Wanting to feel is not the same as feeling, and joystyless's "I wish I could feel" lives entirely in the gap between the two. The speaker addresses someone loved and longed for, but the longing is oddly double. The poem asks for a kiss and a held hand, and it also asks to be able to register them at all. Judging by the wording, the speaker is cut off from their own emotions, perhaps numbed by something the poem never names. "The things I want to" is deliberately vague, as though the speaker cannot even say what is missing. The central idea is a paradox: someone who cannot feel love insists that they love anyway, and that the love is real.
The construction is plain and unrhymed. There is no regular meter, only the short, speech-like lines of someone thinking aloud. What shapes the poem is repetition. The opening runs on the chant "I wish I could feel" and then hardens into "I need" and "I want," so that longing becomes more urgent with each verb. The wishes are physical: lips, a heartbeat, a hand, a cheek. The speaker reaches for the body because the body is the proof of feeling they lack. Even the wish to "make your heartbeat faster" is a wish to cause an effect in someone else, since none can be produced in themselves.
One small echo does a lot of work. Early on the speaker imagines "your lips upon mine," where "mine" means closeness, two mouths meeting. A few lines later "mine" returns in "since I can't get out of mine," and now it means the speaker's own mind, a room with no door. The same word describes the intimacy they want and the isolation they are stuck in. Their request that the beloved's thoughts might "drown my pain" is striking too. Drowning is usually a threat, but here it is the hoped-for relief: pain gone under, covered by someone else's mind.
The hesitation in the middle is moving because of its clumsiness. "But only maybe will it work" is slightly twisted syntax, as if the speaker cannot trust even their own hope. Then comes the request: "if your heart didn't mind / to try a little / to try a little on me." The repeated phrase has the feel of trying on a coat, something borrowed and returnable. It is a very humble way to ask for love, and the repetition makes the speaker sound both embarrassed and desperate.
Then the poem turns. "It's hard to love someone who doesn't love themselves" is followed at once by "they say you have to love yourself before you can love others," a piece of familiar self-help wisdom. The next line is a single word, "bullshit," the only profanity and the abrupt break in the poem's gentle register. The speaker refuses the cliché, and the refusal is backed by evidence: "I've never loved myself / but you / I love you." The line break after "but you" hangs for a beat before the declaration arrives, as if the words took effort. The poem argues, quietly, that love does not wait for self-worth to be in place, and that it can exist as a decision or a certainty rather than a sensation.
The ending is honest rather than tidy. "Maybe I'll feel again" implies that feeling was once possible and might return. But the last line, "maybe I'll love you more if you realize how much you mean to me," is the longest in the poem and stranger than it first seems. The speaker hopes to be healed partly by the beloved's recognition of their own importance. Nothing is resolved, and the poem's persistent "maybe" is left standing.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to dress up the problem. It does not turn numbness into something beautiful, and it does not pretend that love fixes everything. It simply says that a person can love without being able to feel it, and that the love still counts. For readers who have felt stuck inside their own heads, that plain claim may be more reassuring than any polished consolation.