Immobilized Hearts

Beginning in January, I'll be posting a series of four short stories and a novella entitled, "Skewed Portraits." Until then, I'll fill with a few boring prose poetry/essays. This one was written in response to an assignment in which the professor asked us to finish the statement, "To immobilize your heart on account of its longings running contrary to form . . . " So - here goes :)

Immobilized Hearts

To immobilize my heart on account of its longings running contrary to form is to obstruct my essence, to dance to a deaf man's music. And who is the deaf man to write the music for me? He cannot hear my longings, loosed in the rhythm of my soul, or even, with his hand against my heart, feel the cadence which drives my next step. He is oblivious, insensible to my inner world, as he is unaware of his own. Who is the man who cannot hear his own euphony to form the structure of mine?

Whose forum, then, forms the form that determines my longings? Certainly, it is not the deaf man’s forum. Perhaps it is the forum of those who comprehend the difference between longing and lust. Lust being an unbridled hunger. Longing, a persistent hope. Perhaps it is only those who know the difference who can loose the longing and lay waste the lust. But then, who would compose this forum? And is there a composer in all the world who could arrange an aria for me?

Every virtuoso breathes the vitality of his own melody cascading through the river of his being. I must create the score myself, searching out my own longings and discarding the lusts that would infect and immobilize my symphony. My heart cannot be immobilized, nor my essence obstructed! Silence my lusts, I will, but not my longings. I have to hear them pulse. I have to respond to their rhythm and twirl to their tempo and caress every cadence which comprises me. Or else I die, and my music with me. The deaf man has formed my fate.