It's three AM.
He's awake, sitting up in bed
with his heart beating in his hands.
He opens it up with a jagged scissors' edge,
and like Pandora's box,
a maze of himself pours out, vast and undecipherable.
With long pianist's fingers he sifts through the debris;
dust and darkness accumulating beneath his fingernails.
Suddenly, in his heart's mess,
he touches upon a stone, round and smooth.
This rock, his core, this thing of all things of himself.
Impulsively he cracks it against his bedside table,
like an egg against a bowl.
The crack splinters and splits and shudders violently,
then, a moment of the clearest silence, and
the stone of his heart bursts with golden flame.
