Cartesian Quandary (original poem)

I wear my heart on my sleeve and hope a seagull doesn’t swoop down

and pick it up, or peck at it like a bagel.

When I brush up against a stranger to get to my seat in a crowded movie theater,

I hope a piece of my aortic valve doesn’t get knocked off my cable-knit sweater

and into someone’s bucket of popcorn.

René Descartes said “I think therefore I am”

but does the mind-body dualism account for feeling?

For love and heartache stitched onto the outside of my forearm?

With a heart on the sleeve, where does the brain go?On the pant leg? In the shoe?

When my heart hangs from my sleeve by one of its mixed cotton threads,

do I not truly exist?

In the contorted Cartesian world,

I feel, therefore I am not.

I am not a carefully packaged vessel of flesh and bone and blood.

My organs find a way to flee, and flood, and mesh and mold.

My own existence is inverted, like negative space.

Then how come I feel so full?