You can take heart and take a thing to heart.
You can know by heart and have a change of it.
You can have someone after your own heart,
and on your own lose your heart to another.
You can have your heart in your mouth
and eat your heart out, or notice a hole already in it.
You can have your heart in the right or wrong place,
even worn on your sleeve, or set to rest, maybe there or elsewhere.
You can do a thing with the whole of it, say, heart and soul,
or not so much, say, halfheartedly.
Your heart's quite active so you have a heartbeat, but also
heartache, heartburn and heartbreak. What's worse,
you can have heart block, attack, and failure. What's better,
you can exercise it's pulse to avert or treat the previous pain.
You can be somebody's heartthrob, or celebrate one of your own.
You can be heart stricken or heartsick, and sometimes find things heartfelt,
more rarely heartrending. Some people you can find heartless,
but hardly yourself, not surprisingly.
You seek heartsease in your heartland but want not to be heart-free,
unless someone pulls too hard on your heartstrings. Of course
there's heartwarming and heart-whole, heart cherry and heart urchin,
even heartwood and heartworm, but no heartword; still, a word "heart."
So your word sits next to the heart of you, that most sensitive pump so central
to your persona as to sign and symbol tenderness or romance, yet so integral
to the source of the brain's need that without the heart, intelligence would be nothing.
So your heart's on dear terms with the word of you, taking center stage in the drama,
being laid bare and all. Still the vital thing, for any sensitive soul, you are your word.
Thus it can grieve the heart for the word to be rejected, judged wanting in some way.
That's the intimacy you notice when you look at the quandary contemplative posed,
yet that's not the end of it. Because beyond the word there dwells The Wording
at the heart of any creation, its mind, soul and spirit. That's the ultimacy of it.
