It is a long story. This is a short version:
I was about to die.
I was about to make room for new people.
My job was going to be the dream job
of someone who has been waiting for a break.
But I was stubborn; I was not sure I wanted to expire
and the doctors knew too much about death’s tricks,
so, I lived for a while longer, because, also, someone died
her heart was still beating.
So, in a barbarous display of art and cunning
the surgeons carved the dead woman’s chest
and cut her heart out for me.
The empty cavity of my chest waited like a yearning womb
like a bride at midnight, while the doctors held
in their obtuse machinery of death, the flicker of my life,
and the other person’s heart entered me, it filled my chest
and eagerly resumed its mandates of drums and cymbals
blowing, pumping, hissing, blindly loyal to the blood.
And in an instant the other person and I fused, bride and groom,
my life and her life, half in half, betrothed
surrendered to the mystery of electricity and flesh.
Carlos C. Gomez