The poem opens in French, and it opens with the body. "Je veux tenir ta main / Je veux passer mes bras autour de toi / Je veux t'embrasser": three plain wishes, each beginning with the same two words, each a step more intimate than the last, from hand to arms to mouth. Then comes the shortest and boldest line, "Je te veux," a blunt "I want you" with no tender verb to cushion it. Only afterwards does the poem switch to English and ask the question that the French has made unavoidable: "What is 'I want'?" Judging by this switch, French seems to be the language of instinct and English the language of second thoughts, the point where the speaker stops simply wanting and starts putting the wanting on trial.
The trial is built from questions, nearly all grouped in threes. "Is it to long for something you don't possess? / Is it to dream of somewhere you've never been? / Is it to crave someone you have yet to taste?" The word "want" carries two meanings here, desire and lack, and the poem plays on both. The questions also move from the abstract (possession) to the geographical (somewhere) to the physical (taste). Then the speaker turns on themselves: "So selfish? / So dirty? / So empty?" Each accusation is a single short line ending in a question mark, as though the speaker isn't sure they are allowed to answer. The imagery that follows is deliberately unsteady. A "scorching" desire is called a "cavern," which is hot and hollow at once. The "screeches" might be echoes, and the speaker wonders whether they are even "my own," so loud has the wanting become. The "oasis" that might be "a mirage" names a fear that the person longed for is partly something the longing has invented.
At the turn, the poem repeats the shape of its opening and takes it back. The three gestures of the first stanza return as three body parts, "your arms," "your waist," "your lips," now each attached to "Maybe I shouldn't want." Then comes a flat, almost conversational line: "I want you isn't quite the full story." It has no question mark and no imagery, and it sounds like someone correcting themselves aloud. What follows is a lesson in grammar. "I want you to be happy" uses the same words as "I want you," but "you" is no longer the object of an appetite. You becomes a person with a life of their own, one that includes times when they "aren't" happy or okay. The speaker's want has moved from the other person's body to the other person's wellbeing.
The final stanza is where the form loosens. The tidy three-line pattern breaks, and the lines stretch out, as if the poem has stopped counting. The speaker offers to "give my soul," then the body, then the distance itself: "I would gladly give that to you," repeated like a vow. Two details stand out. First, every offer depends on "if you would ask," so the voice that began with "Je veux" now waits for permission. Second, the "two thousand miles" brings back the "somewhere you've never been" of the earlier questions, but distance is no longer the pain of wanting. It is something the speaker would accept for the other person's sake. The violent phrase "recklessly subdue" sits oddly beside this humility, and it reads as an honest admission that the physical want has not vanished, only been placed in the other person's hands.
The ending is the most telling choice. "However close we are, I'll be happy with" trails off on a dangling preposition, a sentence left grammatically unfinished, and the declaration arrives last and hedged: "And if it's okay / I'm in love with you." The poem has reversed the usual order. Desire is announced boldly in the first lines, while love is whispered apologetically at the close.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem works through repetition, parallel structure and the length of its lines. That is what makes it worth reading. It asks why "I want" feels so selfish, and it answers by showing the word change as the poem goes on, until wanting someone and wanting them to be well become the same sentence.