One almost tore away my wall
One almost said he chooses me
Another almost made me fall
One almost finally set me free

But almost only counts
in horseshoes and hand grenades
Fool's gold has luster
and sweet are borrowed serenades
You can't call it love
I'll call your bluff
because almost is only almost
and that's not enough

A roller coaster only climbing
missing the train by a minute's timing
A frozen bud in a snap of cold
An unfinished novel, story untold
A sentence fragment
A muddled accent
A pantomimed kiss
A swing and a miss
A pencil sketch
A warm up stretch
A suspended chord
A ringless lord
A lightning bolt, no rain or thunder
A child at play, no sense of wonder

Almost only counts
in horseshoes and hand grenades
Fool's gold has luster
and sweet are borrowed serenades
You can't call it love
I'll call your bluff
because almost is only almost
and that's not enough

I almost love you too
I almost let you in
I almost wish I was the one
I can almost begin again

And even if the words only almost rhyme
I only almost care by the end of the lines
While I could almost forget, in truth I find
that I will always remember how you were almost mine

You asked me my name in your first remark
We sat on opposite ends of a question mark
You were dashing - made me pause,
me, this independent clause
standing alone,
I made sense on my own
But I answered you anyway.

Ellipses.

Now you are the verb in my heart’s contraction
I am the subject and you are the action
An Interrogative with a Declarative reaction
An Exclamatory and then an Imperative attraction

Ellipses.

Your lips ease
Me, the direct object of your affection,
but never sentenced to an apostrophe’s possession
perhaps more true- a plural “s” suggestion
and the excitement behind an exclamation point’s inflection

The semi-colon understands
We can be on our own, but we want to stand
together
where our letters
aren’t fetters,
but the typesetter’s
better measure
of linguistic pleasure.

We communicate through metaphors and similes
Like the birds and the bees
We speak across homophone lines
to keep a census of our senses at all times
Because words said aloud have allowed
us to find meaning behind the utterance of sound-
mere words and phrases
jumping off of pages
into brain and heart and soul
when the parts become a whole

And with the syntax, punctuation, grammar, and usage
I’m a hopeless semantic always trying to ****** it
Language- yours I understand through the myriad.
Words can’t capture you. Period.