fragment

a broken heart

is not a shard

lodged ticking in the chest

like the shrapnel of a timebomb
or a lie confessed

to be righted
or explained
or summed up

it is mute and
gapingly limbless
and cannot  chase
the hours backward
for the story has been told

ignited
inflamed
and burnt up

and the fading, empty echos
brand a senseless moral
into a numbstruck brain
so ice the pain
and sit suspended in shock

a broken heart
cannot explode 

or disintegrate

or drift into precipitate

of rust or dust or scars

it is the silent corrosion

buried in an ocean as

vast as a blank  watchface

beyond this empty, windswept place

that beats in the pulsastion-

the faded reverberation-

of an extinct and ashen star.