~dedicated to the heart fixers~

sometimes I smack my head,
when a poem commission is lying on
the ground before me, and I just don’t
hear it, believe it, in order to retrieve it…

many months of physical rehabilitation,
sessions always ended with a certain cutesy
Gen Z~Millenial crossover phraseology:

“remember to tell someone you love them”

the instructors mostly youngish,
so we senior~smile
a tad dismissively, give them a reward~grin, and
head for the locker room,
where we gossip and compare notes,
on the Part II of our in-process-future-realization,
living a grueling new life of self-preservation, 24/7

the PTs & EPs pound you on the machina, go faster, work harder,
eat better, sleep more, take those meds, motion is lotion,
walk the talk, never be still, but race to live longer and
prosper, this hard work is your new job, and resignation
is non~optional

now, it hits me, via a figurative sharp slap on the side of the head,
triggering an actual physical manifestation that reverbs to the toes,
that the most important lesson went under the radar,
evading the former trader’s dimming vision,
flunking himself on the rehab test paper,
a purple F for fool,
a grade, earned and deserved, and herein poetically preserved

the hardest heart work, begins only after you co-
commence the longest road back to where you once
belonged, but where you can’t walk alone, for therein
a recipe for failure; and the work that needs doing,
is on you; take that tear-repaired heart, and give it away, it,
one can be healed, but not if sealed, for the hard-hearted
walls thicken, and “over  time, the thickened heart muscle
can become too stiff to fill the heart with blood; the heart
can't pump enough blood to meet the body's needs.”

so break off pieces of your heart, give them away with
relentless abandon, for this is the heart that self-repairs,
new tissue, new fiber, and most important, regeneration,
the one single reparation that can successfully
accomplish the true miracle of getting by giving,
no forgiving, if you don’t exercise the heart by

“remembering to tell someone you love them”




dedicated to the hard working staff of the
Cardio Rehabilitation  Unit
of Nyulangonge, Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation
who started  me
with a mighty push on the long road to utilizing my heart properly

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