Last bastion

Dimly remembered celebrity chefs shuffle
down the cold and darkened highways of the heart.
They are the last personality left. They are the meek
who inherited the heart, what was left of it.
Without food to cook in new or exciting ways
nor audience to gasp and cackle, the chefs
of the heart quietly waste away while staring
doe-eyed into now-empty Safeway windows
checking under the dusty produce shelves
for something they pray the rats haven’t found yet.

Years ago, the economy of the heart boomed
and there was food everywhere. Produce
piled high in pyramids of devotion, meat in
gilded glass cases opulent under fluorescence,
dairy which ran like the mythical river toward
cereals hot and cold. Under it all, thrumming
like great stone wheels on sand under a hot sun
near a river where reeds sang in the wind
the heart produced and gave reward for hard labor.

No one knows when it all ended. No one can say
if it was the heart that dried up or the heart’s supply.
Either way, food of the heart became scarcer and scarcer.
People began dying, not of starvation
but of a certain facial expression that could only
be described as desperation. Now
all that are left are the celebrity chefs, last bastion
of a once mighty empire of the heart
are reduced to husks blown dry by wind.