Borrowed Heart, Unwritten Plague
Sterile dawn, surgery lights like judgment,
a man lies naked to the chest with hope for a future
beating on the edge of the knife.
Doctors move with the certainty of prophets—
scalpels dancing, gloves snapping,
every word measured to keep a secret from leaking into life.
A pig heart thuds quietly in a silver tray,
genes ghosted and tweaked to slip past the alarms in human flesh,
while nurses murmur prayers in code,
and anesthetists check vials,
and somewhere a mother clutches her phone,
desperate for any news less grim, less fresh.
Incisions cut through decades of waiting,
every stitch is a wager written in blood and high design,
because the body doesn’t care for miracles or headlines—
only if the pump keeps time.
Machine sings, suction whines,
and the surgeon’s hands hover—
can you really trick death with a beast’s muscle sewn under the bone?
A thousand years since pigs were gods and omens,
now their organs ride across borders, past quarantine,
to nest in the hollows of the desperate and alone.
Microbes drifting in the bright white silence,
patient zero unaware that his last chance
might be the world’s first new curse,
because every boundary broken is a question unasked,
a hunger unrehearsed.
Wake up shivering, chest raw as lightning,
bandages blooming with antiseptic and sweat.
The man hears the pulse and wonders:
is it gratitude or terror, this rhythm he can’t forget?
But in the hush between heartbeats, something stirs,
a tremor in the blood that no one named.
Every breath could be a warning,
every fever the birth of a new fear.
Down the ward, another patient waits for a miracle,
watching the news and the rain in the glass.
Lab techs scan for shadows—virus, prion,
hitchhiker tangled in a strand.
The pig lived in a bubble, the man behind plastic,
but one misstep, one unseen code,
and contagion walks hand in hand.
A world where nothing is sacred—
not borders, not bodies, not the line between farm and flesh.
Just a mother at the bedside,
a scientist at the monitor,
a nurse with a cross tattooed on her wrist,
each one hoping the crisis will pass.
But in the pulse and the hush,
in the deep ache after miracle,
there’s a silence that will not let go—
a thousand prayers that what’s borrowed
won’t cost more than any of us ever wanted to know.
Borrowed heart, untested fire.
Hope and dread in equal measure spin the wire.
Blood learns new music, but sings old pain.
Every beat’s a bargain, every breath a chain.
Pray what lives in the marrow sleeps unseen,
and what wakes in the dark stays between
pig and man, blade and bone,
because some debts are paid in plagues we bear alone.