Of Hearts That Don’t Break | Mahima Kapoor

This is not a poem about my broken heart,
It could never be, because hearts can’t be broken,
Especially not by people who think they have
Mastered the art of picking up the organ,
Caressing its arteries and veins, making them familiar
To the texture of callous hands and hardened fingers,
Leaving bruises all along the pumping membrane,
Inflicting tiny cuts to the protruding vessels of blood,
And in time sucking out all of that blood, leaving nothing
To be cleaned and sent back to the rest of the body,
But this is your illusion, all of it, from the moment
You decided you were sure it was a fragile membrane
That you could just puncture a hole in with your
Mere fingers, like you did to my external body,
Leaving marks of the hands that I was sure would never
Hurt me, but they did, and you were so sure that
The blackened bumps would be enough to ensure
That my heart would be injured in the process too,
But it was all your illusion, and the blood that you decided
Was yours to drain, just like the shrieking cries that you had
Declared were yours to pull out of my mouth with each
Breath that I took, was another part of your illusion,
Because physical cries and welts you could
Torture me with, but my heart you could never touch,
And when you decided you would keep my heart
In a jar, away from my body, you forgot that
It had been locked inside my ribcage, beating loud,
And louder, and louder now, and what you thought was
The sound of it crumbling into pieces inside the jar,
Was just the sound of the glass exploding into the
Tiniest of shards, because my heart cannot be contained
Away from its home, the intricately carved network
Of the veins with furiously hot blood flowing in them,
Not when every bone that you broke was ready
To build itself anew, and every scar that you left
Was fading into a mark of winning a battle,
And you see, my heart cannot help but beat for me.

Indian Review | Literature, Poetry and Art Magazine | Author | Mahima Kapoor writes for Indian Review. Read and share the joy of literature

Mahima Kapoor is a student of English Literature from India, a self-professed poet with a forth-coming publication in Mulberry Forks Review. She is socially awkward, an avid reader, and a player of words, and thinks that that’s a wonderful amalgamation to be found in a human