"Can I tell you something?" is a strange way to begin a love poem, because it isn't poetic at all. It is what a person says just before a risky confession, a request for permission to go on. The rest of the poem is the answer to that question, delivered in circles that get tighter until the speaker finally says it plainly.
What the speaker loves is telling. There is no mention of eyes, hair or beauty. The praise goes to attention and respect: "how you look when I speak, / How you hear the words I say, / How you think and then respond, / How you treat me like an equal." The repeated "How you…" works like a drumbeat, and each line moves from seeing to hearing to thinking to treating, from the surface of a conversation to its moral core. "You talk with, not to me" packs the whole idea into one preposition. For this speaker, being loved means being taken seriously.
The poem is also willing to look clumsy, and that suits it. "You answer no matter how strange- / I ask a lot of strange-" breaks off mid-thought, and the second "strange" never finds its noun. It reads as embarrassment caught in real time, a speaker who hears themselves and swerves. The dash returns near the end in "I want to do stuff-", where the vague, casual "stuff" is the point. The activity hardly matters. What matters is the pronoun that arrives two lines later.
Before that, the poem shifts from praise to wanting, and its wishes are small and domestic. The speaker imagines meeting the other person's family and having them meet "mine," then pictures them "eating dinner / In the seat right next to mine." Nobody is sailing off at sunset. The wish is for an ordinary chair at an ordinary table, which says more about commitment than a grand gesture would. The verbs that follow are stripped down in the same way. "I want to hold, / Talk, / Listen to you" gives each action its own line, so the poem slows and lets each one land. "Listen" echoes the earlier praise of being heard, so the speaker wants to give what they admire receiving.
Rhyme is mostly absent. This is free verse, close to speech, with short lines that rarely run past a breath. That makes the few chimes stand out. "Say" and "day" meet at the end of the stanza about the "three words, / The ones I'm scared to say," as if the language itself were nudging the speaker toward the edge. There is also a quiet irony here. The speaker says they are scared to say those words, yet "I love you for everything you let me know" has already slipped them into the fourth line, buried inside a longer sentence. The confession is smuggled in early, softened by "for everything…", and only later stands bare.
The last stanza shows the hesitation resolving. "I want to love you. / I do. / I love you." moves from wish to fact to declaration in three lines, with the shortest, simplest sentence saved for the end of the climb. Then comes the poem's most exposed moment: "I want you to love me / I hope you do." The missing punctuation after "me" makes it feel rushed, as if the speaker is afraid of stopping. The verb also changes from "want" to "hope," from what the speaker can control to what they can't. The final "do" and "you" almost rhyme, and the poem closes on "With you," which is also its title. The speaker ends by naming what they were after all along.
The poem's significance lies in its honesty rather than its polish. Its language is plain, even a little clichéd in places ("you mean the world to me"), but the plainness feels deliberate and earned. It catches a moment most people recognize, the pause before saying something that can't be taken back. It also offers a quiet, useful idea of what to look for in someone: not drama, but a person who listens, answers your strange questions, and treats you as an equal.