As Shakespeare said:
“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack”
Yet the heart breaks so faintly.
The one organ supposed to pump blood
bleeds with rotten emotion and ripped sanity.
To the size of a fist yet a major regulator,
no wonder clenching feels so suffocating.
It convulses beneath cages of bone,
bruising itself against ribs that cannot console it.
Strange how flesh can harbor catastrophes
quieter than funerals.
Arteries pulse like frantic apologies,
veins carry remnants of names
the body should have forgotten by now.
And still it beats;
stubborn, pathetic, almost feral—
dragging grief through the bloodstream
as though sorrow were oxygen.
Perhaps that is the cruelest design of it all:
the heart does not shatter dramatically.
It decays slowly,
chamber by chamber,
until even silence develops a pulse.
Until the body learns to survive
on emotional hemorrhage.
Until insomnia settles beneath the sternum
like a second heartbeat.
Every palpitation becomes a eulogy,
every breath an act of reluctant endurance.
The lungs expand,
yet never enough to rid the chest
of its phantom heaviness.
And somewhere between systole and diastole,
grief roots itself into muscle memory—
parasitic, unwavering, immortal.
Perhaps that is why mourning exhausts the body so cruelly;
the organs cannot distinguish
between love and disease.
Both invade quietly.
Both consume from within.
Both leave the ribs hollowed like abandoned cathedrals.
Still, the heart persists in its brutality,
beating through collapse,
forcing life into a body
that no longer knows what to do with it.
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