POETRY: Prisoners of the Heart

Today
I took a photo of my eye
And looking at that eye
With the very same eye
I reflected thus:

“The black dot
That place from which I see
Grows and Shrinks
Expands and Contracts
In relationship
To what’s trying to come in…

Kind of like the heart…”

And just as ephemeral
Emotions as light
For all of our pain
Was just caused
By photographs of ghosts
Floating past
Caught in the act
And as no knives birthed these wounds
It is they
That hold themselves intact

The sea anemones
Frightfully return to their hollow bases
At the slightest shadow or rogue touch
In the pulsing, churning, sea.
So too, tightens the heart
In the shadow of words or promised threat
On life’s cacophonous stage

To live this all
To feel
And not flee
To see
What pain really is.
For
What can hurt us,
Really,
In this game of passing clouds
Resting in movements and wind?

Why, oh why, do we crumple the mirror of the heart
To
Capturing the screaming images
Within
Locked in our own deepest depths,
Loyal to the pain
Imprisoning traumas
In self-involved cells
Hating them and claiming them
As our own

Yes
Make no mistake
It is we
Who hold our wounds dear
Prisoners of war and raging resentment
Whom
We cherish and despise at the same time
Armed to the teeth with fear
Captives
Loathed existence
Yet not allowed to die

Worst enemies
Held in highest contempts
Bound to our sore, sensitive, souls
Blind to see
That all they ever wanted
Was to re-enter The Void
To come back into flow
And gently dance themselves
Back
To their Mother’s home.