Poetry Dare: Day 9

This poetry dare thing has been an interesting experience for sure.  Sometimes, I find myself wondering what in the world I'm going to write about whereas other times I simply don't have a problem at all.  If nothing else, this has given me an incredible amount of practice, and it has made some of my work more efficient.  For example, today's poem hits not one, not two, but three separate reasons for writing a poem: a poetry club prompt, the prompt I posted yesterday (which can be found here), and my daily poetry dare requirement.  I'd like to then conclude that this poem has the power of three poems in one, but I'll leave that to others to decide.



I have a sickness
called
heartache. Its
symptoms include sleep,
silence, food but not for sustenance, only
because I want my guts to feel less
than empty, and isolation like
alone is the one word which
understands how my heart, with
its veins like red wires,
can feel so taut and tired.

I have a sickness
called
heartache. It is
a difficult disease to manage and,
sometimes, I fall for miracles cures like
I fall for women who offer the warmth
of their bed instead of the heat of their heart. I
find myself trying fads like diets, trying
to eat my heart out like change could come
packaged and wrapped, but calories can't
create change unless they
are put to use after their ingestion; I'm
open to suggestions for how to help
manage this sickness because
it may never go away, but I've got
to find a way to live life with survival
as an understood aspect and not
the only goal.

I have a sickness
called heartache; it
takes too much away; I've
discovered
a way
to fight back
with my feet and
movement. When
travelling in a vehicle, we
inherit the same speed
that the craft around us is moving. When
flying through the skies, our
heads are in the clouds, and we
can feel distance like looking
at the earth with the eyes of clouds
allows us to understand how small every
body is; how small each heart
contained within its skin
is.

This
sickness
called heartache is
best fought with the perspective
of movement, with
feet pushing against asphalt, with
muscles set in motion to
change direction, to set a rhythm, to
move veins with the inherited speed of my feet,
to pull my pulse, to breathe deeply, to
wick away sweat like anger could be poured out and
evaporate along with loneliness. This
is the cure I've come up with for heartache:
run.

Run, not away from these problems but
towards a solution; my heart may ache, yet
I don't want it to be because I slept or
spent too much time underneath the covers
of silence. I wake to make my heart
run.