood

Your heart is not just a bloody pump.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be heart ache
and heart burn. Broken hearted
hearts on fire.
The heart of the matter,
or, them what don't have no heart at all!

When they cracked me open
and put me on a heart machine,
they pumped me full of someone else's blood,
gifted me a void.
I lost most of my short-term memories.
But not you. Never you!

Sometimes I call numbers somehow
stuck in my mind. I get people I don't know.
Hear alarm clocks going off
from far away. Black holes in my life,
They are, I'm sure, carried in the corpuscles
of my blood: Mysterious strangers.

So, I know what's mine is mine
But there's someone else out there,
their heart pumping: Carrying my cells.
The burden of my lost memories
Straining sorrowfully at their atom heart
Foot tapping to a funk beat I alone hear.


—Ivor Irwin