The Six Times My Heart Broke
by and published in Edition Two of Pomegranate
The first time my heart broke was in an elephant graveyard. The elephant skulls looked like urinals with tusks. ‘Why have you brought me to this elephant graveyard?’ I asked. ‘It’s not working out,’ she said. ‘You love me more than I love you. I thought the elephant carcasses made a nice backdrop.’
The second time my heart broke was in the middle of the second take of an action sequence in a heist movie. ‘That wasn’t in the script,’ I said to my co-star. ‘I know,’ she replied, and we cowered behind the car door for a series of controlled explosions.
The third time my heart broke I had my heart removed and replaced by a donor heart. I dipped my former heart into a container of liquid nitrogen and dropped it onto a paving slab where it smashed. ‘Art project,’ I explained to a pedestrian.
The fourth time my heart broke was when I swept up the shards of my frozen heart and carried them in a coolbox to a nearby gallery, but while I was chatting with the gallery owner, a dog used his nose to dislodge the coolbox lid and ate the heart. ‘Maybe we could exhibit the turd,’ suggested the gallery owner.
The fifth time my heart broke was when the dog turd that was once my heart was sealed in a glass container and purchased by an elite terrorist group, exhibited as an example of Western decadence – being an especially odious example of our cultural life – and used to recruit car bombers, one of whom obliterated my penpal while he was drafting a response to my overly-critical review of his first novel.
The sixth time my heart broke I was working out my donor heart by swimming laps in a crater full of rainwater. ‘I have nothing to say,’ said a boy standing at the edge of the crater. ‘Or nobody wants to hear it, anyway.’ I wanted to yell and tell him not to get discouraged, but I had swallowed a duck call and so could only quack. He left and never painted the triptych he was supposed to.
Luke Kennard
Luke Kennard achieved brief notoriety when he became the youngest poet ever to be shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2007. This was for his second collection ‘The Harbour Beyond the Movie’. He is also the youngest poet to suffer from “old man’s leg” each morning – a condition which can take up to an hour of pacing around swearing to overcome. He is currently writing his PhD thesis on the prose poem at the University of Exeter.