Upon the scholar’s desk, where dusk’s last ember
fades into parchment dust and ink-stained gloom,
there squats a heart—yet not the heart we remember
from valentines or anatomist’s room.
No, this is older, forged in furnace-breath,
a bellows of rawhide, a wineskin of wrath,
its valves like ancient scrolls half-unrolled in death,
its chambers glowing with a molten aftermath.
See how the aorta twists, a serpent’s neck,
upthrust in arrogant, arterial pride,
while ventricles gape open—cavernous, wrecked—
a furnace-mouth where living coals reside.
The fire within is no mere metaphor’s spark;
it is the literal blaze of thought devoured,
the intellect’s own pyre, the mind’s remark
reduced to cinders, yet still fiercely powered.
Around this cardiac inferno lie
the casualties of knowledge: books unclasped,
their pages curled like tongues that try to cry
but choke on smoke. A rolled diploma, collapsed
beside a treatise torn in mid-debate,
its margins scorched where marginalia burned;
a lexicon lies open, desperate, late,
its definitions lost, its synonyms returned
to ash. The very air is thick with words
that once were weapons, now mere fluttering moths
drawn to the flame that eats the heart of birds
and scholars both—unquenchable, it quaffs
the oxygen of argument and proof.
Touch the pericardium: it is leather, tanned
by centuries of fevered contemplation,
ridged like the bark of some forbidden tree
whose fruit is understanding, whose damnation
is endless appetite. The coronary veins
are rivers of dark burgundy, congealed
yet pulsing faintly, as if memory still reigns
within the muscle, though the mind has yielded.
Listen: there is a sound, a wet, low roar,
the systole of fire, the diastole of sighs;
each beat exhales a syllable of lore
that dies upon the tongue of the enterprise.
The books inhale it, pages lifting, browned,
as if to drink the knowledge back again,
but flame is jealous, and the words are drowned
in heat that leaves no ash for mortal pen.
This is the heart of the autodidact’s doom:
to love the light so fiercely that it blinds,
to gorge on wisdom till the inner room
becomes a kiln where even truth unwinds.
Yet in the ruin there is majesty—
the organ, bloated, beautiful, obscene,
still pumps its lava through the artery
of its own making, a sovereign machine
that crowns itself with fire and with smoke,
and rules a kingdom of incinerate thought,
where every volume is a burning book
and every thought a coal that time forgot.
O heart, O hearth, O holocaust of mind,
you are the end of reading and the start
of something older than the human kind—
the primal hunger that devours the heart.
We stack our libraries against your glow,
but you outlast the paper, outlast the shelf;
you are the final footnote, the afterglow
of every scholar who consumed himself.
fades into parchment dust and ink-stained gloom,
there squats a heart—yet not the heart we remember
from valentines or anatomist’s room.
No, this is older, forged in furnace-breath,
a bellows of rawhide, a wineskin of wrath,
its valves like ancient scrolls half-unrolled in death,
its chambers glowing with a molten aftermath.
See how the aorta twists, a serpent’s neck,
upthrust in arrogant, arterial pride,
while ventricles gape open—cavernous, wrecked—
a furnace-mouth where living coals reside.
The fire within is no mere metaphor’s spark;
it is the literal blaze of thought devoured,
the intellect’s own pyre, the mind’s remark
reduced to cinders, yet still fiercely powered.
Around this cardiac inferno lie
the casualties of knowledge: books unclasped,
their pages curled like tongues that try to cry
but choke on smoke. A rolled diploma, collapsed
beside a treatise torn in mid-debate,
its margins scorched where marginalia burned;
a lexicon lies open, desperate, late,
its definitions lost, its synonyms returned
to ash. The very air is thick with words
that once were weapons, now mere fluttering moths
drawn to the flame that eats the heart of birds
and scholars both—unquenchable, it quaffs
the oxygen of argument and proof.
Touch the pericardium: it is leather, tanned
by centuries of fevered contemplation,
ridged like the bark of some forbidden tree
whose fruit is understanding, whose damnation
is endless appetite. The coronary veins
are rivers of dark burgundy, congealed
yet pulsing faintly, as if memory still reigns
within the muscle, though the mind has yielded.
Listen: there is a sound, a wet, low roar,
the systole of fire, the diastole of sighs;
each beat exhales a syllable of lore
that dies upon the tongue of the enterprise.
The books inhale it, pages lifting, browned,
as if to drink the knowledge back again,
but flame is jealous, and the words are drowned
in heat that leaves no ash for mortal pen.
This is the heart of the autodidact’s doom:
to love the light so fiercely that it blinds,
to gorge on wisdom till the inner room
becomes a kiln where even truth unwinds.
Yet in the ruin there is majesty—
the organ, bloated, beautiful, obscene,
still pumps its lava through the artery
of its own making, a sovereign machine
that crowns itself with fire and with smoke,
and rules a kingdom of incinerate thought,
where every volume is a burning book
and every thought a coal that time forgot.
O heart, O hearth, O holocaust of mind,
you are the end of reading and the start
of something older than the human kind—
the primal hunger that devours the heart.
We stack our libraries against your glow,
but you outlast the paper, outlast the shelf;
you are the final footnote, the afterglow
of every scholar who consumed himself.
The Sunday Circle