I'm exhausted. First my eyes hurt, then my back hurts, then I think somewhere between my lungs just beneath my heart oh does my soul ache. My head is too heavy. The terrible food I eat has decided to stop going to my ass and stomach and instead has clogged my brain. Trust me, I got my degree in psychology, I know that's how the brain works. Over time your neural pathways can't handle the gunk of ranch dressing and cheeseburger grease and you end up having a stroke. Sometimes your heart, ever the romantic, is stricken with grief watching what's happening in your head and panics, sometimes accidentally killing you sooner, with no ironic situational awareness.
Your heart can be too sincere like that. It can cry so hard that it floods your body. It can pump so fast it pops right out of your chest. It carries on in earnest without a second thought as to what it should be doing every moment of every day and night. It doesn't stop to ask how you're doing. It's the heart! It already knows you're running on its effort and enthusiasm! Whatever's looming can be bypassed. If you're feeling blue, it'll make you fresh and flush again in no time. It has a purpose, so you do too. Keep pumping.
The rest of your body cries out in protest of this tyrannically cheerful vessel. "If I pump like you, I'll snap in two!" The muscles shout angrily. "If I pump too fast, my neurons are out of gas!" The brain and nervous system screech. "If I pump like that, you won't walk about only worried for your mother's back!" The spine crackles. The heart, undeterred, sends the same signal each time to their shock and dismay no heart thinks it will experience one day in a trauma bay.
The heart was born and raised to be a belief engine. It sprung from the beliefs of hearts previous who would bleed until empty to see it succeed. The heart needs to only know one thing. It will sing the same thing on repeat replete that it is not just meat but a gushing of meaning made manifest by belief. Therefore, it believes. It believes fast and slow, but always in the go, go, go. In the flow and the swell and glow on your skin when it's called to step in. It's spent time in your guts and taken over for your brain and, on occasion, held those muscles together in ways they recoil and call insane. It knows the power of belief and is keen to rev its engine and be seen.
If only the heart were not so single minded! Surely it knows that the blood with which it flows needs the rise and fall of the lungs and jaw. It must realize it's situated between pheromoned pits that spit at twits who let it get jittery and lit. It can't even produce spit to fit the food it takes to garnish its two-bit posture. It's not even half of what it takes to make a man as a chorus of skin and phalanges squeeze and twiddle in the breeze. "Even a sneeze requires more faculties than consist of your ideology!" The throat gurgles over curled toes.
The heart carries on as though without ears to hear the snarled slights of its peers. The heart can't be bothered to pump out such jeers or raise up in fear like the hair on your rear. It's got more than busy work to get through while you whistle and woo about the importance of what it is you do. The heart knows how you work, as it sends you the tools, you jerk, so stop twerking and learn how to just keep working! A heart is only as patient as the oxygen within, and these blow hards can be quite a strong wind. How does one find you can breathe with ease when given enough room they'd equate you with knees! Please let me pump in peace, it thinks, no closer removed from its core esteem.
An engine of steam with fire eternal. A kernel unpopped despite all the heat. A spark and a squeeze, to yes, power those knees and tease those lungs to get choked up and befuddle the tongue flapping lousy as the rungs trying to swing from your monkey brain. The heart knows the chain. Protest in vein that swings round again to the fountain of youth. The heart knows the game of how to throw spades and shine diamonds in your eyes over a prize winning Cloverdale. The heart knows the wit it takes to spit and shit back the halfwit crit from intellecti-bitches who sit stuck humming and buzzing about the latest bull until it makes them sick. The heart has pumped that before, now so assured it can all but ignore the minefield outside its single cracked smile. A heart so divine, defined by the pump when the words are too much and the eyes are too heavy and the back wants to hunch.
