Heartbreak – Anton Martin Smith Writer

by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com or martinantonsmith@gmail.com

Sometimes a dove is in your heart, but a cat is lurking – so it can’t come out right now.

Sometimes your heart is a flower unfolding, but the sun didn’t rise today.

Sometimes your heart is a drum, but no one can find the drumsticks anywhere.

Sometimes your heart has been stood on, squashed, flattened – but it’s really just waiting for resurrection.

Most of the time writing about…

Your own heart…

Or Someone else’s heart…

Namely it being broken etc –

Means you have probably written a fucking awful thing.

Because you’ve risked being just another bland asshole talking of ‘love”.

And it is because I know this, & so I let it be known, and I almost never write of things of the heart,

That you will know I mean it.

I promise you these are not ‘bland assholes love lyrics type 17a clause iii’.

I used to say you were cold hearted & perhaps I was right –

But to say ‘you’re cold hearted’ is a C- analysis not the A+ one.

For is it ‘cold-heartedness’ or is it ‘correct survival mechanisms of a battle hardened nervous system?’

But on that level, I know that I was more than ‘cold hearted’ too.

I hope both our hearts can still sing after all these years.

Perhaps a heart can still sing to itself while no one – including ourselves – is looking.

But perhaps our hearts sing to each other without us knowing.

This might happen while we are both asleep,

Perhaps out hearts are laughing, joking, dancing & drinking away.

They don’t care that we – the earth strapped ego people – no longer talk or see each other.

Our hearts know we are both like children and don’t know any better,

Than to always get in the way of ourselves & always ruin ‘what might be’.

Our hearts laugh at us, knowing we are such fools –

They know we’re missing out on a hell of a party down here.

And once in a million tries, the two dancing drunk hearts will make a breakthrough.

The human beings attached hear them party,

In that half awake half asleep dreamscape,

For a brief few moments we both feel that the other one is still there.

Yes this is a glorious thing,

But as I’m a greedy bastard, I’d still to see you in the flesh again.

But I don’t know if you will ever allow it.

But why should our disembodied hearts have all the fun?

It’s a simple good argument don’t you think?

And I know I can’t do anything right now other than cajole a few words from the dictionary,

Ask for some of the best ones to fall out,

Then re-order themselves perfectly,

Just to impress you a little.

I wonder if you will one day ever read this?

And I just overheard both of our hearts talking to each other while I was drowsy,

During the party they went outside for a quiet pow-wow,

I heard one of them say this to the other, & the other one nodded in agreement:

All they need to do is clink a glass, raise a smile, make some eye contact, and say hello.

The hearts are right – It is we fools that makes ‘matters of the heart’ become unsolved mysteries.

As a surprise – let’s be wise and follow their advice.

It could happen.

by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com

I have never wrote of heartbreak in any of my poems.

There will be a day when that comes – in fact now is as good as any.

I am probably a coward for not doing so earlier.

Their are many heartbreaks in life – but these are the three big ones:

Heartbreak of the Romantic kind – for the one you were ‘supposed to be with’ but it ‘seemingly cannot ever be’.

This type will not fade as the years and decades pass.

Next is Heartbreak of the Non-Romantic kind – perhaps the most common is the ‘disappearing/invisible parent’ of the seven to seventeen-year-old.

It might be a divorce thing, or they may be there but not present, or deeply betrayed the child.

This kind of Heartbreak I also believe does not really fade.

Next – the third type, another Non-Romantic Heartbreak is (as Jung famously mentioned) is that of the ‘unlived life’

Or more specifically it is:

‘The dispair of the Adult who realizes that their life is now proven (without a doubt via the ‘condemnation of the years’ effect) to be an an unlived, unfulfilled, un-potentiated one.

Jung mentioned that when a parent suffers from this, they take it out on the child –

‘It is the child that suffers most for the unlived life of the parent’.

But of course, this adult sufferer will also take it out on themselves in their inner minds – a personalized hellish torment.

The interesting thing is someone can suffer for not just three of these Prime Heartbreaks – but four if they had the additional wrath of an ‘unlived parent’ experience as a child.

And now I wonder if that ‘sufferer of four concurrent Prime heartbreaks’ is me.

And I wonder if that is also true for the other side of the Romantic Heartbreak – her.

Perhaps we had six Prime Heartbreaks between us both, and when we split together we created seventh & eighth.

And I wonder if that is why we resonated in a cosmic energetic unity for that short ‘lit-fuse year’ we were together.

All Theory aside, how does one keep ones aging chin up under these circumstances?

And of course I know their is no answer to this question –

There is only a half-answer:

Only the traditional only-half-working-one,

To remain stoic in the face of you forever falling down the ‘black chasm abyss’ for eternity.

i.e. The same one they used in WW1 – when you saw your best hometown mates head blown off by howitzer fire from one foot away.

And I think if one were to suffer all four Prime Heartbreaks, that would certainly qualify you for the analogy.

Yes Stoicism can’t actually truly save you if you suffer from three or four Prime ‘life-concurrent’ Heartbreaks.

Unfortunately – as the saying goes – ‘you’re on your own’.

And in closing I will separate out just one of my Prime Heartbreak’s,

The one who signifies seemingly forever romantic lost love.

She is surely the most important one of the different types – it feels that way.

She is after all why I wrote this poem right now, after so many years in mourning.

This is the one where my brain settles on only three bare words:

I. Miss. Her.

Or another song title way to put it would be:

“Heartbreak I Miss You”

‘The Brain’ must know that that’s all that really matters.

The-Professor-in-my-minds-eye says:

‘Heartbreak 101: Torment can make for good art and writing’ – by the way this is a compulsory paper’

Tag: Heartbreak

“Disembodied hearts (have all the fun?)” / (A Prose Poem)

“Heartbreak I Miss You” (A Prose Poem)