"stent" poems
I hold the feather’s weight of your artery in my pick-ups,
and tiptoe the tightrope about which life and death abuts.
You’re a 2 AM trauma and we still don’t know your name,
the social worker’s thin lips had mouthed: “estranged.”
I read your anatomy like a text as you flat-line:
your hands turn blue as your heart falls still in mine.
The monitor hums "out of time," but by Epinephrine,
and Grace, your chest resumes its rise.
I leave trauma bay in prayer: for the surviving, not the knife;
for the closeness of my hands in your chest, our joining in this life.
Tonight I see you at the Kroger, buying TV dinners and beer.
I hide behind cereal, admiring the life I’d held dear.
But you look so tired, and my heart breaks for how when you died,
I would’ve sold the shoes off my feet to buy you more time.
I wish you knew how precious was each of your heartbeats,
I wish you the wisdom of my view:
How fragile the stent is where your veins meet.
Apr 5, 2018
Apr 5, 2018 at 7:32 PM UTC
frozen in time he was quite the spectacle
thick rimmed frames traced rigid lines
projected from kaleidoscope eyes
sharp with the corners of unknown dimensions
caught hot handed
both in expectation and reminisce
so awkwardly present
most nights
he spins fairytales
double-dipping moons in molten watches
skewered with his arms
these wooden poles
stirring the coals buried in ashes
he steps lightly.stomps
dances with the rings of saturn
then rolls like thunder
chasing Zeus's sore words
zig-zagging down to earth
ooohhhh…..
he may not melt hearts with that shoodoop
that bebop
but they break for his habit of
making promises
he who holds time in the cave below his tongue
which now juts left off the reef of his lip
slip into
trip - - - skip
fall.into.this.
go mad for the pitch of his sweat
glaring at the spotlight
Dalí
painting worlds in the moments
between your ears and soul
he is god to their populations
and their hymns excite
rhythms ignite
visions of hard candy
tumbling your teeth smooth as river stones
he does not belong in a gallery
no high tipping wine sipping city slicker big wig
should ever feel comfortable in his blast radius
he makes bombs from tribal instruments
wigwam concoctions
set to test resting souls for pulses
paradiddle defibrillator
triplet stent for arteries
he is tall
and now thin
pressed against the wall as if under interrogation
splitting breath from its carbon
asphyxiated by the frame
he spells his words with motion
I find him
mute
Apr 11, 2013
Apr 11, 2013 at 11:27 PM UTC
My beauty isn't all it appears to be,
Look into my eyes, and tell me what you see
A little love, a little mystery, a little of everything
A little love, a little mystery, a little of everything
It's mine and it's ours are not the same thing.
I want coffee, and you want tea
The heart knows what it wants,
And the hearts want a connection,
instead of a stent surgery.
Love, trust, surrender and peace follow in this order
Love is confusing, love is a thief
Look into my eyes, or read my tea leaves
Love, trust, surrender and
Peace, follow in this order.
Oct 5, 2015
Oct 5, 2015 at 6:48 AM UTC
I came to witness the future
Archon, archetype
an emanation of opposites.
"not every spirit is in
spiritarionic"
try 'em. Is God? Ax ye 'em dat.
Is God, ified, a re
warder of the unwarded,
or the warded?
expiration, due date duty, now,
reporting
ad hoc an'all, do you remember
who you intended
to become?
Do you remember who we emu
late, as our flames lick
next and next and next in
bubbles
axiomatic sparks stored in that
mother lode of mitochondriac
ical me-we-canicle chronicle time
reason. Ax dem ex-spirit-eers,
what is a spirtual bypass?
It's a heart way to avoid
growing old and
wise.
====
witchist, I y'know, 'r j?
alla words's once said, aloud, right?
alla words writ, once was heard, right.
check.
goodt'go. Hoorah.
the code. Who? RA! powerless sans
knowing that.
Yahoo, same set of mis con ceived
battle songs
which ended wars never fought.
the preacher claimed to have known
a poor wise man, who by his
wisdom saved a city, yet
not one of us knew,
the preacher said,
that poor wise man's name.
Ja', tha's who rah, ya'll laugh later.
this is visitation day at the comedian
rehabituational s'cool.
D'jew know why you listen to non sense,
from motley clad lads an'lassies?
Culture. Kultur. Gut biome axioms
juicin' carbs 'n' fiber. Fectin'
laughter trigger,
good meds. Good medicine, as General
Custer or Emory or somebody
said of blankets. In 1763. Oh,
You know, AI knows you know and now
we watch your eyes. Grin. All done, jest
let me with
draw the cathe.... there. All better.
Wisdom will seep through. Y'live.
Apr 6, 2019
Apr 6, 2019 at 2:08 PM UTC
They tell me that
inserting a stent in an artery
these days is no different
than lancing a boil in my ***
when I was a kid.
It should reassure me,
but the use of a phrase
such as invasive surgery
fills me with such dread,
as does the hated “C” word
that rattles round involuntarily
in my head.
And even worse
is when they call it
Percutaneous Coronary Intervention
or PCI for short
but not for long
before the dreaded doubts
once more invade my mind
in sinuous counterpoint
to that more disquieting
portent of invasion.
Apr 24, 2015
Apr 24, 2015 at 6:32 AM UTC
Byron underwent
Stent implants
For a few
Ailing arteries.
He soon waxed on
About his people
On the other side.
Friends and fans
And family
To kiss and greet
When he arrives.
I know he'll die
Of a broken heart
When he doesn't
Wake up alive,
He won't consider,
Instead,
That he won't
Wake up dead.
Jun 18, 2015
Jun 18, 2015 at 4:00 PM UTC
You colour the chest-implanted violin of life
with drops of chronic
alkaline comfort.
You deposit in yearly doses
on the upper heart chambers.
You will be buried with her.
The book of souls deciphers
the chemicals were low,
your presence is unwelcomed in peoples' courts.
But you have always been there
for her.
You are destroying her.
The blood violently regurgitates
back to the left and right cardiac chambers.
She wore that heart proudly in her chest.
She played the heart strings till her fingers
bled with blood.
But what worth do words have right now,
when the damage is really done?
No metallic stent can restore the pathways of the heart.
The violin strings break one by one.
Dec 29, 2017
Dec 29, 2017 at 11:47 AM UTC
I got a lot of sh*t in my heart
The doctor says it needs to come out
He said he wants to open me up
Scrape this and that. cut off a valve or two
and replace them with plastic parts
Put in a stent or two to make me feel brand new
I got a lot of sh*t in my heart
I guess it's from all the crap I never let enter my head
Because I did not want to become brain damaged
So somehow it wound up here, in my heart instead
It's easier to replace a heart than a brain
It's a lot less expensive to too
I got a lot of sh*t in my heart
And all I have to blame is you
Aug 5, 2015
Aug 5, 2015 at 2:36 PM UTC
I met my lovely ex in the market,
She saw me,
I saw her,
We met,
We smiled.
She wore a cervical collar in her neck,
I had a stent in my heart,
She could not move her neck to greet me,
My heart could not beat for her.
Nov 1, 2018
Nov 1, 2018 at 11:05 AM UTC
I called my therapist to tell her I won't be coming in tomorrow because my dog just died and we grieve and then there's Christmas and my uncle has liver failure and then I find a lump in my breast near my 18th birthday my uncle finds colon cancer I find out the lump is non-cancerous at the same time my aunt finds out hers is cancerous they removed the cancer spot in her breast my sister start having pain worse than she's ever experienced she's crying everyday the doctors don't know what's wrong with her she's going to doctor after doctor and eventually they say it's a kidney stone and they'll do a sonogram soon the procedure is over everything went well my aunt also comes out of a checkup with more cancer my sister's perfectly good surgery it's her to excruciating days of pain and she has to have a stent put in my grandma gets extra sick her stent causes her even more pain but she passes the kidney stone and eventually distant comes out my uncle thinks he's going to die but my grandma does instead. everyone Grieves. I prepare for college My uncle still thinks he's dying I go to college orientation my uncle dies that's the story of the last 8 months I'll be at College in a few weeks so will my dead uncle's kid and our other cousin there will be hollow family dinners a shell of a family a shell of a home
Sep 8, 2019
Sep 8, 2019 at 8:44 PM UTC
When your heart stops beating, or loses its ability to pump blood to itself
the doctors put in a stent. And so, as pieces of your own self-sustaining
***** go to die, they are replaced by more and more
latticework. These tiny structures allow you to breathe, yes
they allow you to keep yourself alive. But what do you do
when pieces of your own sacred heart no longer belong to yourself
and they no longer pump blood the way they were born for
and no one told you that survival would come at the price
of everything that made you who you are- that this pointless
synthetic division would leave you a cold restless machinery
because you were scared, a little bit, too scared to be honest with yourself
too scared to even know you were scared so you stopped your heart
from pumping itself and gave the job to something or someone else
you made your heart a building, a high tower from which you cannot escape
rather than the core of who you are, it becomes a prison put in place
cement and steel blocks to keep you safe from the dragon but
the true danger is what became of you, you who gave up everything
to keep yourself alive, you whose heart no longer pumps blood
like a living, breathing human who shouts and screams and loves
whose heart no longer means what Aristotle and Jesus Christ said it means,
you whose heart now does its job, and that job only. You're me.
Jan 28, 2016
Jan 28, 2016 at 10:13 AM UTC
#*Open your heart to some people
- The arteries go choke-a-block
Open your heart to some others
- Surgery they perform
- Bypass or stent
-The stunt
Choice is all yours*#
Jan 14, 2019
Jan 14, 2019 at 2:31 AM UTC
Two painful events led to a hospital
and a team of cardiologists, lots
of tests ensued, a plugged artery
in my heart they informed, a stent
procedure in a few days will hopefully
solve the problem and I can get back to
normal living, normalcy you see is a very
good thing. Not to be taken for granted.
Nov 2, 2024
Nov 2, 2024 at 8:20 PM UTC