"I only have one request" sounds modest, almost casual, like someone asking for a lift home. But the request that follows, "that we remember who we were", carries the whole poem, and by the final stanza the speaker admits it is already slipping away. Mingo Perry's untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks, is about the gap between who two people become in a moment of total openness and who they are once self-protection returns.
The first half builds that moment out of paradox. "Our perception was blurred / Our subconscious could see clearly": blurred sight should be a handicap, yet here it lets the truth through. "Nothing left" could read as despair, but the next stanza turns it into relief. With nothing left to defend, "our walls came tumbling down" and safety is "found". The imagery is of losing control rather than choosing. "Our hearts slid to our sleeves" bends the familiar idiom into something involuntary, and the ground "had parted from our feet" leaves the pair "utterly weightless", closer to floating than to deciding. The words "sober" and "intoxicates" later suggest that drink or something like it lies behind this, though the poem never says so, and the intoxication may equally be a metaphor for each other.
The third stanza gives the poem its most original image. The two build "a home within our hearts", but the keys are faulty because "we never keep them attached to you or me". They "dissolved within our bloodstream." Nobody holds the key, because it has been absorbed into the body. Judging by the poem's later language, the only way back inside may be the very state that built the home. Even the promise made there, to stay this way "when reality restarts", has a faintly mechanical ring, as if reality were a machine rebooting whatever anyone has promised.
The fourth stanza mirrors the second. Walls that tumbled down return as "guarded gates", and the verb "pulled back" shows the speakers have no say. The seas they crossed "transmute to poisoned lakes", which shrinks something vast and free-moving into something enclosed and stagnant. "Transmute" is an alchemist's word, usually for turning lead into gold, and here the process runs backwards. The stanza closes on the blunt, flat "numb", whose short vowel faintly echoes the "up" of its opening line.
Sound and form hold this together quietly. Each stanza has five lines, with no fixed meter. Short lines like "Our walls came tumbling down" sit beside long, breathless ones like "It felt as though the ground had parted from our feet". Rhyme is loose and tends to arrive late, linking a stanza's first line to its last: "down" and "found", "hearts" and "restarts", "fades" and "intoxicates", with "request" and "left" or "up" and "numb" as fainter echoes. Each stanza is therefore a small enclosure, which suits a poem about walls, gates and homes, and the imperfect rhymes are a little like the faulty keys. There are almost no full stops, not even at the end, so the poem drifts and never quite closes.
The last stanza is the most honest. "Remembrance of my request slowly fades" is the poem forgetting its own purpose, and the speaker is caught in the act. "Maybe who we were isn't who we are" is hedged by that "Maybe", as though neither answer can be trusted. "We want to allow love" treats love as permission, something to be let in past the gates, and the next line is a flat admission: "When we're sober, love is hard." The final line, "recollection of our connection vaguely intoxicates", holds a small contradiction. The memory is "vague" and yet potent enough to intoxicate, so it works like a hangover that also tempts. Because the poem ends there, it feels more like a loop than a resolution.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it declines to pick a side. It doesn't blame the morning, and it doesn't pretend the night was an illusion. It sets two versions of the self against each other, the one who was unguarded and the one who guards, and lets the reader feel how much easier the first seemed. The idea underneath is that closeness is hardest when nothing outside us helps to produce it. Because the structure itself enacts the forgetting it describes, we end up feeling the speaker's loss as well as understanding it.