Declinations of You
A Love Poem about Essence and Grammar
A Love Poem about Essence and Grammar
Watching the Infinitive You
While you sleep
Existing in your unconjugated state
Pure
Round
Rested
Uncomplicated
Ready to be invited
Into action
Ready to step into
A new situation
And be transformed
By the elements around you
The genus of the characters around you
The time you exist in
The role you play in this scenario of a sentence-universe
Declinations of you
Extensions of you
Prefixes and suffixes of you
The way your demeanour declines when you speak to one intimate other
Two close others
Many strange others
The way you conjugate when thinking about the future
When you remember the past
When you imagine a wisp of possibility
The way you come across when you interact in formalized form
The extra trimmings that bring you
A register above your natural state
And the way you relax
Let the additions of politeness drop
The facets of facade fall away
In the company of friends
The Dativ You
Comfortable where you are
Already in the place you need to be
The Accusative You
Getting from here to there
Directioned and moving through the world
The Genitive you
Possessive and out of date
A vestige from another age
A reminder of your genealogy
The feminine, masculine, neutral, agender, non-trinary you
Pre-determined, fixed and arbitrary
A skeleton of your structure
The fabric of your skin
The Vocabulary of your Essence
The way your body speaks
Moves
Holds itself
Tenses and relaxes
In spaces inviting, affording, and limiting
Your possibilities of expression
The way your voice resonates vibrantly in a concert hall
Softly in corners of a bedroom at night
Trembles in moments of uncertainty and worry
Bubbling as you laugh at a dirty joke
The rules that govern your being
The lines that define your edges
The melody and cadence of your being
That which makes you recognizable as you
And traces you back to your genealogy
The spaces where the rules have gaps
The exceptions that keep you just slightly out of reach
A perpetual mystery
Unmasterable
Even in my fluency
The bending of rules
And use of Self in unexpected ways
The combination of familiar form with unfamiliar movement
Producing not sentences
But poetry
The places where languages meet each other
Exchange parts of themselves
Inspired to infuse themselves with sparks of the other
To narrow the gap in between us
To build bridges across the divide of the unknown
To become a little more like each other
To become a part of each others’ genealogies