The Disconnected Heart

I’m a writer! Peter said so.

My first formal poetry course was an intensive month-long class when I was eighteen. During this class, something happened that changed my life. Dr. Lucchesi, who insisted we call him Peter and whom many students considered eccentric and cranky, wrote three simple words at the top of one of my poems: “You’re a writer.”

I’m not sure what he saw in those first pieces that I wrote between the ages of 18 and 20. They are not that good. They are overly dramatic, the words of a teenager, but they were based in true emotion. And to have someone I respected and feared as much as Peter tell me that I could do what he did, that I had potential… well, up until that point I had no idea that I even had any talent. He changed my life.

Now, I get paid to write professionally. Clear, crystallized communication is a core part of my job. That’s basically poetry. And obviously, I’m writing real poetry on the side.

God, I wonder if Peter would have been proud of me. I hope so.

Stream of consciousness

Sometimes when I am just waking up from a dream, I can do this thing where I intentionally talk to myself (inside my head) in a stream of consciousness. I guess it’s a form of lucid dreaming. I do not know where the words come from, and they don’t always make total sense, but they flow out of some part of my brain that is usually locked or hard to access when I’m fully conscious. It’s absolutely fascinating because I am not fully in control and I’m totally aware of it.

I managed to somehow get myself into that kind of headspace when I wrote this poem, and the whole thing just came out of my brain in a matter of minutes. It felt like I was disconnected from my own body, and watching myself write it. The words just flowed.

Anyway, this poem is called “The Disconnected Heart.” I was mad at the whole world and how little it feels I matter in the grand scheme of things. I often juxtapose imagery from deserts and northwestern rainforests as a kind of a metaphor for internal battles that I feel, the different sides of myself. You might also interpret it as a story about not getting what you want in life, and how sometimes when you DO finally get what you think you want, the disappointment can surprise you.

The Disconnected Heart

The disconnected heart drips a random light touch kiss
Borne from trickles of meaning, bits and bites

It doesn’t understand the implications of the water to the desert
A deluge wrung from rain and pines in such extravagant excess
And distilled into a single drop making its way unprotected
Through a long lost land of needle-sharp and cruel heat
That eats you from the outside in and inside out in equal measure

One concentrated drop, spread amongst poison bites of sage and scrub
And meant to sustain for seven full days of dry throats and hallucinations
So prickly and complex that even a deluge would not solve this problem
The succulents washed clean away with their shallow roots drowned by April

Because of course the reality doesn’t match the promise
And it never did, it never will, it never had the remotest ability
All the dreams of lost children and forevers and the ache of unshed tears
All of that vanished on a long highway out of the desert

The disconnected heart gave up, made its choice to stay out of sight
Behind a wet picket fence of unremarkable suburban accomplishments
Dripping its little breathy breezes of a remembered past into nothing special

While just one sweet drop could have been the thing that started it all
It would have dug in and propagated if the muse wasn’t a coward
And if the disconnected heart had enough fight inside to make it matter
But it didn’t.

It would have been worth it.