By Charles Sabukewicz
Many years he lived
with a whisper in his blood,
a cloudy, troubling hiss
in the knocking in his chest.
Waiting for sleep he’d listen
to his heart repeat “I am”
with heroic imperfection,
a lisp in a scarred valve.
Now he’s apprehensive
of fault lines on a graph,
an instrument recording
the measure he has left
of electrical potential,
voltaic properties,
necessary signals
for a surgeon to proceed
by careful intervention
to calm such dissonance
and stop the volume lost
with every lightning flash.
