No one understands the shortcomings of words better than I
Their irrevocable price of tongue and heart
Fragments of phrases slip through my futile fingers
Grasping at the threads tangled across languages

Intricate perplexing aggravating
As a shoelace-knot of a sentence
Shallow entangling ensnaring
As a spiderweb of speech

Impaired by the limitations of expression
Further subjected to inequivalence in hollow translations
Rendering me to scrawl in desperate-blue
ink words reminiscent of my love for you.

i'm prone to doubt
so i kept a list
of each and every moment
that my heart (mind)
asked me if i loved them
until the entries were too numerous to deny
and all that was left
was yearning
and an answer i could trace
in real time

I was going to compose a parallel poem
mirroring the ways you show you care
but you have made it evident
that I will never be your home.

You would
thoughtfully answer my never-ending stream of questions
carry me to bed with a blissful blanket of sleep and softness
grant me the honor of wearing anything you owned, and smile at my choices
actively correspond with me, more in the span of a few weeks than your standard for a lifetime
trust me to take care of your bright-green banana-of-a-boy
assist and twist and crack my spine further
track and plot my heartrate to find a trend in tempo and tone
and always provide the nearness I need to breathe
and feel
and be
myself.

I did not need to pen a poem
to know that you care, albeit reticent
but you have made it evident
that I will never be your home.

If a boy falls in love with a boy
and no one is around to hear it
does the boy really love at all?

But once the sound carries
and electrical pulses transfer
encoded messages are decrypted
and interpretation can never be taken back

But reign in the words
and clutch them tightly to your chest
and bite your tongue lest they escape
and interpretation can never be taken back

If a boy falls in love with a boy
and he does not want to hear it
was there ever any love at all?