Open hips
Open lips
Open throats
Open arms
Open minds
Open ears

Where are the open hearts?

This is what heartbreak looks like.

It is the soliloquies you wrote to him at midnight while crying

It is the formality a smile and the absence of warmth

It is the nausea and the ***** because this mornings breakfast just didn't have the heart to stay with you

He didn't either

This is what heartbreak sounds like.

Silence
Breaking
Static

This is what heartbreak feels like.

The burn of your concerned friends eyes into your back

The burn of the shame tinging your cheeks red

This is what heartbreak is.

You
Me
But not us

Never us

Everytime I let
the men on the street,
feast on my anatomy,
I lose body parts.

The first part to disappear
are my fingers,
leaving me unable
to touch.

The second part to disappear
are my feet,
leaving me unable
to walk.

The third part to disappear
is my throat,
leaving me unable
to talk.

If a fourth part were to disappear,
I fear it would be my heart,
leaving me unable
to love.

I search for my body parts
in hopes of
becoming whole again.
But they are scattered
among hungry dogs
wide-eyed and salivating,
always wanting more.

Crippled,
I face forward
and avoid eye contact,
repeating silently:

I must protect my heart.
I must protect my heart.
I must protect my heart.

I am a chasm of subtleties
I wish someone could see.
But poignancy doesn't catch the eye
like an unchallenged face,
chained to a first glance:
smart, pretty and worthy.
A list of attractive adjectives
I've heard before
left me with nothing
but my tenderness to hold onto.

Papers and pens expensive,
careful the words selected.
Prose:
Cautious
Considered
Calculated
Discussed
Digested
Politically correct
Stilted.

But since the advent
of cheap communication,
words are thrown
right and left,
democratized into existence,
bullied down before anyone has time
to grasp the meaning
or the consequences complicit
to disrespecting the dialectic.

I wonder:
Where can I find those mourning
the death of conversation?
Perhaps resigned
to the penance of unabriged silence.

Some nights
the moon throws its light
like an old man
who can't hold his liquor in
and spits blood in the morning

Someone ought to kick some sense
into me, if they did I'd hum
like the body of a fiddle

I propose we all strip down
and take a swim with my friends
the dragonflies, but no one will listen
to what I have to say when I throw my voice
like an empty bottle deep in the forest

When I think of all the dark
and swift things of my rivers,
I wonder why time the old boot -
legger hides his maps and goes
on traveling the low roads

Alone I can tell you there is so much
beside the point of the thorn of the rose
and why the moon is with me always
whenever i choose to go it alone

I drink from that blue jar of time
and breathe the breath of sweet infants

Believe you me the dead shepherd
we sent up the river in a faraway land
in a time so long ago still holds us
all by the holes in his hands

You can see the dark clouds up ahead,
my cloisters I am always walking through them
with you children of the lost dreams,
and with you fifty-something snow-headed men

We have just collided with our lost sons
on the high road of morning, we are rising
dust like the dirt on our children's graves
saying nothing to our brothers the stones.