Verily! 'Tis Not A Pump
... but a doorway. A portal between worlds. A poem.
Laying down your head,
After a long dayโs work,
Unable to find calm and
caught in anxietyโs grip,
You take the measure of your hearts beating.
Recording it with the legalistic exactitude of a religious dogma,
The creed of a purpose filled life.
Indistinguishable from the strategies and tactics
Of war.
As if the bloods procession of your body
Is a military march,
Rather than the whirling dervish dance of torrential flood waters.
Keep time!
Keep time!
Do your work and fail me not.
Dear friend, a man with a regular heartbeat is as dead as the man with none.
You think the heart is a tool of industry?
You think it is on the clock?
Thou fool!
Keep watch and see how it rides upon murmuring wings.
Dances atop ocean waves in the cool light of an October full moon.
Curls and twines and twists at the fingertips of a vine
feeling its way through the forest undergrowth.
It strains not.
It finds no honour in deeds.
It is its good pleasure to sing sweet serenade songs
Of crimson passion to arterial rivers,
Whose blushing waters carry the soft scent
Of blooming red roses.
Memories of dreams that the body forgot
In its waking.
In its own marching
To the spirit of daylight.
Cursing sleep and the moon and the night
For its lack of purpose.
But the blood never ceases to dream.
The Blue Flower colours its streaming return,
Blue with a yearning that arose from such dreamings,
And wanderings upon Venusian pathways.
A yearning for the hearts warm embrace.
For the outstretched arms of Tannhรคuser Gate.
See now?
See how you have turned the temple over to bankers and business men?
Who declare that time is money.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Keep time!
Keep time!
Do your work and fail me not.
The living temple has become a lifeless factory.
Concrete walls, stale air,
And the putrid stench of death-grey smoke that
Chokes and wilts and siphons life.
And you? You slap haplessly at an alarm clock
That sets your heart racing at double time.
Rubbing the haze from smog filled eyes you realise that
another night has passed
in which you did not dream.



โAnother night has passed
In which you did not dreamโ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Are you familiar with Rudolf Steinerโs (admittedly kooky) physiological philosophy of the human heart? It sounds like you are, but it could be coincidence. There are physicians who have taken up his ideas and run with themโBertram Von Zabern is one in the USโand anthroposophic medical doctors regularly beat the cardiac drum of โThe heart is not a pump!โ
Anyway, thanks for a lovely meditation on the heart! I hope to learn this one off/by heart!