More of Newman’s Poetry

Love Me Like You Mean It by Leslea Newman

Love me like you mean it
like it was the very first time
that night last May
with your neigh­bor’s TV blar­ing downstairs
and your dog whim­per­ing and twitching
in her sleep
and you trem­bling so hard your bones
rat­tled against each other
and the bed squeak­ing on its four unsteady legs
I tell you it was like a reg­u­lar sym­pho­ny orchestra
in that small room
and I was mak­ing so much noise myself
it’s a won­der I heard any of it. 

Love me like you mean it
like it was the very last time
not the next to last time
or the time before that
but the this-is-it-never-again-
not-even-one-more-time time
because some day it will be
though we prob­a­bly won’t know it just then
since that’s the way these things usu­al­ly happen –
one of us will die
or go away
or decide she needs some­thing else
some­place else 

So love me like you mean it
like this is the only time
I’ll ever have to give myself
to you com­plete­ly open
tak­ing you in as far as you want to go
and then far­ther still
for only you can touch those places
deep inside me
where I wrote your name
a thou­sand years ago
in a lan­guage I had nev­er heard
before you came home
to speak it