Five single words, Pain, Peace, Torture, Joy and Love, stand at the head of five short stanzas, and each stanza reads like a dictionary entry for a feeling. The subject is lopsided love. One person gives everything and gets nothing back, while another accepts that devotion, enjoys it, and moves on to someone else. The central idea arrives in the last stanza: a single relationship can produce joy for one person and pain for the other, and love has to be defined as both at once.
The poem is built on alternating viewpoints. Stanzas one and three belong to the giver, the person "caring for her so deeply" and watching "your love with another man." Stanzas two and four belong to the receiver, who is "given all you want and need." The pronoun "you" shifts roles along the way, so the reader is made to stand on each side in turn. The effect is a seesaw, with Pain and Torture at one end and Peace and Joy at the other.
The rhyme scheme is the most clever part of the construction. In most stanzas the opening word anchors the sound: Pain closes on "gain" and "vain," Peace on "cease" and "feast," Joy on "boy" and "toy," and Love on "above" and "of." Torture, with "her" and "blur," shares only a looser final sound. Each stanza therefore ends by circling back to the word it began with, as if the feeling were a trap. The best example is the rhyme of "joy" with "toy." The happiness named in the heading turns out to depend on treating someone's heart as a plaything, and the sound of the word makes that point before the meaning does. The second and fourth lines of each stanza are unrhymed and loosely paced. There is no fixed metre, and the lines lengthen and shorten as in speech. The one-word headings work like a held breath before each statement.
The imagery is plain but sharp. In the third stanza the speaker's pain comes through the senses: "Hearing her laugh and seeing her smile / While your eyes water and blur." The cruelty is that her happiness is the very thing that hurts. The blur also suggests he can no longer see clearly the scene he is forced to watch. The second stanza has the oddest image, kindness as a "free buffet" on which someone can "feast." Read alone, the stanza seems warm, but "free" and "feast" suggest appetite and taking without paying. By the time the fourth stanza shows the "sweet and loyal boy" being dropped, the buffet looks like a warning. A casual, even slightly comic image has been given a sour edge.
The first stanza sets up the poem's accounting language with "so much to lose / and so little to gain." The final stanza goes back to that idea when it says "one side gets joy and laughter." The word "side" makes love sound like a contest with a scoreboard. Just before this the poem reaches for grand, vague language: love is "wonderfully special / Made from everything above." That lofty tone collapses in the last line, "The other's pain be made of." The inverted grammar of "be made of" is slightly strained, as if the sentence were being bent to land on the rhyme with "love." It reads like a speaker forcing out a bitter conclusion.
The title "Hand 2 Heart" is worth a second look. The numeral in place of "to" suggests the casual shorthand of text messages, which fits the poem's everyday voice. The phrase itself recalls a hand pressed to the chest as a sign of sincerity, and perhaps also the idea of handing your heart over to someone. These are inferences from the wording, but they match the poem's concern with what is offered and what is done with it.
The poem matters less for any single image than for the way its form argues with its message. Five parallel stanzas, each with the same shape and the same echoing rhyme, give the poem a feeling of order and fairness. The feelings inside them are anything but fair. The tidy structure sits against the uneven emotion, and that contrast carries the poem's complaint. It also never names a villain. It lets one cold word, "toy," do the judging.