If I Were A Love Poet
“I want you to bite my lip until I can no longer speak. And then suck on my ex-girlfriend’s name out of my mouth just to make sure she never comes up in our conversations. I’m gonna be honest, I’m not really a love poet. In fact every time I try write about love, my hands cramp, just to show me how painful love can be. And sometimes my pencils break, just to prove to me that every now and then love takes a little more work than you planned.
I heard love is blind so I write all my poems in Braille. And my poems are never actually finished because true love is endless. See I’ve always believed that real love is kind of like a super model before she’s airbrushed - it’s pure and imperfect, just the way that God intended.
I’m gonna be honest, I’m not much of a love poet, but if I was to wake up tomorrow morning and decide that I really wanted to write about love, I swear that my first poem would be about you. About how I loved you the same way that I learned how to ride a bike - scared, but reckless. With no training wheels or elbow pads, so my scars can tell the story of how I fell for you.
I’m not much of a love poet, but if I was, I’d write about how I see your face in every cloud and your reflection in every window. You see, I’ve written a million poems hoping that somehow, you’ll jump out of the page and be closer to me. Because if you were here right now, I would massage your back until your skin sings songs that your lips don’t even know the words to. Until your heartbeat sounds like my last name, and you smile like the Pacific Ocean. I wanna drink the sunlight in your skin.
If I was a love poet, I’d write about how you have the audacity to be beautiful even on days when everything around you is ugly. I’d write about your eyelashes and how they are like violin strings that play symphonies every time you blink. If I was a love poet, I’d write about how I melt in front of you like an ice sculpture every time I hear the vibration in your voice, and whenever I see your name on the caller ID, my heart plays hopscotch inside of my chest. Y’know, it climbs onto my ribs like the monkey bars and I feel like a child all over again.
And I know this sounds strange, but every now and then, I pray to God that He turns you back into one of my ribs just so I’d never have to spend an entire day without you. And I swear I’m not a love poet, but if I was, my first poem would be about you.
And after all of that, she was like, “So how do you feel about me?”
I said, “Let’s put it like this: I wanna be your ex-boyfriend’s stuntman. I wanna do everything that he never had the courage to do, like trust you. Honestly, when our lips touch, I can taste the next 60 years of my life. And some days, I wanna swallow stacks of your pictures just so you could be a part of me for a little bit longer. If I could, I would sample your smile and then I would let my heart beat to the bass line, and we would create the greatest love song of all time whenever we stand next to each other.
Love, I was the only one made for you. And you, you can be ‘At Last’ by Etta James and I’ll be ‘Ooh, Child’ when you’re in pain, or you can be candy-coated drops of rain even though it never rains in Southern California.
And together, me and you…we can be music. And when my friends ask if you’re my girlfriend, I’ll say no. She, she is my musician.
And me, I guess you can say, I’m her favorite song.”
- Rudy Francisco (comedian)
