ECG

They showed the broken rhythm of my heart
With inky ripples traced in peaks and troughs
The night when sudden life was torn apart
Left echoes like a dry persistant cough
This paper trail more signature of self
Than any scribbled scrawl of given names
More indication of my vital health
Than any poet’s talk of light or flames
My quick survival charted there as fact.
“And here, you see a murmured aftershock”
The remnant spider scribe of heart attack
My ailing pulse, my brittle ticking tock
Once took a moment’s beat to catch its breath
And left me reeling at the edge of death.

It starts
in the quiet
itching in the fingers
like new skin knitting under blistered burns.

I have always written.
Before I had my letters
(before the lessons
with stubby pencils
curving sense out of the air)
I would scrawl nonsense waves
folding and boiling
in a crash of senseless surf
onto pages meant for pictures

I scribbled a whole Atlantic
before sense and sound
delivered the waves to reason.

I still find it hard,
when writing,
not to let the rolling sea
scatter into fragment waves
that whisper into the breeze of my fingers.

I have tried many addictions,
I have spent people like money.
I have tied my hands
to stop from fussing at the leaves.
If I ever loved I left it still spinning,
but I have never lost the itch

a pen to scratch its bleed of ink
into a sweet clean ****** page.
To scrawl my feint history
in every broken harbour
of her yielding skin.

On the day
her body burned
she asked the
winds to be
her friends
and they
picked her
up and poured
her through
the fingers of
their hands
like a river
without ending
that won't
be tied or
bound, until
every trace of
dust embraced
the freedom it
had found.