Your Heart is a Radio

Don't put a name to my heart, that will only change it. By calling it something, you negate its possibility to be anything. My heart is and can be everything but can also be nothing. Don't tell me what it is because it will have already changed by the time you are done naming it. It will become what that name is not. It will shrink away from all pigeonholes and fill any space it likes, become any color or sound. In Paris, God told me my heart was a radio and it shied away, became a road. In Berlin, an artist told me my heart was a spoke but it smiled and grew antlers, chewed cud. When I was walking in the vineyard, my mother tried in broken Spanish to say that my heart would have to break before it would grow. My heart grew unbearably warm, filling itself with blood and fluid, desperately working all that evening and night to patch its own cracks. We are wrong to name things, to change things with the act of labeling. It is a sign of our hubris and the source of our agony. Birds do not have names for their wings yet they still know what their wings are, they know better than anyone what the essence of each wing is. Our problems arise in agreeing on what our own words mean. In the future, there will be no words. Evolution will favor those born without tongues, the ability to speak being an overwhelming weakness in the survival of the fittest. Burning books will no longer signify tyrannical censorship but a spiritual catharsis, releasing oneself from the burden of definitions. We will know the purpose of our souls as thoroughly as we know the purpose of our fingernails. Until then, I'd like us to sit still, saying nothing and listening to our own ribs thump against our breasts. Lets stare at each other's shoulders, see the hairs rise on our necks when we feel each other's touch, smell the sweat that drips off our elbows and into thin air. I'd like us to think not in words but, for the first time, feel what it is to be human while not having to name ourselves human. And there, as the wind draws us closer still, we can tremble together awaiting a place where our own hearts make sense without words.