Most of the time we never notice our own breathing. In joystyless's "love of you" it is nearly all the speaker can notice. The poem opens on "unsteady breaths" and then makes a strange claim: they are "the only thing that keeps me even." The speaker is held level by the symptoms of agitation. That paradox sets up everything that follows. Calm here is no peace, only a fragile balance that could tip at any moment, and the poem is about the moment it tips.
What the speaker wants is stated through the body, not through abstract talk of love. We get "soft lips" and "skin," each placed at the end of one line and denied in the next: "I'll never get to touch," "I'll never get to feel." The line breaks do the work. The lips and the skin appear briefly, vivid and almost within reach, and then the following line takes them away. The two denials mirror each other, so the loss feels like a pattern the speaker keeps running into. When the same verbs return stripped of their negation ("I want to touch / I want to feel"), the denial seems to have turned into hunger. The repetition reads like a thought that will not stop looping.
The middle of the poem is its most puzzling stretch. "society over rules" is a fragment, and it is hard to say exactly what it means. Judging by the surrounding lines, it may hint at outside pressure, some social force that stands between the speaker and the beloved, but the poem never explains. That silence is a choice. We are given the effect of the obstacle and not its cause, which keeps the focus on the speaker's inner state. "laughs too loud / kept me calm" is just as slippery. Whose laughter is it? The loudness might be a distraction or a social performance of cheerfulness that once helped. Either way, the verb is in the past tense. Once "kept me calm," the laughter no longer does, and the poem moves into a present of "I want" and "I need."
The form supports this collapse. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no stanza break, so the poem runs as one unbroken stretch with nowhere to pause. A reader trying to speak it aloud ends up short of breath, which matches the opening image. The sound is hushed and hissing, with "soft," "society," "skin" and "steady" all leaning on the letter s, as if the speaker were trying to keep their voice down. The lines also get shorter and plainer as the poem goes on. And the pronoun changes. The first half leans on "me," a speaker things happen to, while in the second half almost every line begins with a capital "I." The self crowds the page as control slips away.
The ending is the poem's sharpest moment. "for the love of god" is an everyday exclamation, but it echoes the title's "love of you" and drags that stock phrase back toward its literal meaning, so the exclamation becomes a confession. Then come three short lines: "I can't / I won't / I need you." The progression from *can't* to *won't* to *need* moves from inability to refusal to bare truth. The first two are deliberately open. The speaker may be saying they cannot steady themselves, or that they cannot or will not act on the feeling, and both readings fit. Notice too that "you" appears in the body of the poem only in the last line. Until then the beloved exists only as fragments, lips and skin, and the speaker addresses them directly at the very moment self-control gives out.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint about everything except feeling. We are told nothing about who the beloved is or why touch is impossible, so the poem can stay with the sensation of wanting something you have decided, or been forced, not to reach for. Its plain vocabulary and ragged, unpunctuated lines make that feel unpolished and urgent, like a message written before the writer could talk themselves out of sending it.