never call your love poem "love" call it the hunter and the chinese apple call it the painted giraffe of Indiana don't raise people's expectations people will expect to fall in love when they read it give them a red herring trick them into reading yet another love poem

call your love poem I'm running away
to a cold continent
because nothing true is easy to say
call it grapes on a Tuesday
call it bitter almond if it's going poorly for you

never say love in a love poem
it's really not specific
say green sneakers say your hands
on the edge of the table always at dinner
as if it were a cliff
your small hands which betray you
and reveal that secretly you are always free
your hands which are warm on my waist
say I try to picture your eyes
and suddenly I am just hurtling through space
blind drunk on the cognac of you

say
lets move to the jungle and live on coconuts say
I want to turn into a circus octopus for you say
I am your eggshell I am your sashimi I am your
contemptible beluga caviar
served in an old empty paint can
rimmed in fire and rust
with a side of cartwheels

say
have some tea on this ordinary
day I picked and dried the leaves myself
I kept bees for your honey I fed them on lavender
the teapot I made myself by going to China
to study teapot making for seven years
because you once ordered tea at Pho' Pasteur

say I have been preparing for your
arrival even though
all the airlines had crashed into cities and
the trains had crashed into cows and
the wheel factories had all burned down
and someone else had broken both our legs

never write a love poem
because you make invisible things bright red
because you are taller than the sun
all of life is red and the sun is at our feet
and this is not a love poem
it is a leaf on a tree in the Black Forest
it is a piece of slate in Snowdonia
it is the painted dust of Kilimanjaro
the stars of this feature
are a hunter in green sneakers with a bottle of cognac
an apple from China that claims to be an eggshell
and a giraffe in a zoo in Indianapolis
who hates almonds and is
painted the exact colour
of your shoulder


-Tay

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