Sunday Service: Alex Dimitrov Poem
I Wanted To Write It For You
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
Did you come here to be with yourself?
Did you finish that day you couldn’t begin?
That’s not what was written but what I came to ask.
I wanted to live with you.
I wanted to know where you leave yourself
and who you live inside.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
I wanted to call you, I wanted to hear
just you. Talking. To me.
I wanted to see your mouth move.
I wanted to write you.
A novel, no letter.
Do you understand?
I wanted to write
without a beginning or end.
I wanted to write just the love part for you.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
Above a window. Near a fire escape.
Because we have no escape
I wanted to write it.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint
like I wanted to write it for you.
Just the love part.
That’s the only thing I wanted to write.
That’s what it says. Above a window.
Framed by a fire escape.
That’s what someone has written.
Just the love part.
There’s no plot. Nothing happens.
Nothing will happen in this poem.
Nothing much happens in life.
Nothing worth knowing about really.
Just the love part.
No beginning or end.
I wanted to write it for you.
Alex Dimitrov’s first book of poems, Begging for It, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2013. He is the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. Dimitrov’s poems have been published in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, Poetry Daily, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize in 2011. He is also the author of American Boys, an e-chapbook published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2012. Dimitrov works at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.
I Wanted To Write It For You was inspired by The Lovers card of the tarot deck.
Sunday Service