Most people know the feeling of wanting two opposite things at once. In "Heart to head," lauray turns that tug-of-war into eight short lines, and the result is less a debate than a slow tightening of the screws. The title echoes the familiar phrase "heart-to-heart," a frank conversation between two people, but here nobody is really listening. Heart and head state their positions in turn, like two people speaking past each other in the same room.
The poem runs on repetition. Three of its four couplets begin "My heart…" and "My head…", and the grammar is kept so close that only the opposites change: "right" against "wrong," "stay" against "leave." Matched this tightly, the lines start to feel like a seesaw. The heart is always named first and the head second, so the head sounds like a reply, a contradiction. The speaker is hardly visible between them. The only "I" appears in the first couplet, as the thing being argued over, and the poem never says what the speaker is right or wrong about. That gap helps the poem, because any reader can fill it with their own situation.
The most interesting move comes in the second couplet. We expect the head to be the cool, rational one, but lauray gives it the same verb as the heart: "yearns." The head doesn't just advise, it longs, and what it longs for is "you being gone." That line is also the first to run long, seven syllables against its partner's five, as if the clumsy phrase were dragging its feet. Notice too that "you" appears in both lines. Even the wish for absence can't be spoken without the beloved sitting inside the sentence. The poem's quiet irony is that to get rid of someone, the head must keep thinking about them. Both halves of the speaker are fixed on the same person and want opposite outcomes.
Rhyme is mostly held back. "Right/wrong," "you/gone" and "stay/leave" don't chime within their couplets, which keeps the poem sounding like speech rather than song. But "wrong" and "gone" echo each other across the first two stanzas, so that being wrong and being left are quietly linked. The only real near-rhyme arrives in the final line, where "free" and "breathe" share a long vowel. That small click of sound gives the ending a finality the earlier couplets deliberately lack.
The last stanza also breaks the pattern. "Decided to forget you:" has no subject at all. The decision isn't credited to the heart, the head or even "I," and the missing subject makes it sound like something that simply happened, the way a decision does when you are worn down. The colon then works like a hinge between the choice and its cost. The verdict, "My head's free, my heart can't breathe," is built from plain contractions, the voice of someone too tired for ornament. "Free" suggests the head had been held captive by memory, and "can't breathe" shows the price of its release. Anatomically it is the lungs that breathe, not the heart, but emotionally the image is exact. It matches the tightness in the chest that people describe after a loss.
The order changes here too. In every earlier couplet the heart speaks first, but in the final line the head comes first and the heart gets the last word. The head may win the decision, yet the poem ends on the heart's distress.
Heart against head is one of the oldest ideas in poems about love, and it could easily have felt worn out. What lifts this version is its refusal to name a victor. Forgetting is not presented as a cure, only as a trade: one part of the speaker is relieved while another is suffocated, and neither version of the speaker is whole. The poem gets there with almost no explanation, using pattern, one well-placed break in that pattern, and a single physical image. For a student of poetry, it shows how much a small form can carry when every repetition is doing a job.