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121 Gospel of the Famous Heart The artist who tried to get the museum to display a white, used urinal is dead. But that urinal into which so many pent-up souls released, went on show, signed, labeled, non-odorific and dry. So we turn into art. Maybe living’s a kind of art? Maybe i could remove this thing from its bone cage, and send it freeze-dried to the New York Society of independent Artists, labeled “My Heart,” but then i’d need a replacement. in China they think the brain’s the seat of passion, not the heart, but since this is America i could shop for one at oh My Heart down at the medical mall, steel hearts with plastic valves, stainless and digitally regular, porcelain hearts with rubber aortas, pretty but easily shattered, even flesh hearts like clenched fists, that old technology the salesman steers me away from while looking askance at the moist chamber open in my chest. Meanwhile, back in my life, i’ve survived the divorce, though it still bites when i read my old poems and have to say words that have ceased to pertain, such as “My Wife.” She had it tough deciding whether to love me or not, like that artist who designed his Paris apartment so the front entrance and the bathroom shared one door—she hinged back-and-forth, stay-or-leave, duty-passion-friendship-sex for years, and when she finally went i felt all my futures had slammed shut, latched, locked, bolted and barred, but tried to live with an open heart, and wrote it down to control the hurt, open-and-shut, open-and-shut, as long as the valves do that i’ll stay alive, wet, cherry-red and pumping. You want to see my drained grey heart behind glass like a skinned dove? i’m sorry, it’s my birthday and a woman wearing red lingerie has just come into the room, and i’m getting distracted. i love her, she is shaking her heart-shaped ass at me and she says, “Come out of your head!” And you, reading this poem, you don’t get to join us in bed, where liquid yellow candlelight shivers on two bodies hinging open-and-shut, pulse at the neck, red tongues—it’s my birthday, not yours, the door is locked, and you are standing outside, paparazzi at an opening, hoping to catch a glimpse of the famous heart. ...

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