Heartlessness

HEARTLESSNESS

In Sydney,
a donor - first
catatonic, then dead
- some body’s person!

His heart cut loose
- still beating -
bloody strong
as it hit the ice!

Surgeons lobbed
the good heart in
packed ice in an Esky,
battened the lid with metal braces
and flew it, ‘Express’ ...
to Melbourne...

They knew their thrust:
waste heart to be recycled
- come what who pays

- and in Melbourne
'Badheart’ waited.

At Tullamarine,
Police waited for an Esky.
Policecar lit the Freeway
blue with sirens on Signal 8
through Moonee Ponds:

Must short-time one heart
from airlift to operation.
Emergency! A man might die!
Pull all stops out for a heart!

In the Policecar Sergeant Duty
& Constable Geewizz
Surgeon Ambition & Sister Makename
nursed a metal Esky...

made a speedway of
the freeway not done
at END FREEWAY signs:

The wheelspin
made a heartbeat,
for the one in the Esky
in them all.

North Melbourne: no freeway.
Midday traffic! They slowed.
Felt the beat doubly slow.
Sergeant Duty sirened Faster!

Needed Heart for hospital,
Hospital for the heart.
“Shit Move!” Ambition cried!
...so Duty drove harder...

Parked cars sped past.
Housefronts fled by.
The T-junct came up too quick.
And Duty lost it!

The Copcar flipped,
and a powerpole came in.
In an iron-embracing
Gush.

In slow replay:
Duty died pulp between
engineblock and powerpole.

Geewizz’s armpit
was quarried all the way thru’
- by the scoop of a parked-car’s open door.

Sister Makename slumped forward.
Her door-edge-severed head
wired by veins across the Esky.

And the Esky still whole!

In a metal mangle, stuck
in spotlights of windscreen shard,
surgeon Ambition flinched...

Ambition shocked passersby
with bits of life!

Shocked to a single sentence
he bristled with speech:
“Get the heart out!”

He ordered the Ambulancemen:
“GET THE HEÃRT!”


But they didn’t know whose.

1990 © Wayne David Knoll

First published 1993 in “ Compost of Dreams
Wayne Knoll,

Fusion Arts Colony Malmsbury Vic 3446

Also published in 'Studio' Magazine 1994.

Rooted back in faith again, I return to the heartwood of my making. And I believe more than ever in the one Great Heart which increases ours as other-softened hearts which allows respect for the Image to its full tenderness in sacrelised humanity. But, this ticker of an action poem beats with something else. Written in Melbourne while visiting from Trentham, when a real striker like this happened. I think The News told of smashed-up emergency vehicle that killed a number while carrying a kidney loosed toa free radical in an iron box.