If you bring me coffee in the morning,

black, one sugar, just how I hate it.

I’d drink it anyway.

Sometimes love is a foreign language,

and you’d be mispronouncing me.

I touch your arm,

you flinch,

say, “Not here.”

I translate: not anywhere

But you just mean: not now.

If you buy me a sweater,

a good brand, expensive,

but maybe a size too small.

I’d put it on anyway.

A tight fit, like us.

If you write, I love you,

but the font is all wrong.

The letters hang all awkward,

like a borrowed phrase

from a language we neither of us speak.

I say, I love you,

but if you don’t hear it

not in a way that lands

Maybe next time,

I’ll write it in your dialect.

Trailling in a fifty foot banner

Behind an aeroplane.