The Pepper Should Be Lonelier
Knowing our love is salty makes me think:
in ocean towns love is part of the weather,
the wide hands of the breeze fanning it in from the sea.
In ocean towns, love gets inside your mouth when you yawn,
until you have to brush your teeth again, and it hangs in the air
above your food, and you can smell it in your clothes,
and somewhere are smells of crab meat and suntan lotion,
but you can't find them because all the love's around.
And the salt hangs like a love letter on the fridge,
reminding you so much that the charm gets as redundant as the waves.
And you wish to God that for just one minute of your saline life
you didn't have to be so goddamn happy!
But our love stays next to the pepper, and near it are smells
of shoes and cat hair so thick our eyes water.
Our love is contained. We keep it in a porcelain sailboat and take it
in small sprinkles with french fries and watermelon because it gags us straight.
But there are times when you come in from the wet air of July,
I can taste love on you, like drinking from the ocean.
And there's the smell of hair, and the smell of shoes,
and of watermelon and french fries and the wet air of July.
And we all crawl in bed, seasoning it, shoes underneath,
and the cat curled like a seashell near the window, unaware he is an ingredient.
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Submitted on May 01, 2011
Modified on March 22, 2023
- 1:17 min read
- 1 View
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABCDEFGHIJKCLBMNOGPOQR |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic heptameter |
Characters | 1,272 |
Words | 254 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 22 |
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"The Pepper Should Be Lonelier" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 2 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/87516/the-pepper-should-be-lonelier>.
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