My heart needs a valve grind

Hello folks,

I've been a bit crook lately.
It seems my heart is wanting to go on long service but as the very small business I am it's hard to give the poor bugger time off.

My heart keeps coming to me with catalogues with glossy pictures of paddocks where you can pat friendly horses or float along striped beach in solar hammocks.
I often wake to find little cut out pictures of setting sun's in Sicily or spring mornings, crisp with croissants from Croatia, sticky taped over my ribs.
I see my heart with his ear lodged in spiral shells listening to the swishing sound of loved ones on long distance lines.
He still (God Bless) video tapes Getaway and sings along with the jingle.
Sometimes I'll spot him with little grass skirt cut from discount flight coupons tied around his beating waist, having a little dance to old hula albums during coffee breaks.

Even we have have knock off beers on Friday my heart always manages to turn the conversation, in a very amusing and genial way, to topics of tropics.
We fill our glasses and talk of plane tickets, the strange customs of customs and how you can happily ignore a stranger for a 20 hr flight and excuse yourself for the professional rudeness of it all. (My heart says that the worse way to start a friendship is to be forced on each other. He reckons real friends always know when to piss off. I, it seems, am a lucky exception).

We will both laugh, look off into the pokie playing distance and speak a few words of our crap German that we learnt while sipping wine on the Rhine (way back in 1999) to our local Austrian born bar maid Esther.
Esther (who says that Australians would gladly give you the shirt off their backs and beam happily at you as they peeled off a cotton blend garment stinking of armpit and daytime telly. Germans, she says, would just buy you a new shirt) smiles at the two idiots trying to Lego together a foreign language for fun and tell us that as long as we only want to say "Attention! I beer! Sausage? Yes! Thanks sausage for you!" we will live like Prussian kings in the land of the well made train time table.

My heart and I laugh at such efficient humour and wish we were younger, that the bar maid's fella was brighter and nicer to her, then we both look at the Haig Whiskey clock and decide it's time for dinner and for another week to be documented under "over" in the ever expanding file of time and space.
My heart and I will then shake hands and thank each for another week of working together, another week of being baffled by brutal efficiency and mad octopus drum style therapies toted by leaders to fix up the messes made by the last crazy octopus we voted in.
Then he goes back to his chesty flat and I wander back to mine, sniffing at whatever flowers are having a quiet busk to the bees.

My heart is a good bloke. A real mate.
Whenever the chips have been down and the poop has been flung into the fan of destiny, my heart has always been there looking for the good things in life, lighting little kindling fires of compassion. (Especially after we've both had the Love Gas cut off by some character who slammed the door and clacked off in a high heeled huff to God knows where).

Lord knows I've taken my heart for granted for more years than I can remember.
I've put that poor bugger through some terrible stuff, things that laid the poor bastard on his back so he could only breath in small unbelieving gasps and barely cycle around his plasma route on the red cell bicycle we found in the paper.
I've put in him in some positions where all he could do was hang on to my ribcage with one hearty hand, dangling over an abyss of bad moves like some mad parody of Indiana Jones in that great Hollywood love story "Idiot goes bung again".
We both had times where we sat around bus stops, sipping at puddles in order not to pass out and offered to dance, sing, tell jokes what ever it took for the bus driver to cram us in amongst the crumpled luggage and get us the hell out of Dodge City before the Sheriff finds out we were sleeping with the Deputy.

But I've never heard a word of complaint from him.
He just smiles and says things like "Ahhh well mate. We live and learn don't we?" and puts on old blues music.
It seems as long as he has an old black dead dude having a electric whinge at him he's back on top by the third "My baby gone" lamentation. Amazing.

Good God...I've nearly choked the poor bastard with cheese, nearly snapped him in half trying to get fit, nearly made him explode with chemical dabblings.
I've taken him completely for granted, growled at him when he missed a beat, kept him in conditions that you wouldn't let a dog fart in.
Yet he's always there, pumping away, morning noon and night, adjusting the valves and regulating the curly tubes to keep me going, ever diligent, not asking for much other than an occasional affection, a funny movie and a chance to do his best.

I've even looked into going on life support so the poor bugger can have a bit of time away but my heart always smiles like a workaday Saint and says "I'll go next year when we can go together, mate. I'd miss you too much".

To be honest I think my heart is at the stage in his life where he has to share things in order to enjoy them.
We used to be able to do separate things. I used to just hand the reigns over to him and say "Go hard son!".
My Lord....you could write a million dollar book filled with our shenanigans, a marvellous film about the times when I'd just let my heart take me where he wanted to go.
We had some crazy times allright. Waking up in married in Italy. Dancing with our balls out in France. Hitchhiking to S.A in 1990 to see if you could falls asleep in the trees for a living. Sleeping in the car in Melbourne because we'd forgotten to get a house. Wandering up backwater creek systems and not daring to breath while a platypus Mum made her scurrying burrow three feet from us.

Great fun. I'm not sure if he missies it as much as I do. I suspect so. He's careful with his words my heart.
"Actions are the thing mate" he'll often say when caught in a fix "If you can't do it, ya mustn't really mean it".

I'd love to be able to shout my heart a Summer in Europe.
I'd love to buy him a flash velvet suit and let him wander up and down the canals, doing little show off drum solos for girls, being caught in wide eyed wonder as the people of foreign lands welcomed him in and made small nests of happiness for him to turn around and lie down in.
I'd love to be able to take him to some strange place, where language is long staccato music and music has no singing.
I'd love to row him out on the moon spotted lakes of some countries where people think thinking is better than drinking and dancing is nicer than drugs.

Maybe I will.
He's a hard bugger to surprise but, if I can one day at knock off drinks, I'll just slip him a couple tix for front row seats to life and let him go like a terrier after a tennis ball.

Mean while.....well.... we just need to sort of this gas bill and get our cholesterol down so we don't need to sit down and wait for the spinning got stop on our way back from the letter box.
Ahhhh.....Summer............


Mick "My heart goes boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom tikky boom boom boom" Dog.