Broken Hearts

There are no mechanical replacements for broken hearts

No bypasses for a love betrayed or denied

Even when it feels like your chest has been cracked open

And your heart has been ripped out

All we can do is grow scar tissue

Become a little more cynical

In the realization that Hollywood is all about illusion

Camera tricks and crafty angles

Harlequins masquerading as the girl or boy next door

Because we don’t understand what love is

We don’t listen to those vows

About richer or poorer, sickness or health

Or if we do, we don’t believe them

Since we trust in the promise of happy endings

With stirring crescendos of romance uplifted into gossamer clouds

We have been indoctrinated with ideals

Fantasies of impossibilities

Unreal as any misproportioned Barbie doll

Or glossy airbrushed photo spread

So disappointment is a foregone conclusion

When we don’t measure up

To unmeasurable visions of dreams

Based not on love but greed

How can we when we are trained in selfish fantasies

Instead of hard realities

Dragged dirty through a thousand tragedies

Tarnished by time and fate

Until we no longer recognize the truth

Of mutual support and shared attention

Comfortable love whose soundtrack is heard through an open window

Elastic enough to bend, not break

 

 

David Trudel    ©  2013

 

 

Incision

This angry red line will fade

As will the slow burn of transient pain

Becoming a faint memory that I’ll laugh about

Dismissing the whole event as inconsequential

I’ll cavalierly gloss over the memory

Because it will be as forgotten as yesterday’s rain

But part of me will always live here

Remembering the truth of the thin white scar

How it was when it was raw red

When I was as vulnerable as any Old Testament offering

Finding cruel mercy in a scalpel’s edge

Learning that miracles come at a cost

Counted in a currency of suffering

 

 

David Trudel     ©  2013

 

 

Janus Place

This is a place of two directions

Where sounds are paired

Like a call and response

Chimes ring in softened doublets

Calling in twinned tones

This is a place of two intentions

Some entering to never leave again

Others here for healing and rebirth

A place of fear, pain and ultimate loss

A refuge for repair, healing and hope reclaimed

This is a place of mixed emotions

Where despairing sobs collide with laughter’s joy

Where elevators ascend to heaven and descend to hell

Carrying all, without the price of Charon’s coin

Into a timeless realm beyond the veil

 

 

David Trudel  © 2013

 

 

Surgery Day

Today I am having heart surgery to replace my aortic valve. For the past while I’ve been writing poems that allude to this and the stages I’ve been going through along the way.  I’m sure some folks are thinking that it’s kind of odd to write poetry about a health issue but I don’t believe poetry should just be confined to themes of love and beauty.  There seems to be a pervasive fear to discuss and write about our human frailties so I see this as an opportunity to explode this shibboleth through poetic self-expression.

 

I am blessed to be living in a country that has a public health system, where I am able to access excellent care for almost no cost.  I have every confidence in the medical staff at the Royal Jubilee Hospital here in Victoria and I’ll be attempting to take notes and continue to write through my convalescence.

 

Thank you for all the warm wishes,

 

Love to all,

 

David

 

 

Arrhythmic

My heart is not arrhythmic

At least not yet

It’s just the rhythms of my life that have been disrupted

By my heart’s treasonous murmur

I have shed the patterns of comfortable serenity

For trepidation set against anticipation

I make preparations for my convalescence

Without a backbeat

Not knowing the tempo of recovery

My heartstrings are slack-keyed

Waiting to be tuned

By a luthier of broken hearts

When I will be reset and rebooted into

Tick tock

Tick tock

Precision beats against the drumwall of my bloodied chest

Torn open but not asunder

My heart will be absolved of its imperfections

Given back its undercurrent of regularity

Rhythming into conformity with normalcy

Alive to light dancing across the sky

Tuned in to tidal ebbs and flows

Ever mindful of the fragility of now

And certainly forever

Never arrhythmic after playing a moment of time

Outside of time

Again, and again

And again

 

 

David Trudel       ©  2013

 

 

Haiku – July 10

Artery opened

Instructed not to keyboard

I use my left hand

 

 

David Trudel   © 2013

 

 

Angiogram/plasty

What to bring to hospital

According to the poorly photocopied instructions “what” includes

A translator

“If you do not understand English”

And since these instructions are in English it gives me pause to wonder

 

I don’t understand a lot of things

English or not

Maybe I should bring a translator of sacred mysteries, women, or hospitalese

 

I’m instructed not to wear nail polish, make-up, false eyelashes, hairpins or talcum powder

So no sympathetic Pride Parade cross dressing in the cards for this adventure

It is okay to wear face cream, deodorant and acrylic nails

Maybe I should rush out and get some face cream to wear

Just because it’s allowed

 

I’m advised I’ll have hair removed from my groin and/or wrist with a clipper

Slightly better than a hot wax treatment but about as appealing

Before I’m punctured

Allowing the passage of a fine tube into the blood vessel

There are no nerves inside the blood vessel

They tell me I won’t feel the passage of the tube

Carrying some fluid of an undisclosed nature

That will be mixed into the circulation allowing for a series of x-rays

Which will result in 3D images of the inside of my arteries

And the wall of my heart

I wonder if it will show the golden repairs that mark past heartbreaks

 

Major complications are rare

But the chance of stroke, embolic event, kidney failure, cardiac arrest or death

Is one in a thousand

Which is way better odds than the lottery I play but never win

 

A small patch dressing will be applied to the groin area

A sandbag will be placed over the dressing for pressure for approximately two hours

Interesting, in case of flooding I’ll be in a defensive posture

 

In case of any severe pain, malaise or fever report to the emergency department promptly, the discharge instructions state

Malaise is a pretty broad term

Not uncommon for poets and social commentators to encounter

I look forward to contacting the ER should I feel malaise afterwards

For philosophical discussions of an existential nature

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013

 

 

Sun Dance

It won’t be a sun dance for me

I won’t have my chest pierced with sinews

Or dance myself into revelations at the edge of coma

But I will deliver myself

To be cut open

My sacrificial heart will be lifted into the cold light

Of an operating room

The table will just be a table not an altar

There won’t be a biblical patriarch in attendance

Quoting hallucinatory admonitions

I do not embody the guilt of my ancestors

Yet I wonder how blood sacrifice came to be exalted

Priestly slaughter of innocents to satiate unknowable gods

I’m certain that the creatures slit open

In some bizarre ritual transference of guilty projections

Of shame

Of fear

Of hatred

Did not feel ennobled by the experience

Just hard done by

Like royal attendants walled up in the tombs of kings

Or victims of Aztec flower wars

Climbing to the top of some pyramid

To watch the sun glinting off an obsidian blade poised high

Before the downward thrust

It must take a lot of misplaced religious fervor

To overcome the realization that death is present

And soon you won’t be

More to the point, willingly

I wonder at the intensity of self-sacrifice

Allowing a suspension of flight or fight response to imminent threat

Choosing acquiescence to commands

Hoping that unbelievable assurances hide a shimmer of truth

Not a black hole of nothingness

Trusting in mysteries

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013

 

 

Pre Op Thoughts

I’d be going crazy if I was still living in some of those places

Like when I was an urban cliff dweller

Looking out at a forest of concrete and glass

Seeing forty thousand pairs of eyes looking back

Makes one a little squirrelly at the best of times

Let alone a few weeks before open heart surgery

Trying to wrap my head around that thought

So I appreciate my forest oasis at city’s edge

A small piece of ancient landscape left untouched

Where my feet can connect directly to bedrock

Resonating on a time scale of profundity

Where I can look out above treetops to the sky

Where I can consider the future from a far-seeing place

I play with alternate versions of the Chac Mool moment I’m on course for

A Stoic exercise of negative visualization

Asking what’s the worst that can happen

Then imagining how that would play out

In order to prepare a strategy of positivity

It’s strange since I don’t have any symptoms

I don’t feel sick

Quite the contrary, I feel better than I have for years

But I’m told a valve needs replacing

It’s a wonderful thing to be alive today, I think

In this world where medicine has become clairvoyant

Where heart valves can be manufactured and installed

Without missing a beat

Now I have a medical team

I am conveyed from one appointment to the next

Relentlessly lining up for ultrasounds and angiograms

Until the moment my chest will be opened and my heart repaired

My sternum will be wired back together

I’ll be stapled shut

There will be no heart attack in six months or a year

The only murmur I’ll hear will be the whisper of the sea

And the wind in the trees

Singing heart songs that I will listen to

With gratitude

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013

 

 

Symptoms

Have you experienced any shortness of breath?

 

No, while thinking sure

Every time a beautiful woman looks in my general direction

I’ve had my breath taken away enough

Enough to keep life interesting

 

I’ll take that as a no, he says

After my recitation of the home gym, walks and bike rides

 

Now I wonder

My fingertips seemed colder in those new gloves last winter

Was that a sign

Perhaps

Maybe there’s a bunch of shit I can blame on the faulty pump

Post op, that is

 

After that waking up moment

Through queasy fog

Time splinters rustling like wind chimes

Into the coming to in recovery

Where you realize you have more lines running into

And out of your body than there are lines on a gaff-rigged schooner

Pain, an explosion swaddled for now by morphine

Or something

But there

There, coiled like some viper biding their time

In the center of your chest

Through the haze you realize the battle has begun

So you deploy relentless optimism

Against enervated ennui

Every kind of discomfort imaginable

Until it gets better

Which it will and does

In time

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013