Reveries of Heresy

what I feel now isn’t this moment’s feeling but the echo of a sealed life, a memory seared into me: a baby begging on her knees, screaming for her mom  not to leave, her dad hauling her body out the door— me, a half-alive flounder flopping, mouth hooked by the fisher-brute, shin-stoppers scraping the floor then you looked at me with those well-deep eyes, and the floorboards  splintered— you were the catalyst, erupting all the feelings  I’d buried, dormant heat rising until I boiled & flayed to hide you, poison & medicine, anathema & anaesthetic— feeding the starved creatures inside my belly until they  exploded, splattered, entangled with your monsters, fused into the mess we are now: two flounders stranded on sand, gasping, mistaking breath  for love

A musty burlap sack descends over my head, and my tongue cements itself to my palate. A frog squats in my gullet,  gulping down every vowel— before a wisp of sound can leak out. The more I force the words to escape, the more the boa in my throat coils, tightens, constricts. The more you press, coerce, lose your temper, the more the truth curls inward, seals herself away—

This mind, a bootless wrangler, hounds its stubborn mule-heart. Who truly holds the reins — or reigns? The scrawny man scurrying in the soil, or the beast with hooves of ingot, forged in crucibles of blood and toil? The bow of horsehairs quivers the strings, only to screech in cacophony— unaware it’s the strings that summon melody, while the hand just follows, inching delicately toward the goldilocks symphony. Truly, the heart — primordial organ — makes her choice first, before thoughts flood into the chambers. To wrestle her is foolhardy— a makeshift dam, undone by the heart’s own tide. Yet will the mind ever learn, tripping the same short circuits endlessly?