My heart, the
small one I
made all by
myself, then
put into a
small black
frame, which
once held a
photograph,
is hung on the
wall against which
the long side of my
bed abuts the right side,
that is, if I am lying on my
back, which is how I usually
lie (I don’t believe this was al-
ways the case, but I digress); it
is just above my pile of pillows,
flat against the wall, my heart,
which means that when I’m in my
bed, that is, if I am lying down in it,
my heart is just a small distance above
and an even shorter distance behind, my
right ear, every time I sleep, which is most
nights and a fairly good percentage of the day-
time hours, truth be told. So usually my heart is
right there, over me, every time I sleep, wherein
ofttimes I dream, sleeping and dreaming, dreaming
and sleeping, my heart, my pinkish paper heart, with
its blue background, silently hanging, flat against the
wall, framed in its black frame, it’s there, behind the
small rectangle of glass, where once there was a
photograph, just above my ear, right next to my
bed, where I spend most all of my sleep, and
an awful lot of the time when I am awake,
every night, every day, for over two and a
half years now, my pinkish heart that’s
cut from crinkled paper that gives it
the look of a small, heart-shaped
map of the terrain of some
pinkish locale, and it looks
down upon me as I sleep,
and as I dream; as I
sleep and dream,
dream and sleep,
my heart, as I write
these words, words that
are written with penmanship
so horrid, so quickly strewn across
the page, that I’ll scarce be able to de-
cipher them (of this I can now assuredly attest),
that heart, that pink and crumply heart, is now,
for the very first time, at least that I have ever not-
iced it doing, that pinkish, rough-hewn, topographical heart
is – it’s smiling at me, it is literally smiling at me, and it has
a nose, even, that heart, and it’s, well, it was just smiling at
me, I swear it was. But when I look at it now, which I am,
and I am looking at it intently, scrutinizing it, staring hard
at it, all focus is on my pink heart that is framed in black
with a blue background, and which sits flat against the
wall above the head of my bed, as I look at it now,
I kid you not, but that heart is no longer smiling!
in fact, that pinkish, amateur-looking, roughly-
surfaced heart has now, now has, a very
prominent and pronounced frown upon
it’s dimpled and pointy-chinned face.
