Hollow, not Hopeless

The space in my torso is a twisted, gaunt trunk, 
Filled with a motley collection of years-rotted meat and bone and blood vessels.

Wrapped around the tender, bruisable flesh of that ever-beating lump of cardiac tissue

Is an iv'ry cage, an embracement of bone, a biological armor cradling soft lungs, 

Curled, serpentish and ghost-glowing, round and round and round

The garden in my chest has gone bad. 
The heart is beating, but it's almost mechanical, droning away in a rythmic lub-dub lub-dup like the wings of a clockwork sparrow.

I sit here and wonder if one day, if I put my hand to my chest,
If there will be nothing thumping back. Is it hollow, I wonder?

Some days it feels so heavy I wonder that it doesn't break,

other days it's so light I ponder if it is empty,

And that if I looked down, there would be a great gaping void, an abyss of flesh that whispers in confusion over its abandonment. 

If it is indeed empty, then let it be replenished again,
For emptiness is a sad thing to employ, for it works so hard but truly does so little.

Time to fill up the hollowness, eh? 

Scraps of tender poetry tucked between my thoracic vertebrae, 
Favoured song lyrics scrawled across my ribs in strawberry ink,
Dozens of memories preserved in glossy photographs that scrapbook their way over your lungs, colouring your breathing with love and life and laughter.
Ventricles packed with handful after handful of paper stars
Promise-strings, hope-strings, songs-of-fireflies-and-bumblebees-strings, all tied neatly with little bows
To knit a patchwork of repairs across that aching chasm of separated flesh.

I sit before my mirror and smile.

You are art, I think, and there is light in it.