The first day that I met you
My heart was pounding in my chest
But it could have been because
I ran there, to the Starbucks
On the Ave
The one you used to work at
But maybe it wasn't because I was
In such a rush
It could have been the coffee
I've heard that can increase your
Heart rate
Or maybe both of these are wrong
You see, I was born with a slight
Arrhythmia
Which messes with the way my heart beats
But maybe it was my hearts way of saying
This one is the one
There's no way of knowing
But ever since that day
I've been smitten;
Scheduling my whole day around
Getting to see you
And I even remember the first time
I rode in your car
Because
You were worried about me
But it became a regular thing
You drove me home on the nights
You worked a close
And each and every time I fell more and more
And you started to feel like home
Because home is not a place
But a feeling in the heart,
And maybe it was my arrhythmia
But I've felt it since the start
And then you up and left
You moved so far away
But you needed to be with your family
I just wish you could've stayed
So I guess I had to visit
Because I was craving you so much
You see, you're like a drug to me,
You're my ******
My crutch
Because I wouldn't make it
Through every day life
Without your voice to hold onto
And our conversations replaying
Over and over
In my painseeking mind
Play it through
Then rewind
Again and again
I reminisce you
And every time we're together it's like
The world stops
And as we lay together
You tell me
"I can hear your heart beating are you okay?"
And maybe you heard
The arrhythmia
Which is why you were concerned
But my heart pounds in my chest
Like the timpani in an orchestra
And every third beat is half the length of the others,
But that's just *the arrhythmia

In between   (a poem)
.
my mind struggles against its own illusion
nightmare tumbles out into still morning
light is heavy,
a fog of echoes...
and I am caught
.
day dreams the sunlight
dreams light the day
and I am caught in between
mourning echoes...
like a stillborn ghost
who can't take a breath in the present

….
  
I live on a tropical island and just want to go surfing with my husband, but the nausea in the early morning as I try to eat  breakfast and drive with him to the beach is so uncomfortable.  Day after day it makes even surfing a chore, and I consider not going anymore.  Background anxiety and unreasonable irritation interferes with our marriage, frustrates him enough to want me out.  

For me, a trip to the grocery store or meeting a group of people awakens the same dreadful fear as rockclimbing a cliff. Perspective has been lost in the extremes.  I try to gain some control over this hindering nuisance, seeking situations that bring the same surges of adrenaline so I can learn to master it.  If I can just push past the avoidance that would keep me inside doing nothing, if I can just ignore the feeling I want to throw up, if I can just get out there, I am rewarded with life’s potential beauty eventually.  Many days I do enjoy the thrill of mountain biking or connection with nature when surfing, but there are too many days of internal struggle that reduce what should be enjoyable to a relentless chore of wrestling inner demons.

The VA offers a few sessions of marriage counseling, and the doctor begins to explain PTSD.  ***, I’ve learned to cope with an unreliable brain, but now there’s this?  From what I understand (and that’s just me, an amateur philosopher) Sometimes the brain is so traumatized, that the memory is literally sealed off, encapsulated, protecting it from changing.  If later something happens that is similar, the brain triggers avoidance responses as a take-no-chances survival mechanism.  Literally the brain is protecting one’s self from one’s self.  This all-or-nothing strategy works fending off potential dinosaur attacks, but in our complex society, these automatic avoidance behaviors complicate functioning and well being.  Life becomes an attitude of constant reaction instead of motivated intention.

The website for the National center for PTSD says.  “After a trauma or life-threatening event, it is common to have reactions such as upsetting memories of the event, increased jumpiness, or trouble sleeping. If these reactions do not go away or if they get worse, you may have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.”  

“Common reactions to trauma are:
• Fear or anxiety: In moments of danger, our bodies prepare to fight our enemy, flee the situation, or freeze in the hope that the danger will move past us. But those feelings of alertness may stay even after the danger has passed. You may:feel tense or afraid, be agitated and jumpy, feel on alert.  
• Sadness or depression: Sadness after a trauma may come from a sense of loss---of a loved one, of trust in the world, faith, or a previous way of life. You may:have crying spells, lose interest in things you used to enjoy, want to be alone all the time, feel tired, empty, and numb.  
• Guilt and shame: You may feel guilty that you did not do more to prevent the trauma. You may feel ashamed because during the trauma you acted in ways that you would not otherwise have done. You may:feel responsible for what happened, feel guilty because others were injured or killed and you survived.  
• Anger and irritability: Anger may result from feeling you have been unfairly treated. Anger can make you feel irritated and cause you to be easily set off. You may:lash out at your partner or spouse, have less patience with your children, overreact to small misunderstandings.  
• Behavior changes: You may act in unhealthy ways. You may:drink, use drugs, or smoke too much, drive aggressively, neglect your health, avoid certain people or situations.”   It lists four main symptoms: reliving the event, avoiding situations that remind of the event, feeling numb, and feeling keyed up (also called hyperarousal)”

Four words strung together: Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  They’ve become a tired cliché, exhausted from the endless threat of random cruelty camouflaged in banality, weary of the weight shouldering back the wall that separates death and gore from the living.  Living was a reflex beyond willpower and devoid of choice. Control was self-deception.  The mind was so preoccupied with A: survival, B: sanity, in that order.  Rest was a cruel illusion.  The tank was drained, no room for emotions ditched.  Empathy took too much effort, fear was greedy.  Hopefully they can be remembered and found on the other side, if there is one.  Sleep deprived cells were left hyper-alert from the imminent, shot up and addicted to adrenaline.  Living was Fate and Chance, and meant leaving that time and place sealed in forgetfulness.  

Now PTSD is a worn out acronym, a cold shadow of what it feels like.  I try to think of something more personal that can describe the way it randomly visits me, now resigned to its familiar unwelcome influence.  It steals through my brain, flying ahead of me with its own agenda of protecting sabotage.  Its like the Guardian Trickster of Native American legend.  Its an archetype but real enough to make mistakes: Chulyen, the black raven.

A decade after the ER, contentment is found in a garden of slow tranquility as a butterfly interrupts a sunbeam.  My heart fills with bittersweet as I’ve finally found something I love and want to keep.  Just then Chulyen’s grasping black claws clamp my heart with painful arrhythmia and it fills to burst, tripping in panic trying to recover its pace.  The sudden pain drops me to my knees, in the dirt between fragrant lavender and cherry tomatoes.  Pain stops breath and time and makes me remember the ER, when my heart rebelled its ordained purpose for a week.  I had tried to throw my bitter life back in God’s face but He didn’t take it.  Now that I have peace and a life that I treasure, He’s taking it now.  The price for my mistake is due.  It was all just borrowed time and I’m still so young, my children just babies.  God with a flick of cruelty reminds me not to put faith in the tangible, especially when its treasured.  The sharp claws finally relent and I can breathe, looking up with a gasp and the Raven takes flight overhead leaving a shadow.  Bright noon warmth, unusually heavy and foreboding, seems to say ‘there will come a time when you will not welcome the sun.’   Doctors run an EKG and diagnose ‘stress’.

The bird perches on my shoulder two more decades later, always seeing death just over there.  So I sit on the porch just a little longer and check my list again, delaying the unavoidable racing heart and rush of tension when I fix the motorcycle helmet strap under my chin.  I know all those stupid drivers have my life in their cell-phone distracted hands and hope my husband knows how much I love him, and my daughters too.  

Chulyen wakes me at 3:00 am when autumn’s wind aggravates the trees.  His rustle of black feathers outside unsettles summer’s calm night.  He brings an end-of-the-world portent that hints this peace is just temporary, borrowed.  Tribulation will return.

Ravens are attracted to bright shiny things.  Chulyen steals off with treasures like intention, and contentment.  I don’t realize they are missing until occasionally I find myself truly living in the moment.  I guess that is another reason why I crave adventure, for those instants and epiphanies that snap me out of that long term modis operandi of reacting, instead of being.  The daily list of ‘I must, or I should’ can for a brief while become ‘I want’  and I am free.

My companion the black bird perches relaxed in the desert on the gatepost of a memory.  A bullet-scarred paint-faded sign dangles by one corner from rusty barbed wire:
    No Trespassing    
    That Means You
I have a haunted idea what's behind the fence.  Chulyen implies the memory with a simple mistaken sound:
a Harley in the distance is for a second the agitating echo of a helicopter...
or those were the very same words they said when...
or I hear a few jangling clinks of forks in our warm kitchen...
hinting a cold cafeteria at 5:00 am smelling of fake eggs and industrial maple flavored corn syrup,
and everything else that happened that day...
My cells recollect, brace with the addictive rush of adrenaline.  But the raven denies access to the memory, distracting with discomfort.  I trip and I fall hard into the gritty dirt of irritation at the person who unknowingly reminded me.  Anxiety floods in along with fatigue of the helplessness of it all, back then and still now.  I can't go further.  Chulyen’s tricking deception says Leave This Memory, you never wanted to come back.
But I already knew from just recognizing the bird patiently sitting there a sentinal,
recalling every other time he tricked me with nausea and depression.
I tried to tell myself again that behind that gate,
the past has dried up from neglect.
Disintegrated into dust,
Blown away,
doesn't
exist.
…


After everything else, how to work through this?  The VA gave me a manual, a crudely printed set of worksheets with a government-looking blue cover page:  Cognitive Processing Therapy.
“In normal recovery from PTSD symptioms, intrusion, thoughts, and emotions decrease over time and no longer trigger each other.  However, in those who don’t recover, the vivid images, negative thoughts, and strong emotions lead to escape and avoidance.  Avoidance prevents the processing of the trauma that is needed for recovery and works only temporarily.  The ultimate goal is acceptance.  
There may be “stuck points”, conflicting beliefs or strong negative beliefs that create additional unpleasant emotions and unhealthy behavior.  For example, a prior belief may have been “ I am able to protect myself in dangerous situations.”  But after being harmed during military service, a conflicting belief surfaces, “I was harmed during service, and I am to blame.”  If one is ‘stuck’ here, it may take some time until one is able to get feelings out about the trauma, because one is processing a number of rationales.  “I deserved it because…” , or “I misinterpreted what happened, I acted inappropriately, I must be crazy…”  The goal is to change the prior belief to one that does not hinder acceptance.  For example, “I may not be able to protect myself in all situations.”

(chapter continues with recovery methods)

Got home from the hospital late last night
Still can't seem to find my appetite
I can't seem to sit still
There's a hole that I don't know how to fill
I've listened to my ipod non stop
Headphones so loud I feel my ears are gonna pop
The dice will fall as they may
But at the end of the day
I know that they were always loaded
I feel like my life has always been encoded
Protected by a cipher I could never completely break
I never truly understood what was at stake
Until that day last week
When you and I were hanging by the creek
We were laughing and tossing rocks
Just relaxing having good long talks
When my vision started to go hazy
and I know this is crazy
But i knew then that I was dying
And you started crying
I felt a sharp tightening in my chest
I lost consciousness as the attack progressed
I woke up in my hospital bed
The doctors told me that I should be dead
They used phrases like "suffered major cardiac event"
I asked what that meant
I told me that I had a heart attack
I was immediately taken aback
I was only seventeen
This was almost something that was unseen
Arrhythmia was the name of the disease
They said it was easy to manage with medicine and their expertise
But now I can no longer rest
Knowing that I have ticking time bomb in my chest

Ours was like fireworks
in the mid-summer sky
Radiant,
       Iridescent,
                   Incredulous,
                              Alive
but the finale came suddenly, unexpectedly soon,
& the band played on,
as if nothing had changed,
as if a fountain of sparkling embers and flame
had not just erupted mere inches away.
And now,
where explosions once seared summer's sky with crackling thunderous incandescent delight
Only whispers and wisps of smoke remain,
Scattered by the breeze,
Whithered, then, by rain.
And of the evening's reveries precious little can be found:
some soured beer in crumpled cans, discarded haphazardly
surrounding a threadbare picnic bedspread
rumpled beneath the branches of an ancient live oak tree.
Dew now wet where lovers once had lain,
staring up into the night
in wonder, ignorant of such banal things
like: masquerading lust in love's robes, declaring,
"I've never loved a love as deep as the love I have for you,"
and truly being unaware of the uncanny substitute;
Or the unbridled disenchantment unleashed by abandonment
and the inevitable transience of an insufferable pain.

We ****** on bar balcony balustrades, over looking city streets.
We ditched tampons into trees rather than wait to satisfy our needs.
We left your ******* in a planter
on a patio under an eve
On purpose, So that some poor, unassuming shop-keep
Would find them
(along with cigarette butts and an empty bag of ****)
and have no choice but think to themselves,
"Did someone **** here?"
and then immediately understand the answer is
"Yes. Exuberantly!"

We defiled. every. place. we went;
giggling with glee at all of our indiscretions.

Oh how many indiscretions could there possibly be?
We shall know;
All of them!

And so we did,

And we were free.



On new years eve I carried you piggyback in your peacock blue sequined gown through the streets of our ****-soaked-gutter-of-a-town.
You were barefoot, drunk, and refusing to be told what to do,
that you had to wear your shoes,
that the streets were far to ***** and dangerous for your tender little feet- you said "Just let me be, It's fine. It wont **** me..."
then, looking at the gutter, continued,
"probably.
And these shoes already are, so..." sticking out your tongue
But I couldn't put you down.
Not in that place, not at that time.
Nor did I even want to. I could have carried you all night
(which was fortunate, because for most of itI did.)
We were declared the city's cutest couple by a stranger on the sidewalk whom we passed while galloping down the street, you, giggling, alight upon my back, running at full speed. This declaration was reaffirmed by everyone met.

A pixie, you know, will always trip you up
(they're natural pranksters you see).
Their magic is undeniable, but oh what trouble they can be.

- My toothsome little faerie - You meant trouble for me;
but what a beautiful, beguiling mess you turned out to be,

You snuck pixie dust into everywhere we went, and
Dispensed it with abandon-
Spread it like caution to the wind.
Sanctifying everything and everyone we met.
That poor city was baptized in our joy.
It's sins washed into glittering gutters,
where we lay sparkling, genuine and loved.


We broke the records that night,
all of them, known and not.

We loved harder than diamond,
than a trailer-hitch to the shin,
Deeper than the fathoms of the trenches at the bottom of the sea.

We made soulmates seem like strangers.
We spoke nonsense fluently.
We shared mind and body, food and drink,
and careless wanton play.

It was

The most
     *******
          Fun
   I've ever had
       in my life...

Probably the most that I ever will.


Every moment I was with you had
the sizzle and the tease
of a bottle-rocket, lit
and held between my teeth.

I knew that I'd get burned
If I held it to the end,
But I did it just to prove I could;
To prove to me
That I was brave enough
To be unashamed
  To be unafraid
   To be.

I'm tired all the time now
Heart rate above average
Sometimes I could swear it is ready to stop beating
Strange arrhythmia waging war on me

And my clouded mind.

I pressed my head against your chest
To listen to the compression

                                           Papillary muscles
                                           Beating at irregular tempos

                                                         ­                  Papillary muscles
                                                         ­                  Beating at irregular tempos

I pressed my head against your chest
Your heart beat out a confession

                                           Keeping up with you is
                                           Both exciting and exhausting

                                                     ­                   Keeping up with you is
                                                              ­          Both exciting and exhausting

                                                     ­                                                              Hey!

                                           But I don’t want to
                                           Slow things down

                                                           ­                                     As if you could


Arrhythmia
When things just don’t line up

                                           Now the blood’s begun to rush
                                           But you’re unavailable

What’s coming next for us

   Can’t being friends                                                   Being friends can’t        

                                           Be enough

                                                         ­                                       Well it has to be

you love her, don't you?   
because she's beautiful; 
she's exciting; 
she's empyreal.  
because she kisses like these are her final moments of life  
and she wants to spend them only with you. 
 
but be careful who you trust (the devil was once an angel, you know). 
she makes your heart flutter, but  
anyone'll tell you that really,  
arrhythmia isn't a good thing.  
 
she's a disguise, grief wrapped up like a gift. 
oh, darling, she's a pretty war. ****** in her veins.  
 
(but) 
 
let's go from the start. 
 
your bones don't fit  
you feel as though your throat is all sandpaperandnails 
you're alone. you've been ohsolonely.
 
then you meet her and she's all chocolateandcinnamon and     
    perfectly 
                aligned. 
 
you look into her eyes. you see a nebula.  
an interstellar cloud but made up of something you should know but don't.  
she's  dumbfounding; 
it's refreshing.  
you like mysteries.  
 
she’s  everything  you’ve  ever wanted (probably) and she pulls you out of that hole. 
that one with the festering thoughts  
and the dark spaces where you could go for days at a time. 
your heart was heavy, a sky full of rain.  
but she was a tempest. your saving grace. 
 
this is a story about love, but it's not a love story.  
not really. 
this is a story about the human condition, 
about how, though the heart isn’t the *****  
that makes us feel, 
it still hurts the most. 
and more importantly, this is an open letter 
to the skies, 
to whichever deity decided that you couldn’t 
be with her forever. 
 
you're a house with empty rooms and 
there's a storm teasing the windows; 
an aggressive ballet. 
looking back, 
you suppose you should have noticed the leak 
before it got the chance to flood 
 
and you remember the look in her eyes when you said  
"even though I did geography at school, it didn't teach me  
the difference between an earthquake 
and you" 
and she said she didn't understand  
and you said * that's the point, neither do I.*

for to love someone 
is to give them your heart on a platter 
and hand over the cutlery, too. 
but you remember just thinking oh,  
if she makes you giddy like this then  
what could be wrong? 
 
you know that "gravitation is not responsible 
for people falling in love" 
but the force with which you feel the desire 
to present your heart like a gift, to 
open yourself to the possibility of hurt and break 
must be greater than yourself 
 
and you never knew why they called it  
"heartbreak" until the day she left 
and you realised after, that the difference  
between you and humpty dumpty 
is that his friends thought he was worth trying to  
put back together again. 
 
the thing is that 
empty rooms echo, and now 
so do you. 
 
and after that, 
after the fallout 
and the body count of all your past selves 
they'll say to you: 
you're young 
it's not the end of the world.
but 
when someone makes flowers grow in your lungs  
and then makes you choke on them 
it feels like it is. 
 
you know what? 
you notice empty spaces more 
once your chest becomes one. 
 
a house of cards 
imagine matchsticks; 
burning love but 
singeing your fingers, 
and she never asked why you flinched 
 
her palms, eden. 
her kiss of death, 
her purgatory embrace. 
she, aokigahara, suicide forest. 
you were born to die in her arms. 
 
and if you ever wondered
why they name tornadoes after girls, 
you don't now. 
 
you, lacklustre lazarus­. 
you know you're no phoenix; 
the ashes consume. 
 
so here you are. 
and ode to you, 
because words shouldn't be like bullets, 
staccato, and 
vowels shouldn’t have sharp edges- 
but they do. 
 
you see, 
poetry is the place love goes when it dies, 
the place where heartbreak is framed with metaphors 
and mounted on the wall as art. 
a library of all the things left unsaid. 
 
the psychiatrist takes lots of notes. 
about how you thought she was your   
deus ex machina, 
about how you remembered too late that this is real life  
and really, all of this is just a periphrasis. 
 
you think 
sticks and stones, sticks and stones 
but the truth is that words 
are like bullets, 
and her tongue the gun; 
her “goodbye” ricocheting against her teeth. 
 
now, today, it’s you with the weapon;  
taking control the way god never did. 
cold metal and clammy hands. 
cleaning up the mess left behind 
by a tornado named her. 
 
b a n g.

words fall
like hapless fledglings
tossed from a cliff edged nest

with much screeching, squawking,
countless feathers lost

and then an awful thump
or hopeful, glorious flight

first love is tachycardiac love
all adrenaline, sweating palms
and stutter-stumbling sqeakings,
ungainly gropings,
when not with you, mopings
unrealistic hopings
for happy ever after endings,
breakings, bendings,
awkward mendings,
repeated leavings,
repented lovings.
heartfelt givings,
of broken hearted rendings.
lendings,
of time stolen from life
tearing, teasing,
tantalising teamings
crying, begging,
pleading strife
and then,
the metaphorical knife
cutting, slashing,
wordblow bashing,
screaming, reaming,
end to loves life.

til eventually, words fall,
like old birds leavings
to settle, unremarked upon
at the base of the tree of life.

first love's loss, is slow dying.
arrhythmia to flatline
in a multitude of laboured breaths
and long lingering sighs.
a loss of warmth,
from breast and thighs
and water copious,
falling from red rimed eyes.
sobbing, murmuring,
don't know whys?
from lips turned
toward,
bleakset skies.
as one settles firmly,
into black dog muck
no longer able to give a f▼ck.
tucked in tight to sadness,
lost all sight of former gladness,
caught up and shackled tight,
to the badness
around and around,
the carousel goes.

then,
at last,
the blessed silence,
as you die
one of many of....
                    life's little deaths

I am but a single
dry dead leaf
laying beneath an endless willow tree
around the waters bend
close to the toadstool pow-wows
only inhabited by the faeries.

& the moon- she still shine,
captured but by a sphere, yet so free
her light may breathe
a chilling, frigid touch
between the memories you
have buried so deep.

So please do not fret your wondrous mind
over all of your insecurities,
though she may shine with a chilling reminder
I promise that in your eyes
a beautiful soul
is all she sees.

As my mind races I feel
I am unable to describe
the exact emotion you
have gently
injected into my mind.
My eyelids grow heavy
my minds afloat to space
all that is left in my world as I know it,
is the perfection on your face

      You see darling,
      I am a hija de la luna;
      the stars will align with
      Castor & Pollux
      Cancer, Aphrodite, & Fortuna.
      They greet me as old friends,
      join me in my nights of fantasy.
      tell me darling what do these strange constellations mean?

Oh how I pity thy cataracts
eyes white & glassy
but I promise the warmth will melt your frozen gaze
& in time, you will see.

       The horizon shifts as I do to you,
      how long do you wish to be at sea?

Alas, you know my poison  
doubt seeps into my skin
like an 80 patch.
Through thick & thin,
even on the sorest of feet
I will skip merrily along your path.

      Round my head I gaze,
      The sky has been stained
      with fuchsia & clementine
      among the blues.
      tell me again, how may I find your presence within the hues?

Wrap yourself within my blanket
of ease & security.
Trust me with your life or not,
for I want to be
there, when you most
need me

      You cannot help
      you are a broken bird
       I cannot deny my psyche as it worries
      does a dove not care about her nest back home
       when she soars above
       the sea?

Next to the beating arrhythmia
you try hold dear ‘twixt your ribs
my favourite poem of yours has changed
where I will weave a small nest
dream of your lips
& the sound of rain.

Because love is painful
and it hurts
and sometimes I don’t know
if I can handle the weight that
it puts on my shoulders --
crippling me.

I see a picture of you
and I don’t know where to go,
My heart stops and
I’m left here, alone.

I struck the match
Watched it burn to my fingers
And let it keep going
I tried to light a fire
In my veins
In my heart
All I did was blister
And I can’t
Shake off these scars

I wrote a message
On each wall of my heart
But all it does is bleed
And I cannot take it out
And show it to you
My hands are red with trying
Digging around beneath my skin
For something I could give you
Some part of me
That you would want to keep
Now all I have are scars
And a heart that doesn’t
Beat the way it should.

Do you like science? Cause I've got my ion you
we're a dance of subatomic particles, you get my cardiovascular system worked up

"Nerd," you declare with a smile sweeter than C6H12O6
I glare at you and giggle louder than 194 decibels, we break all the laws
I'm so attracted to you, scientists will have to make a 5th fundamental force

we fit together like sticky ends of DNA
I fall in love with you every time I see you, faster than my DNA replicates
being in your arms feels like homeostasis, we'll last longer than thorium

I think I'm kinda maybe trying to say
every time light reflects off of you and onto my retina the sudden protracted cardiac arrhythmia I get tells me that gulp Iloveyou

I don't slam well on love
It slams on me
A drumming thrumming arrhythmia
Ba-bump ba-bump ba--- bump-ba-bump
A little loss here is a little gain there
Only, it doesn't work that way
My stopwatch heart hiccups then echoes
Like odd flats and sharps
Seemingly out of place among the expected
A beat that needs to be acquired over several listenings
Like a new food that needs to be tasted up to 12 times
Before you can truly decide if you like it.
It take more than 3 licks and a bite to get to my center
One, two three, you're not for me
Four, five, six, a few more licks
Seven, eight, nine, out to dine
Ten, eleven, twelve, you can delve
And yet... Here it sits in my chest with its arrhythmia
Patiently waiting for that defibrillating current
That shock that will set it right
Or perhaps it's never meant to be that way
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps
It's perfect in it's imperfection

My heart's a stereo,
and we can dance if you want to,
because the rhythm is gonna get you,
on re-pe-pe-pe-pe-peat.

I reach deep inside of myself
hoping to pull something out.
Tickling, teasing,
A game I like to play.
I know the risks:
Dehydration, fatigue, tooth decay, osteoporosis, anemia, hypotension, arrhythmia, cardiac arrest, death.

I roll the dice, because in this moment
I know I’d rather die than keep the Poison inside.

So, I dig, deep, into the dark,
Until I hit it: X marks the spot.
Tease it out. Force it out.
The treasure spills from the core of me.
I win.

I am emptied over and over and over again,
Until there is nothing left of the Poison and nothing left of me.

I first noticed my abnormal heartbeat
in Duluth, Minnesota.
Standing across the canal from you
separated by water
and the waves waves waves.
I still swear to this day
that it was your breath I heard
mingling with the hush of water.
The next time I notice my heart
we’re at the hospital.
You tell me to uncross my ankles
and hold out my wrist
your thumb brushing over the more delicate part of its skin
and your stethoscope cold on my throat.
It’s only a
one-two-three
four
before you’re pulling away
my pulse going with you.
I don’t care if I have to live with arrhythmia
live with the pills and the appointments
and the lack of a steady thump thump thump
in my chest.
Just the ghost of the feel
of your thumb on my pulse point
on my wrist
on my neck
curving behind my ear
and my hand on your heart
with your thump thump thump,
will keep my blood flowing.
I’m a girl with a broken heart
and I’m in love with a cardiologist.

i fell in love with you
once
long ago
with my eyes closed
and the dream-screen drawn

we danced
like music notes across their barred landscape
we danced
the loveliest late-night lullaby

you became my hiding place
lilac and lace linens
stretched over a lumpy matress

my indiana jones
waiting patently and poetically
in a long-lost temple of slumber

you come back to me in waves
softly and subtly
while i'm half awake
you're kissing the broken down shorelines of an insomniacs holiday

i wish i could keep you
like an empty bottle in the window-sill
or a heart arrhythmia
this lonely romantics cardiovascular waltz

let me snag you up from my dream-dust
and stitch you to my sole like a lost boys shadow

let me find you in my reality
tip-toeing over an underlined paragraph
of a beer stained paper-back

i'll find you
someday
after a long-over-due nights sleep

perhaps in the guitar strings
or type-writer keys
or at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey in the ever-humming freezer

be mine
evasive valentine
i'll even let you hide in the curls of my hair
or under my fingernails
i'll keep you
if you'll let me

just don't forget me
come sun-up
when you gallup away
from my sub-conscious escape

take my heart-rate with you
tucked into your breast-pocket
like a floral handkercheif
or a photogaraph taped to the dash

come back
to the grey matter kingdom
tucked behind my eyelashes
i'll meet you in the idiosyncrasies of my synapses
writing love stories that never once happened

You will get over him
You will get over him
You will get over him

I repeat to the blurry reflection in the mirror
Of the hollow girl with perpetual
Tear streaks stained on her cheeks.

But what am I to do
About this gigantic hole?
This huge gaping chasm in my
Soul that makes my chest tight and
Makes each inhale and exhale a fight?

My world is still capsized
From the crater you created
When you let me slip away.

When will my heart stop seizing?
Or will it just stop beating?

“You explode in me here and there, now and always; you are causing a brain seizure in my ******* heart. I’ve been so actively lethargic, I am in ******* literal pain without you”
- Ernest Hemingway

<Sun May 14 5:00 AM PST>

Let us be smart about this departure,
time unscheduled, yet leaving inevitable,
the sound of fabric torn, a rent performed,
a ripping, a release of the gripping, connecting
tissue of weft and weave tying parent and child

(All of us poets, all of us comprehend,
there are two points, two buttonholes
that offer escape or farewell, when we
commence on something new, when we
pen our chest’s demands to exhale, cease the hammering

Perhaps, here, just after the third stanza,
the brick enormity of our selected task, on chest,
weighs heavy, boulder difficulties ahead, now fastened
and faster and faster realized, begs us, quit this essay,
return to placid, from an arrhythmia of imploding loss)

So many fabrics, so many tears, wet and dried,
but upon commencement, the only finish line,
is another commencement, when the (mine-own) rendering
is finalized, beyond repair, when guilt gulfs overflows, flooding
plains of forever pain officiated by signed scar, “here was”

So many separations, varied and variegated,
surficial shallow surgical  or plunges, widths of trickle,
depths of deadly plunges, records of inches, dates,
names, new heights inscribed, measured on a door jamb,
lost, erased, when child’s door closes permanently

Came today to the West, to Pacific Ocean entrance,
to celebrate a good boy’s ritualized threshold crossing
over into manhood, both symbolic and and realized,
but tear-up seeing the small child-man leaning in and on
his father’s larger frame, a coinciding giving & taking

no bonds are eternal, for such is life, the weft must be
warped, sundered and separated, so many reasons,
experience speaks, scars are like bandages,protecting
but deceiving, what they cover can never be excised,
a space created, that only oxygen can touch both sides

but never, ever be reperfected, mended,…or finalized

2023
San Francisco

Whether storms are all numbered, counted, and expelled from heaven's manufacture as sensational, furious strands of wind and rain, who can say? As they arrive, however, it is nonetheless clear that they arrive as effects to sets of circumstances.

I sat up straight as an arrow, freshly awakened from a stirring dream of madness as the latest one arrived, watching the black clouds like mighty arms, struggling and arguing against the trees outside my bedroom window. I had been torn by an invisible hand clutching me by the throat, snatching me from the murk of an ephemeral bedroom.

Engulfed in unsatiated fear, powerless to convulse even the tiniest flesh patch or creak a bone, my body was wrapped in only a gray silken **** cloth. As I lay awake, speechless, thunderbolts cracked.

As I was rendered helpless to petrification, I was surrounded by strike after strike, a confounding series of white bolts striking seven times in each place, following a path of concentric circles around my small bed.

I struggled to move, feeling a moving static across my body like jellyfish stings from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, as I felt the cold chill from each bolt setting my face into a freezing strangulation.

I was pulled away. I faded away from the smoking holes surrounding the bed, the sub-zero chill outside and the torturous heat of fear and arrhythmia pumping spews and spurts through my arteries inside, and I was left to wander in my own fantasia as I stared up to the ceiling above me in my real bed, daydreaming of its meaning in epistomological fashion.

I feel the heat
                 upon my neck
                  sparking fire,
                   just a peck
                     liberated,
                 what the heck
                    kissing lips
                 & moving hips
                  touching me
                with fingertips
                hot and steamy,
                 & very dreamy
                   skin of gold
                smooth & creamy
                  inked in breath
                 & just like death,
                come to take me
                 then forsake me
                  words you utter,
                make me shudder                
                     afterthoughts
                 a coming morning
                   & even though
                 ample warning
                  your way inside,
                   you are horning
                      romancing
                of the coming reaper
                   our feelings go,
                   so much deeper
                       not so much,
                 a peaceful sleeper
                      cannot wait
                    or take a pause
                   surgery needed
                     for the cause
                     releasing me,
                    a lovely clause
                    plunging knife,
                      causing pain
                       cutting out
                      the ugly vein
                      taking hold,
                   a waving mane
                      telling me,
                    familiar songs
                     come inside
                 where you belong
                       even if,
               they think it wrong
                darkened hearts,
                 climbing walls
                  a melancholy
                   southern drawl
                   like a wanting
                    Vodoo doll
                 pounding sound
                 inside your chest
                    Am I cursed
                 or am I blessed?
             buried in a loamy nest
              heart arrhythmia
                   taking start
                 take a blade,
                 remove my heart
                    taking love
                    & pull apart
                  I hold it beating
                     in my hands
                   relieved at last
                   of its demands
                   as shadows fall
                   low in the deep
                   of promises
                   we'll never keep
                    curling toes,
                   as blood it seeps
             colored in cascading red
                 of endless nights
                     that I have bled
              laid at last, telluric bed
                   I'm melting slow
                   into your arms
                     dissolved into
                the haunting charms
                       glad that I,
                  just bit the farm
                        lying in
                   a field of wheat
                    covered by
                  my linen sheets
                    a **** place
                    for us to meet
                     & burning
                 in the guilty heat
                I'll write you here,
                 inside my room
                    skies apart,
                 forgiving gloom
                     push aside
                 impending doom
                 or what dangers
                   wait & loom
                 I wait for death
                    & love
                    ...to bloom

                Cherie Nolan © 2016

gun in your hands
was fully loaded
you aimed it at my head
pull the trigger I said
i know you will
you fired the gun but
it was my heart you shot instead

my heart is a gasoline guzzler
running on the fumes of burned out
memories, thoughts, and breaths.
my veins play jump rope with my bursting capillaries
and beneath the seam of every heartbeat
is an arrhythmia that smiles back.
no longer is every intake an oxygen a dutiful task.
rather i, as a sovereign animal
convert the anguish into carbon dioxide
because i don't care for the proton pumps
or the electron chains. i am negatively charged
and hidden inside this bubble is a dark cycle
beseeching for the spotlight.

roll with the punches baby try not to shatter while you wait to
feel it
it might take a while for every synapse to come alive but
i promise you'll feel it in the end
light up like a christmas tree with every nerve impulse 100 watts your body
will light up the room.
you cast shadows on the moon and i wonder why
is it so cold?
(this wasn't what i wanted when i picked up a pen,
but it seems
like every poem becomes part of you
your blood runs in these pens and i can't help writing about you and your
talus -
that word means both
jagged rocks when you look down from a cliff and oh is this what you want
and the bone of your heel
that you grind into my chest and ****,
i think
that sums you up
pretty well.)
because your sparks were always the best thing about you,
when you short-circuit and sputter and all your lights flicker your synapses
have more life than they know what to do with
roll with the punches and cradle your cheek and be grateful that
at least you didn't crack
because electricity and water don't mix and you've killed enough sharks
in your lifetime.
you don't need another funeral on the mind
when you're still watching the procession
of your own -
(or maybe it's just a fantasy
which is
more likely than not,
you were never able to face that talus
at the bottom
or your christmas lights sputtering and
stopping) -
you watch your own funeral and breathe and i
pray
to god for a miracle
because your measured breaths are the saddest thing i've ever seen because i know
you're just breathing by eights

[eight protons eight neutrons eight seconds in and out
atomic number eight processes to stay alive]

the periodic table hung on your wall like a map of the world you
breathe by eights and i pray harder and breathe ragged you were always more measured than me like
you're morse code and i'm an earthquake
you're heart rate and i'm arrhythmia
you're chemistry and i'm alchemy and you disprove me with every breath
you the child of bright mathematics i crumble in your gaze
but still you short-circuit and i stroke your hair and breathe ragged while you sputter
your synapses can't hold all your life so i'll conduct the overflow
ground your talus in my chest and i will take all your flickers for my own.
it might take a while
but you'll feel it
i promise
because it's not so cold with your short-circuits in my chest and i bet it's not so numb
with my pens scratching your arms
you light up and i wonder how you can breathe so steady
with all this smoke
in the air
(i was breathing  ragged already but you said asthma suits me and
i guess you're right because
you were always the one with all the elements memorized while i
struggled to remember that air
could be something other than
painful)
you short-circuit and i stroke your hair and pray
for your numbers to add up
this time
and you sigh and disprove me
again
because i only live in your flickers and sputters and my
ragged breath
and i pray you will flare brighter light up stronger because
when you feel that punch
i can't conduct that impulse.
roll with the punches baby you'll feel it i promise it
just takes a while
breathe by eights keep that heart rate steady
you imagine your funeral procession and sputter
i breathe ragged baby i will take all your misfires
and write odes to your sparks
just be ready for that feeling when it hits.

Intertwine our pulmonaries
Pull tight, tie together our coronaries

My superior vena cava resting near yours
Hear that, the sound of opening ventricle doors

Beautiful looking aortas fixed
Winding together as a double helix

This heart of mine will skip a beat
Just so my arrhythmia and yours might meet

This ticker will only continue to tick
If next to yours it may stick

Not a murmur because of bad health
A murmuring of loves bountiful wealth

Atrium to atrium, heart to heart:
Blood's continual pumping, so long as our valves never part.