CARA ADDLEMAN

A Love Poem

You told me to write a love poem. So I smiled and told you I’m not much of a love poet, that I don’t like the way that emotion sounds when I try to show it. I told you I’d rather not.

I’d rather end sentences with the weight of a full stop than a line break or some empty words that don’t quite hit the semantic spot. I told you I needed a plot.

Needed the space and security that circles the weight of that dot and the box the margin makes for my emotions.

But for you I have tried to write a love poem.

This is a poem of love for the technicalities of writing a love poem, and this is a sonnet, a seduction, a celebration of the throat-caught, word-choking, love-hoping writer’s block.

This is a lament for the paper-cut funny bone of love’s ticking clock, and this is the sound my brain makes when it tries to speak of what it cannot.

I hope you like it. I hope you see the remnants of technicalities. I hope you think of me.

I do not wish to spite mere indulgence but you told me to write as though conducting a fight, a rejoice of on-drip love-sick plight, something Shakespearean-bear like. Something that is, not something quite.

You told me to write and this is my proof that I have tried.

But I have never viewed love through the gilded haze and violent elegance of other’s people’s eyes. I have always wondered why those others seemed so surprised that love was not rose-tinted.

I have viewed love through the soft and viscous hum of second tries, the space left after goodbyes, and the gentle grey of an argument about something that has now been forgotten, something never important enough to have become that which it comprised.

I have viewed love through shared cups of tea and yellow walls,