Carsten René Nielsen:
Circles
(Prose poems, 1998)

The Heart

The heart is not a hollow muscular organ but a dog that leaps out of its pen, swallows a lesser of its species, and so is slowly choked, while astonished and coughing it staggers away with spit and gastric juices gushing from its jaws. Baudelaire wanted the heart to sleep like a beast: »Résigne-toi, mon coeur; dors ton sommeil de brute«, but the heart never sleeps: when even the animals have stripped down, it remembers the time when the forests still stood and shadows fell like trees.

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