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Drum Drum Beating – Poem by Katherine Bennett

Muffled but heavy, the drums play an unsteady beat

Although it is the thing that that keeps me on my feet, a reward for each time I breathe

My chest it quakes, it aches of uncertainty

Of unreliability

It hums as it drums. A buzz in the distance, that is three inches deep inside my ribs, the power generator servicing me below the surface

It beats there in its place, shaking, close to breaking as it thumps awake each beat

A glass chandelier almost smashing, a block of ice that is cracking

It doesn’t hurt it just sits, waiting, hovering, unfading

Its loudness grows quiet over time, losing focus, but time to time it growls back like thunder

An earthquake, a storm that showers metal.

Terrifyingly unapologetic, remorseless

I am walking on a tight rope, trembling

The weak muscles are in my heart and not my legs. Why do they feel so numb? Why am I so fragile?

The balance is the lungs themselves, as I breathe every breath with contempt, not quite regret

Pulling oxygen into my veins, against the struggle of the heart

My heart, red and bloody and always beating, contrasting the feeing of the block of ice, that it is

My heart is my humanity?

It doesn’t feel so trustworthy, it doesn’t feel like my sanity

It is an isolation that is suffocating me

Often, I even feel angry, but I push those feelings away, and breathe

And when the beats fade, the furnace inside me does too, the unwanted irate hotness that makes me want to heave

The stress and the sweat and dizzy head

I yearn to hear the silence from the drums that are always drum drum drumming

I swallow as my chest tightens

The continuum of palpitations

My solution, conclusion, stop breathing

I try to remind myself that I am alive not only because I am breathing

I am just a state of being, I am existing, despite it

I won’t stop breathing, but if I did, the drum would stop it’s banging.

One held breath away

My heart won’t stop beating. Drum drum beati-