My Heart is Travelling Again

My heart is travelling again,

Walking down my ribs like stairs,

Thumping along the floorboards,

Promenading through an empty hall and

Into a crowded room.

People bump into me

Like my heart once bumped against my chest,

And now lounges somewhere deep below

And a little to the left.

I race out of the room and into the sky,

If I am to catch my heart—

To seal it in bone,

To hide it at home,

To make it my own—

I must beat what beats in me.

Here the gardens are untended, but

There is no trace of the bloodied stars

Dripping from the chambers of my heart.

A ladder appears; it leads to the moon.

I climb.

I follow my heart. I must get it back.

Into the night, I do not look back.

The night is one empty eye,

The half-mast moon its pupil.

Pierced on the celestial bone is my heart

Bleeding stars.

And the eye twinkles.

My heart paints the galaxies

With little beads of blood

That glimmer. I wink

With my right eye, and in my left,

A reflection of the stars shimmer.

I stand on the ladder with one eye closed and

The other turned to the heavens.

Above me is my heart, below me, my home,

And inside me: billions of stars.