Coeur D'etat
after Daniel Borzutsky’s “The Heart Is a Lonely Perineum”

The heart will stop beating itself up when it gets bored.
Normally, its abysmal self-image stymies any chance it has
to learn Thai stick fighting or mob-style interrogation tactics,

but give it a few moments of peace and all the plastic sunglasses
you own shatter, the shampoos crumple, the red pistachios blanch
from its pick-a-lolly-and-don’t-pay stylings. What a sonic

sneak attack! Like a shark whose blood-sniffing life depends
on constant motion, even a tic or two each second, to keep
from drowning like a brain-dead hunk of meat,

so the heart depends on its day job at the factory pulling
levers and yanking the hoses to go glub-glub. Maybe
the Greeks wrote a myth about how the heart offended Hera

and she banished it to the dankest cavern of all, the human
ribcage, and it’s doing time until eternity’s up and its name
is called and it defends against a panel of all the great judges:

constellations, parents. Exes. The disappointed teachers
who thought you’d be a chemist. They thank the body kindly
for hosting the rigorous task. They were in on the gang-violence

to the heart’s self-image. They orchestrated the kidnapping,
the getaway car, the bribed juries. They knew, left alone,
it would metastasize, rally youths, infect whole nations.