Ask people what love is and you usually get an adjective or a metaphor. The speaker of "What's love" offers neither. The title is a question, but there is no question mark and no definition, only a run of moments, each introduced by the same phrase: "It's love when…". Love here is not something to explain. It is something that happens, and the poem points at it the way you would point at the weather.
The first four lines work like a slow approach. First "you enter the room," so the loved one is still at a distance, merely arriving. Then "I look at you," "I hear your voice," "I touch your skin." Sight, hearing and touch bring the speaker closer one sense at a time, until the distance disappears. The repeated opening returns like a pulse, but the small changes matter. Only in the first line does the other person act. After that the speaker does the looking, hearing and touching, so love starts as something that comes to the speaker and becomes something the speaker reaches for.
The rhythm tells the same story. The first four lines are steady and conversational, seven or eight syllables each. Then the pattern falls apart. "It's love" is only two syllables, a catch of breath. The next line, "When I feel you," has four. The last line stretches to nine, as if the speaker has finally exhaled. The capital W on "When" shows the formula being cut in half by the line break. The speaker, so orderly in the list, loses the thread at the moment of "feel." That verb is also different from "touch," which stops at the skin. "Feel" has no obvious boundary and could be physical, emotional or both. And "you" is now its direct object: not your voice, not your skin, but you.
Then comes the line that holds the poem's real interest: "And don't know that I have ever been." Been what? The sentence refuses to finish. The speaker might mean in love, or happy, or alive, or themselves. The phrasing "don't know that" rather than the more usual "don't know if" has an odd, slightly off-balance sound, as though certainty has slipped. The most striking reading is also the plainest. "Been" can stand alone as pure existence, so the speaker may be saying that, in this moment, they cannot be sure they existed before. Love does not add something to the self. It erases the self that came earlier.
The poem's sound supports this quietly. It has no regular end rhyme, but "room" and "you" share a vowel, a small link between the place and the person. The one real chime is held back until the end: "skin" in line four and "been" in the last line, which rhyme in many accents. The body's surface and the speaker's very existence click together, and the poem has been moving toward that click all along. Love is felt first in the body, then in the sense of being at all.
The vocabulary is just as spare. Nearly every word is a single syllable, and "love" is repeated five times without a single adjective to decorate it. The only two-syllable words are "enter" and "ever." One opens the poem into space, the room, and the other opens it into time, the whole of the speaker's past. Everything between them is small, ordinary and close.
What makes the poem effective is that it does not claim to know what it is talking about. Most definitions of love sound confident. This one begins with confidence ("It's love when…") and ends in not knowing. That is a more honest picture of the experience, and it leaves readers with something to work out for themselves: whether the speaker has lost their past, or found out they never really had one. A poem this short cannot answer that, and it is stronger for leaving the question open.