I'm Trying to Break Your Heart--Siobhan O'Neill

I am Trying to Break Your Heart BY KEVIN YOUNG I am hoping to hang your head on my wall in shame— the slightest taxidermy thrills me. Fish forever leaping on the living-room wall— paperweights made from skulls of small animals. I want to wear your smile on my sleeve & break your heart like a horse or its leg. Weeks of being bucked off, then all at once, you're mine— Put me down. I want to call you thine to tattoo mercy along my knuckles. I assassin down the avenue I hope to have you forgotten by noon. To know you by your knees palsied by prayer. Loneliness is a science— consider the taxidermist's tender hands trying to keep from losing skin, the bobcat grin of the living. Young, Kevin. "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 1 Jan. 2008. Web. 11 Sept. 2014. This poem stuck with me particularly because of its "parallel-ness" so to speak to my life currently. Every teenager or young adult alike is experiencing a heart break, or will soon be heart broken. Perhaps it is our naivety to the concept of loving another person who isn't family or its out innate selfishness that catalyzes a broken heart, but either way they are inevitable. By personally having my heart broken my freshman year I know exactly of that raw feeling that is being incapsulated the poem I read by Kevin Young. His metaphor of power and ownership in a relationship to the workings of a taciturn are so graphic and like I said before, raw, it almost takes me straight back to freshman year. This poem focuses on a universal theme more than reflection the author's culture. A broken heart as well as a need to abstain from a broken heart is as common in Egypt as it is in Germany.