my heart never closes

my heart never closes

was the first name I came up with

for my second memoir,

which I soon retitled

the book of friends and aesthetics ―

to make its contents clear at a glance,

and as an homage to milan kundera,

whose penchant for folding together

deep thoughts on philosophy and culture

with tableaux vivant of interesting characters

had been a big influence on me back then―

and I wrote to about page 125 or so

over the course of the first year or two

of the 21st century, about my time

in olympia in the 1990s, and then I had to

mothball that project permanently,

once freelance writing assignments ―

and stay-at-home parenting primarily―

sucked away my time and energy

and ability to plan creative projects

that required the integration of big, disparate pieces.

I still have the boxed-up notes

to potentially finish that book one day,

but that’s not the point to this poem.

that original title has never left my head,

like a self-made halo I just can’t shake.

every artistic cut we inflict for pragmatic reasons

haunts us like an unworshipped saint.

as much as the long term patterns that anchor our art

are religious rituals, so is the detritus at our feet

the key dogmatic foundation, powerful exactly because

its apocryphal and piecemeal nature

makes it undefinable and thus

exponentially multivalent.

and of course we constantly do use

disparate pieces to create ― integrating together

seamlessly both new and old, large and small,

cerebral and just plain aesthetically pleasing elements ―

because the god that dogs us

barks the command:

show the world that my face

is made up of junk,

so that all hearts will always be open

to what’s forgotten and broken.