it charms me to know
that you more or less embrace
me,
& my
tendency to overload my love letters

with unwieldy subordinate clauses &

chronically recombinant parenthetical asides

(let’s the two of us not even
delve into my penchant for jagged, staccato commas,
inserted for the express purpose of bracketing my repertoire of damp, anxious superlatives)

I like to imagine that you look at these with a grin & a half-hearted eye-roll
& generate
questions, questions

I will use a metaphor now (or is it a simile?) & say that you mow through them with
all the possible coordinates of action and variables
(there’s that word again)
at the ready,
inuring yrself to the faint charm of wish-thinking
&

I won’t quite say that I waste time trying to deduce yr motives
or next move,

but I have to confess that the contradiction inherent

in my wanting our love to be so intuitive
that the mere act
of
wanting it to be intuitive
would make it contrived

keeps me up some nights

even though I force myself to project an image of you
smiling sympathetically and telling me that
“it’s only a paradox,”

& that,
“even if it’s not,”
(as you adopt an expression of only partial-humor),


“who said anything about love?”

11/27/2011

Posted on 09/06/2012
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