Rehab

We wear harnesses like crossing guards. In a pouch over the heart, over stent and bypass, a black box with leads pressed onto metal nipples. We pedal and tread and row while our signals are picked up by antennas on the ceiling, X’s like the eyes cartoonists give the dead. Angels of telemetry with vials of nitro watch over us. We beam to their monitors now a barn dance, now a moonwalk. They cuff us and pump and we keep on so tomorrow will live off today. Nurse, we won’t forget the animated video of our cholesterol highway where LDL, black-hatted scowling donut holes on wheels, blocked traffic. But with muscles like gutta-percha, can we leave time’s gurney in the dust? By now only the dead know more about gravity than we do. In reply, a tape of Little Richard or Jerry Lee comes on and we’re singing, aloud or not, all pale infarcted pedalers, rowers, treadmillers, and our hearts are rising in the east.