My Second Favorite Kind of Love…

…Unrequited. It’s a joke mostly, but a little bit… not?

How many millions of poets over thousands of years have pondered the concept of love? As life’s greatest gift, or it’s greatest curse when it leaves you without warning. As the very meaning of life itself.

I won’t propose to be any kind of expert on love but I do know it’s complicated. Not much of an insight, I know. Half the time someone falls in love and the other is oblivious, or simply not interested at all. And none of it’s really personal. It’s all just pheromones and timing and dumb luck.

So I’ve had my fair share of loves. It’s just that most of them have been unrequited. Ill advised and fleeting or else ill timed and silent. Or some sad combination thereof.

But in all honesty it felt better to feel strongly than to not feel anything at all. Maybe that love wasn’t meant to be but it’s still love and love is never not a beautiful thing. And feeling things, deeply and honestly. Well, at least it makes for some pretty good poetry.

***

You are not mine to write about

I have no more words for you

Because when I look in your eyes

I am swimming in soliloquies

I am floating in fables

I could write an epic

About your laugh and

Symphonies about the slope of your shoulders

Don’t dare touch my hand

Because I could spill sagas

About your hand

In mine

That blessed intertwine

But your fingers are not mine

To lace with my own

That seam will never be

You are

Nowhere near

Mine

Your name tastes like caramel in my mouth

A candy I cannot claim

So don’t ask questions

Please

Don’t expect my voice

Because I’m afraid all I could muster

Would be a song

To sing your praises

And it’s a song I cannot sing

It is out of my range

Which is to say

You are out of my reach

And someone else wrote the notes

Which is to say

You are tone deaf to my attention

So I have no more words for you

Because even if I did

I know you would be

Illiterate

To My I Love You.

***