Hollowing the Foundation

by Christopher Munde

When a scientist slides a piece of a heart
Under a microscope, he finds it still beats
On its own, just like the poets said but never believed;

“The name you were saying in your sleep. Who is she?”

There is an ossuary in
The Czech Republic decked with forty-thousand human skeletons. There is
A chandelier of the remains of entire people, and a looming pile of
Only skulls, in the Czech Republic there is a Jonathan, a skull
With a stained molar

The manifestations are everywhere now

A glass exists, outside one’s head, so polished it can isolate
A metaphor: this is the moment our voices are excised
Finally, and dissected; there are pans small enough to drop wet ideas and
secrets
Into, thoughts squirming independently outside the death croak, barren of
secrets
Now, the croak of each voice passing stiffer into a stiff breeze, what it is
to lose heart:

“If you weren’t dreaming of her, why say it? I don’t dream,
personally, but that’s me.”

When a man slides a piece of his own heart beneath a microscope, he excises
His name, he asks his wife to retrieve it and when she glimpses the beating
In the Petrie dish, she thinks of how it is the image of her love for him isolated
In flesh, and she turns to him to say so, to profess proof that love is no more a belief,

The void of mystery dies with the certainty of void

But her voice was left, insulated by the knowing, at the hearth
Of knowing, the croak secreted as dry air, and only his name bleating in her throat as love briefly
Was given shape, every element conceivable, dragged to light: mystery exorcised

If I asked which one was Jonathan I’d be missing
The point of a dry monolith of exposure

“The more I find out, the worse…and worse…You’re like them all”

The knife I only dreamt aloud is metal in my brains

There is beauty in consistency, in others’
Bones arranged as furniture, but there is a skull
In the Czech Republic with a cigarette-stained molar
And the more they see you,
Jon, the more they take your shape
Away from you, out from your
Deepest clay

Our voices don’t need us

There is an ossuary

In a piece of heart

Click here to read more poems.