Corazon

It pumps blood

But not love

And though flooded

With toxins

Of noxious

Too often

And so like

The forbidden fruit

Becomes rotten

When serpentine

Inamoratas

Besotted

Betray it,

Delay its

Carotid

From reaching the brain

Where innate tendencies

Conflate infatuation

With fate’s

Meant to be’s

And pulse-pounding

Decrees

Of the tightening squeeze

And the ease in which

One more attack

Cardiac

Seems to break it

And render it

Barely intact

But it keeps beating on

With each stroke

Of arrest

Testing it

Till its limits

Burst out of your chest

Or unless

It is ripped from it

Like the Aztecs