The Middle-Age Heart-Weight
Science, now perfected for mandatory
use, waits for every 45-year-old
citizen at malls and city centers.
The plump pump doesn't need
plumbing out from the chest cavity
to scale as perhaps one might
have wished in dreams decades,
centuries, millennia ago.
If through x-rays the surrounding
organs don't crowd each other
or crush to accommodate the pounding
love mound or if the sound-pound
meter doesn't rumble true compassion,
the whole body and brain will need
aligning for more precise training:
Terrorized hunger and lonely care
rest on a table for two, three, four.
Technology has advanced enough
to drop at villain and average-Joe
soles the good news beyond CPR
to tenderness, consolation, charity.
"the yellow-footed beings holds the mirror to the bathing-suited man's face while the other puts his hand in the man's chest, removes his heart, and places it on a scale." -- George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
