When Love Feels Like a Stranger
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Some days, the poem arrives with its shirt untucked.
I can feel the seams. I can see the scaffolding. The images have heat, but the shape is still arguing with itself. That is how my poems have felt lately, particularly draft-y, as if they came into the room before they were fully dressed.
Part of that may be pressure. I am teaching a workshop in Indonesia, and teaching asks for a different kind of mind than writing does. Teaching wants clarity, generosity, order, and enough confidence to guide other people through uncertainty. Writing, at least for me, often begins in the opposite place. It begins in confusion, contradiction, shame, hunger, and that private pressure behind the ribs.
Today’s poem, “Speaking of Love,” lives inside that split. It speaks to the heart as if the heart has committed a crime. It knows the heart is necessary, but it resents needing it. It wants the mind’s candle, the clean logic of thought, yet it cannot escape the body’s rhythm.
That tension gives the poem its pulse.
The poem begins with accusation
The opening gesture is harsh:
I speak to my heart as a policeman to a criminal.
That comparison does not flirt with softness. It places the heart under suspicion right away. The speaker does not approach the heart as a friend, a child, a wound, or a beloved. The speaker approaches it as an authority figure approaches someone already accused.
That choice matters because the poem is not simply about love. It is about mistrust of one’s own capacity to love.
The speaker seems to say: my heart is not safe. My heart will get me into trouble. My heart wants things that disturb the order I have tried to build.
There is also a moral pressure in the lines that follow. The speaker insists they are not “wrong or immoral,” but still feels “undeserving and unexempt.” That pairing is painful. It suggests a person who has not necessarily done anything wrong, yet still feels sentenced.
That kind of inner logic is familiar to anyone who has ever felt unworthy without evidence. The mind may know the charges will not hold up in court, but the body still waits for punishment.
The poem captures that suspended state. It does not explain the whole story. It lets the feeling stand.
Draftiness can be a sign of pressure, not failure
Feeling that a poem is draft-y can be frustrating, especially when life is already full. Teaching a workshop asks for presence. It asks the teacher to think about other writers’ breakthroughs, questions, fears, and craft decisions. That can leave less psychic space for one’s own work to arrive neatly.
But draftiness is not always a sign that the poem is weak.
Sometimes it means the poem is still close to the source. The heat has not cooled. The speaker has not yet found the cleanest container for the feeling. The poem may still be carrying the weather of the day it was made.
A finished poem is not always a poem that has been made smoother. Often, it is a poem that has learned where to keep its roughness.
What revision might listen for
When I revise this poem, I will not begin by trying to make it prettier. The poem’s power comes from discomfort. I will endeavor to protect that.
I would listen for three things.
The line breaks can carry more pressure
The poem already has a clipped, breath-driven feeling. Some lines land with force because they isolate a key word or turn. Others may still be finding their best break.
A poem about the heart should make the reader feel the stops and hesitations. Line breaks can mimic the offbeat pulse the poem names. They can also sharpen the speaker’s resistance.
The question is not only where the sentence breaks. The question is where the feeling flinches.
The strongest images should have more room
The heart as criminal and the heart as caged creature already speak to each other. The mind’s candle adds a second system of meaning, one based on light, scent, and control. The ending’s fruit and meat introduce hunger.
Those systems can coexist, but revision might make the transitions between them more deliberate.
Many poems about love try to redeem it. This one does not rush toward redemption. It lets love be muddy, bodily, inconvenient, and suspect.
That refusal gives the poem integrity.
Love is not always experienced as arrival. Sometimes it feels like trespass. Sometimes it feels like being governed by a stranger inside the chest. Sometimes the heart seems to want the very thing the mind has argued against with perfect evidence.
The poem understands that conflict. It speaks from the place where tenderness and resentment share a room.
That is why the draft matters. Even if the poem changes, even if lines are cut or images are reordered, its central truth is already alive: the heart may be vulnerable, irrational, and difficult, but it is also the organ that keeps feeding the rest of the self.
A draft-y poem can still know something. This one knows that love is not always gentle when it enters. Sometimes it arrives as an accusation. Sometimes it arrives as hunger. Sometimes it arrives offbeat, behind the ribs, asking to be heard anyway.
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