why I don’t write love poems
by Adam Messer
because on the mornings we wake up together I’m already spinning
like the start of a twister in late May. I get busy, and twenty-three pages into a botany
manual, already the roots begin to overflow. If I send hibiscus, if I send iris,
if I send vinca – I can try every hue and color but they’re
varying shades, all varying shades of reds and scarlets and
passion and maroons because this is what you do to me. Unavailing,
I digress to watercolors because at least they’re real like redwoods, dotting
myself with an opening to tell you what hums quietly inside, two inches
past the lungs. Significant shades of low-branch green and Pacific blue
press themselves to walls to doorframes to the windows stretched miles down
the coastline. At such spread the same colors seem more like prose
than an element, so we’re back to the start, and I mean it when I say endlessly.
Suddenly the world seems to exist in only headers and subtitles
because body text doesn’t provide the feeling and body text is reserved
to fill the spaces between your hands and mine, thighs and mine, your world and mine.
Titles are for the main ideas, but I think three “you”s and two “your”s are enough
to get the point across instead. I toil workshop and revise ‘til my eyes
must see if my hands are alive; by that point I’ve taken out everything
but your name, because you’re still the only thing I’ve got right.
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