I ask what your favourite word is.

You say you don’t have one, and
I don’t understand.

See. I’m a poet.

I tried hard not to be,
Rejected it with every
Fibre of who I am but
Words form in ways I can’t
Negate.

See,

You speak and I notice
There’s more in what you say than
You know.

Your voice is delicate,
Not in the way you sound words
But the way you phrase sentences,
Like the subject is something to be
hidden behind premises.
Some people grab chance by the throat,
****** you right into the center,
Until you’re drowning in meaning
And unable to listen to anything but the
Beat,
B-,
Beat,
Of your heart but

Not you.

I can respect that.

You’re all tact and logic and
It’s not about feeling
It’s about thought process and

I still don’t understand.

See, my tongue is clumsy,
It stutters and stumbles and smashes its way through life,

But it finds meaning where there isn’t any,
Notes how you say “Spoke”, not “talked”,
How you dance through every word in the English language because
Deciding on the right one
Has to be perfect.

I think that,
You are perfect.

My favourite word is puddle.

I don’t know why, but
When I say it, my tongue kicks
my teeth and
It reminds me of the way my
Consonants get heavier with
******* in my brain.
It makes language ridiculous,
Because the end of its vowel is so sudden
It should cut
But it’s so ******* round.

Puddle.

I can’t explain, not in words,
But I smile when you say it and
I promise you that sometimes
language is less about logic
And more about that feeling
in your gut
When you look
at me and verbs flow out of your mouth
And for once you’re not thinking
And, -

"I love you."

If you thought, it wouldn’t be true and -

"I love you."

Cogs whir to a halt and,

"I love you."

I don’t trust you for a second because
My mind is now skipping stones across oceans
Waiting for depth to show, yet
There’s nothing below,

but still,

Sail away with me.

Let’s leave language behind and use touch to define
The borders between where I start
And you stop.

We’ll find they’re less obvious than we’d thought,

Because I love you.

Not in the way that I say it but
In the way that your presence makes my stomach churn out musical notes
And I was broken, but I don’t want to seem desperate and
I guess that when you say you that don’t have a favourite
I realise,
Puddle’s a scapegoat.

My favourite word is whatever name you’d give for the
Goosebumps on your skin when I touch you.

My favourite word is the colour of your eyes.

My favourite word is the way your voice goes real high when you’re excited.

My favourite word is how I can feel where you touched my flesh, for days after we last met.

My favourite word

Is you

But I’m too shy to say it.

So here, take puddle,

And run away with it.