Gonna write you a love poem

Title is a shout-out to Sarah Berellies' "Not Gonna Write You a Love Poem" which has rather become my anthem these days. This piece is best read aloud. 

Gonna Write You a Love Song

I keep meaning to write you a love poem where I liken you to the warm breeze of spring, or the sun setting across the soccer fields, or the smell of oranges.
I would like to write these poems for you because I think they're true and also
because I have promised them

To you.

Some days it seems poet and liar are two sides of the same sparkly coin.

My friend Kristen last night, told me she values her word above almost anything. I would like to keep the promises I make
To you. I would like
To draw them from the frozen ground like snow bells and trout lilies in the springtime.
My friend Mira says that people make decisions with three centers of the body: the mind, the heart and the gut. She tells me if these centers aren't in line I will break my promises.

It’s not that I lied about wanting to write you a love poem.
It’s just that the truth
Is one of those words I can never quite see straight on.
It blurs and spreads like ink under the spilled water on your freshly finished homework after I promised to be careful with the water near your freshly done homework.

I would like
To write you a love poem

About how your pen ink blurred and spilled across the paper like curry on your carpet that night we were watching Love Actually and you made me promise
To not spill curry on the carpet and sometimes I think my life could be seen as a list of
Foods I have spilled on other people’s
Valuables and sometimes I think our love

Is the edges of the spill,
Spreading outwards and turning your carpet a little green and making it smell a little of curry forever and
Even if we break up now your carpet will never be the same

I would like to write you a love poem
And that poem would be about how you are the springtime sunshine melting the ice of my heart And I would like
To stand on the frozen pond on the cusp of spring and not break through
But the ice is rotten and I think
Poet and bad listener may be two sides of the same sparkly coin and I think about how
I promised
To write you a love poem.
But first I have to get out of this ankle deep freezing cold water.

My feet have turned blue by the time I get out of the pond and
Then I have to tumble my socks dry and then there’s dinner and homework to think of
And I have made it out of the pond but somehow I
Left my promise to write you a love poem
Where my feet cracked through the ice.

I would like to write you a love poem on creamy paper
With a real actual calligraphy pen
But I spilled the ink and it got all over everything
My paper, my desk, my phone, my hands,

My hands

Are always
Smudged
With pen ink or with marker or with good, dark earth or with a dozen other things
I have spilled and then forgotten.
I have noticed
Your hands
Are always clean
Your nails spotless
And I know there’s a poem in the way your hands are as clear
As the sunlight climbing to the golden tree-tops to make room for the night to fall across the earth
I must be the night, forever chasing you in this metaphor
Forever promising
To write you a love poem and I think
You and the night are two sides of the same sparkly coin

Ice cream on my brother’s iphone
Peanut sauce in my mother’s fancy bag
Nail polish on my best friend’s kitchen table
Milk on my dance teacher’s cat
Salad dressing all over the MET Museum's front steps
Curry on your carpet

I promised to write you a love poem.