«I would like you to kiss me…» — Poem analysis

I would like you to kiss me If you were loved me If you were stay with me and you were hug me If you were touch me

i would like you to kiss me If you were looking in my eyes If you were sayed something If you were smiled for me

I would like you to kiss me Affectionately If you were my best friend and my greatest love I would like you to kiss me just kiss me

I would like you love me If you were love me too much

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A kiss is what the speaker asks for here, but never alone. Four times the poem says "I would like you to kiss me," and each time a condition comes attached, as if the kiss were a lock that only the right key could open. The poem has no title, only three asterisks, so its first line does the work of a title and sets the terms for everything after it.

What the poem explores is the gap between a gesture and its meaning. The speaker doesn't want a kiss in the abstract. They want one that comes from love. The conditions pile up in the first stanza: "If you were stay with me," "If you were hug me," "If you were touch me." In the second, the list moves from touch to attention: "looking in my eyes," "sayed something," "smiled for me." That "something" is telling. The speaker doesn't dictate the words, and being spoken to at all is what matters. "Smiled for me" rather than "at me" makes the smile sound like a gift meant for one person.

The grammar is unusual, and it shapes the poem's effect. Almost every "if" clause has the same form, "If you were" followed by a verb in the wrong shape. Standard English would say "if you loved me" or "if you were to touch me." English uses "were" for things that aren't true, or aren't yet ("if I were you"), so the word signals a wish rather than a fact. But because "hug" and "touch" follow it directly, without "to," the phrases also lean toward "you were hugging me," a scene already happening. That second reading is my inference, but it fits the poem's mood, in which the imagined moment keeps pressing to become real. Either way, the errors don't read as decoration. They make the voice sound unguarded, with nothing polished between the feeling and the words.

There is no rhyme and no regular meter, so the music comes from repetition. "I would like you to kiss me" returns like a refrain, and "If you were" opens eight lines, giving the poem a pleading, almost chanted rhythm. The stanzas run four lines, four, five, then two, and the third is where the pattern breaks. It opens with a single word on its own line, "Affectionately," the only adverb in the poem and the one place the speaker says how rather than what. The biggest condition follows: "my best friend and my greatest love," superlatives that join friendship and passion. Then the refrain returns and the "if" disappears: "just kiss me." After all the bargaining, the speaker drops every condition and falls back on the plainest imperative. The lowercase "just," and the lowercase "i" that opens the second stanza, may be accidents of typing, but on the page they make the voice look smaller.

The two-line ending changes the request. "I would like you love me / If you were love me too much." The kiss was never the real subject. It stood in for love, and now the speaker says so. The wish also grows, from being loved to being loved "too much." In ordinary speech "too much" is a complaint, but here it is the demand: the speaker wants more than is sensible. The poem ends on an "if," with the wish still hanging. The first stanza made love the condition for a kiss, and the last makes more love the condition for love. The speaker never gets out of the conditional.

The poem is worth reading because it uses almost nothing: no metaphor, no scenery, only everyday body words like kiss, hug, touch, eyes, smile. It understands something awkward about wanting to be loved, which is that a kiss given without love would be worse than none, and that love can't be requested as proof of love. Its repetitions, its shrinking final stanza, and its unfinished last line carry that feeling more convincingly than a more ornamented poem might.

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