20090722

True Heart

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.


My nerves are strung on pianos of pain.
Your gentle fingers alone know the
sweet refrain that can cool my blighted
conscience and soothe a bruisèd brain
too long banished to a howling
wilderness. My true heart, you turn
my sheets into stone when you're
miles away and I'm sleeping alone.
You remember what's bitter, neglecting
the beauty that's grown, tending
dead gardens and chests stuffed
with hollow emptiness. The horses
were knocking all night in their stalls,
my heart ticking down in the grass
wheresoever it falls. Can you learn
how to breathe again if ever you get
outside the walls where the dark
prince so long ago wickedly misplaced
you? Ah, beloved, you make tombs
of these eyes. With your dune-slope
hips and your tranquilizer thighs, and
your velvety lips and your statecraft
sighs, what deadly orbits must strange
new moons learn to trace around you?

2 comments:

  1. !!
    You know I love this. It feels good, it sounds splendid- it reads like the bible without the inner conflicts inherent. The rhymes were subtle yet crucial to the flow and the metaphors are something else entirely! Nerves strung on pianos of pain that only his love can play, the horses knocking all night and the everything from "Can you learn.." is breathtaking. The speakers love seems to have passed away and it almost reminds me like some classic like E.A Poe's Raven and his lovely Lenore(nevermore!).

    I gasped at the expression outside the walls where the dark prince..misplaced you- this is so innovative for it gives death a special meaning, almost a hope that there is something beyond those walls? This expression is very fitting when discussing death for life is indeed no more than an enclosure and beyond- nothingness or something- who can know?

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  2. it's like sometimes one can push a metaphor far enough, like changing the angle of light into a prism, so that suddenly all the words refract and the possible meanings and interpretations amplify. in a small way, this is like one of those.

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