Love is the subject of Dave Bonta's poem, but it is not a confident one. Nothing here announces what love is. The speaker tries out descriptions one after another and never settles. Love is a hard word to say, a hard game to play, a nuisance at bedtime, a fever of the mind. The central idea is that love resists a single definition, and the poem's shifting, hesitant form says so before any line does.
The opening image is the strangest and best. "Will the missing kiss / grow on his lip / like a difficult word". A kiss that has not happened is imagined as something that grows, like a seed, a beard or a blister. The idiom "grow on" is hiding in there too: things that grow on you gradually win you over. The simile then ties the kiss to speech. Both are made with the lips, and both can stall there. A difficult word sits unsaid on the tongue, and so does the kiss. The poem does not say whose kiss is missing or why, and that gap carries the feeling. Absence takes on a physical shape, something almost visible on a mouth.
The second stanza turns from the body to play and then to the dull practicalities of the evening. "Is love is a hard game to play" has a stumble in it, with two "is"s colliding as if the question started one way and swerved into another. As printed, this is the longest line in the poem, about eight syllables against the four or five of its neighbours, and it is the one that trips. The sentence has trouble getting out, just like the difficult word of the first stanza. Then comes the deflation: "or an inconvenience / on the way to sleep". After the game metaphor, love becomes something that stands between you and your pillow. The long, clumsy word "inconvenience" is comic here, a dry, administrative term for a feeling that keeps people awake. It also quietly admits that love has a night-time life, the hour when questions get louder.
Only in the last stanza does the speaker appear: "or to my mind". The first stanza gave us "his lip", so the poem has been looking at someone else. Now it turns inward. The phrase works two ways, as "in my opinion" and as a place, the mind itself, where "a great delirium" is going on. Delirium is a strong word, close to fever or hallucination, and "great" raises it further. But the poem ends on a surprise: "between joy and concern". Concern is mild, almost polite, so the stanza lands at a point on a scale and not at an extreme. The delirium is not pure happiness or pure pain, but a state of being pulled between them, worried and glad together. That is perhaps the most honest answer on offer.
The poem's construction supports this uncertainty. There is no punctuation and no capital letter, and the "questions" of the title carry no question marks. They drift out as thoughts rather than being put to anyone, and the lowercase look makes them seem half-spoken. Each stanza after the first opens with "or", so the poem is a chain of alternatives that never chooses among them. The metaphors move through mouth, game, bedtime and mind, from the body to the everyday to the mental. There is no regular rhyme, but there is a faint echo in the stanza endings: "word" and "concern" share the same vowel and the same trailing r, so the final line quietly answers the first stanza's difficult word. The soft, hissing sounds of "missing kiss" give way to plainer, harder ones in "hard game" and "great delirium", as though the language itself grows less hushed.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. In nine short lines, it declines to flatter love with a grand declaration. It shows a speaker who keeps reaching for the right image and who suspects that being unable to name the feeling is part of the feeling.