Love Poem

I, I as in me, speak of poems.
Speak of their stories,
Speak of their songs.
Their story, their song; their words,
effectively infinite.
Effectively, meaning there’s practically no end.
No end of combinations,
No end of endings,
No end of ideations.

I fell in love with the act of choosing.
Each word a hinge that turns the world a fraction of a degree,
until what I mean becomes what I meant and then something else entirely.
I love that I rhymed the line above, unintentionally,
and the one above this, a little more purposefully.
I love how rhythm can carry an idea as far as syntax,
how a phrase can return wearing new clothes and make me look again,
and make me wonder why it didn’t catch my eye the first time.
I love that I can bait and be baited, can play and be played with.
I can be the reader and the read, the page and the breath that crosses it.
Sometimes, I love that it refuses conclusion.
Every line wants to end, but every line also wants to live.

A word is a pulse with a beat that I can’t hear unless it wants to be heard,
and in my poem, I’ve the ears of an elephant.
Can I hear the beat because I’m the heart?
or is the heart pumping because I’m the beat?

I’ve spent an afternoon inside a single sentence.
Fractions of a millisecond inside a single sentence.
Weeks on a single word, because finding the word
is what would make it my poem.