Three Locks

"I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three." - Elayne Boosler

These days when I leave my house
I place my heart in a glass bowl on my coffee table.
It is not that I don't like to take it out into the world with me
It is just that when you wear yours like I do
strapped to my chest like a bullet proof vest
you discover quickly it is messy
and easily broken.

And I can think of a thousand other scraps
of bone, tissue, and organs
more valuable to give to those I love
than this pulpy mass
of perforated tissue.

I never stopped learning to play the part of the hero
Stared down an army of girls toting Tommy guns
in stilettos
just to say that I loved them and survived it.
A little wiser for the way the wind
has made a whistle of my chest.

But I've learned that my heart is an organ
built to circulate
and not stay still
and it is always pulling me in oppositional directions.

Learned through trails and errors
about its puppeteer ways
how it pulls me about by marionette veins.
A ventriloquist hidden behind the stage rafters of my ribs
and velvet curtains of my breasts.

In the safety of my locked apartment it waits each day
until I come home
and tell it stories of the million times or more
it might have fallen in love with everything and everyone
it sees.

And I am aware that some day
I will come through that door
and a woman will be waiting for me
a stiff martini in one hand
and my last pack of cigarettes in the other.

She will crush them
telling me I was a fool
to think of poisoning something
so beautiful and carefree.

And since I don't have my heart with me
to set it free
like a carrier pigeon and send her word that I am coming
I will use my tongue instead,
a collection of muscles stronger than my heart
to conjure her into existence.

She will love me fragile fierce
and tender tenacious.
And her entire body will be a poem
that I will never be clever enough to capture.

She will use those her hands to
hold me upright when I am shaky
and feel like my chest wall is a mine shaft
caving into its own darkness.

She will wrap palms full of desire around my waist while we
dance,
laugh too loudly - a sonar signal for me to find my way to her in a crowded bar,
cling to my jaw with her fingerprints when she kisses me,
Grip my body with strength and admiration
to bend my knees to my shoulders while I bring her children
scream mewling into this world.

She will understand the panic pain I feel when my parents
have become collections of ash and memento adorning my temple walls.
She will know how to touch me and make my body a
cathedral built of sound and gooseflesh.
She will worship rivers for their wisdom
always leading to an ocean somewhere
a wild place
bucking and swaying
against everything hard that tries to keep her
landlocked.

She will know the value of the home we have built together
never to stray too far away without being able to find her way back to me.
She will think twice about locked doors
and how multiples of three are sacred truths to me.
So when I come home that day
to three locks loaded like a gun
ready to fire all blanks built of bravado in my face-

And she is waiting for me
I will not be surprised
at the smell of gun powder
singing in her hair
or the lock picks
dangling from her wrists.

I will know then
that hearts are not for keeping
but for giving away
as mine beats a rhythm
sounding the click and slide
of each tumbler bowing
for her entrance.