Found my heart on a shelf in your home

covered in dust, crumpled behind the piano

a poem

Tracked it across the land wide and brown

buried in cinnamon soil, overlooked by big gum and

charred bush

I know my heart drowned in the sparkling sea

where ozone and froth combine to churn diamond sand

into me

Sniffed out in the warm of your car’s cracked seats

the baked-biscuit-brown smell of hot vinyl

beats

It beats, it beats. I’m defeated

I can’t collect

All the pieces

at once

so I save my tears

in a leather sleeve

hoping

one day

for my heart’s cleave

Day 13 prompt (still catching up): write a poem in which the words or meaning of a familiar phrase get up-ended. I chose “home is where the heart is” as I’m travelling and seeing many people and places who hold pieces of my heart

While you’re in the hospital

I’ll eat fish n chips with your offspring in Subiaco

And it won’t seem real to either one of us

Don’t know when I’ll next see you

If you’ll be in the world or still cloistered

with that dim-somehow light of infirmary

which conveys an unreality

oddly yellowish and why must only

the meek in there expect a decent outcome

because out here they say

Go For It and Live Without Fear

and Dance Like No One’s Watching

but that wouldn’t be OK

because you’re high-risk for falls

while we

step easily

across the abyss of clouds and hours

to land safely in another father’s arms

Today’s prompt was write a poem of simultaneity – in which multiple things are happing at once. Since we’ve been here visiting my father-in-law in hospital, while also existing somehow as-normal, it is quite easy (and quite heartbreaking) for me to think about these two, very different, simultaneous realities.