“Every heart starts with a crack, And every beating it gave and took, And couldn’t take back. Every heart starts with a crack.”
Why am I starting today’s Behind The Lines with a different poem other than the one in the featured image?. Well this is where ” Heart under attack” started.
One poem just turned into another. I couldn’t get any more distance out of the above but I did like the way it used “beating” in a couple of different ways and that even the sound of the word “crack” sounds like something breaking whilst we are also pre-conditioned to associates hearts starting with a beat and not that contradictory phrasing.
In today’s second poem from Unreconciled Doors, the subject is my own tell tale heart.
Building from the embryonic “Every Heart” fragment, I tried to vocalise the sound of a life-sized unexpected emotional eruption and to put on a page how it felt to be at it’s epicentre (Yes I am bags of fun!!) .I also wanted to convey that sad sense of -didn’t see said parting of the ways coming.
This poem relates to a specific summer’s morning a few years ago, when ,out of the clear blue sky, I realised that a relationship I was in,(and all in) was over. The other person knew it, their family knew it, but I was left as that character in the carriage of the carousel when the carnival had closed (Elvis Costello’s/Roy Orbison’s “The Comedians” says it better than I ever could-what a tune).
“The beating over”-this could be perceived as the heart stopping/ the emotional beating of estrangement /the heart skipping a beat as love skipped town/ the “dawning” realisation….or it could be all of those-which is what I found delicious about the enigmatic phrasing.
“Radiation” and “Vacation” are probably a clichéd rhyme but I wanted to use another word for heat or sun and both evoked this feeling-and in particular how they contrasted with the altogether frosty and sparse “Leaving’s colder” in the line that precedes them.
The phrase “Loose Lips sink ships” was on my mind-maybe too many history documentaries-and this is where “loosened lips” came from.
I then needed a finish for the poem, so, counter-intuitively-I went back to start.
“It might be black, it might be cracked”
This repetition of the opening couplet was a good book-end, but, it needed something else.
There was a terrible freedom in the situation our poet had found himself in inside this poem, so I pondered how to best symbolise this.Freedom got me thinking on synonyms for it and Liberty and it’s bell came to mind.
I thought that this was perfect -somewhere in the town square of this turmoil was a bell ringing-a cracked bell calling it’s pitiful disciple to tearful prayer-
“Like a distant bell from an unknown hell”.
Thank you all for reading along today and every day with Behind the Lines.
I feel honoured to share my work.Just a note as I have had some comments on the Algo Instagram page, on Word Press and via email, which I really appreciate-I am fine-I am very happy with my life and live my own way. I recognise that this may not be clear in some of the subject matter that my work contains however!!.
If my work which deals with issues and situations that I have encountered on my journey resonates, then brilliant-That’s a job well done for a poet!!!- and if it helps inspire, makes sense to you, or helps people make peace with themselves or others, or shows that they are not alone in how they feel on a given day, then I am delighted!!.
Take care of each other,
Algo
Unreconciled Doors was released in Kindle format yesterday for $€£ 0.99
If you like and if you can, having being delighted by this daily dose of dissonance, maybe Buy Me a Coffee please ,or even better, buy Unreconciled Doors, so you can read along with Behind the Lines!
Algo Poetry-Behind the Lines 