"Any lover who waits for his girl to make the running
has too much faith in his own
Irresistible charms. The first approaches, the pleading,
Are the man’s concern: her place
is to hear his smooth line with kindness. To win her, ask her:
She’s dying to be asked."

"

Light touches the wooden floor of my foyer
like you touch me, not the other way around.

When I close my eyes and think of you,
I think of how small you make me feel
when we’re holding each other like we’re
sleeping steady in a silverware drawer.

Your hands are like these poinsettia petals
and I still don’t know how to write you this poem.

— O, only the desperate stay up this late; alone.
January; the moon is moving farther away by the hour
and it’s tied hearts around its tail like wedding cans.
The year has been consummated and the new moon is
paving a road for another year and I can’t help but
wonder if this will be our last.

I’m reading a book that translates directly into the scent of honeysuckles.
It takes me to that night, post-rain, in the summertime,
when moonlight spilled out from streetlight jugs and I wished
that you’d kissed me goodnight.

I still wonder why you didn’t. I still wonder why I didn’t.

There are certain things I’m truing to understand
like why my heart lurches at the end of every poem and why
my heart lurches at the end of every kiss,
but I’m starting to think that they’re made up of the same things.

I’m replicating your touch and making a list of all the reasons
why I like your hands better than all the others but all I can
get to is “You’re beautiful and I’m falling for your knuckles.”

I’m new to all of this. Still unsure of what temperature our skin
creates when we’re sitting on a fallen log and you’re blowing
smoke rings out from behind my ear,

still unsure of what to do when we lay besides each other and
our limbs are having conversations of their own while we
lay silently watching black and white films.

These are smaller than poems and they have
been written by hundreds before me and a hundred more
will tell you the same thing, but I hope you know that
when I ask you where you’ve been in this world,
what I really mean is if you’d like to see it all
with me.

"

"Why does one poor lover fasten a noose round his neck, and swing - depressing load -
From the roofbeam, or another run a sword through his gizzard?
You, Love, you peace-lover, you get blamed for their slaughter."

"Offered a place in the sky between Castor and Pollux, I’d still say
No. What’s heaven worth minus you?"

"I think that when you fall in love with someone, every single day you spend with them you fall in love with them even more. It’s like you find something else to love about them everyday. The way they laugh, the way they sneeze, even the way they blink. I think that’s how relationships last. When things are exciting, everyday you spend with that person is like an adventure into their soul."

"The same sense of the transcendental arises in the experience that inspired Plato. The experience of falling in love. This, too, is a human universal, and it is an experience of the strangest kind. The face and body of the beloved are imbued with the intensest life, but in one crucial respect, they are like the body of someone dead: they seem not to belong in the everyday world. Poets have expended thousands of words on this experience, which no words seem entirely to capture."

"It is the same with Love. Play stubborn, you get a far more thorough
Going over than those that admit they’re hooked.
So I’m coming clean, Cupid: here I am, your latest victim,
Hands raised in surrender. Do what you like with me."

"We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with her there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time."