Love poems usually announce a feeling. This one, which has no title, only a row of asterisks, begins by asking something: "How does it feel when you smile." The speaker doesn't claim to understand the person addressed. He wants to find out what it is like to be them. That curiosity is the poem's central idea. Here, loving someone means paying close attention to them and admitting how much you still don't know.
The opening questions go for extremes: laughing "so hard you cry," screaming "so loud your voice hits the sky." The speaker wants the biggest emotions first. Then the poem shrinks to small, charming habits, like hiding from your mom "just to make her a little worried" or taking your time "even when you're in a hurry." The speaker is interested in contradictions, the odd little habits that make a person themselves. "Right or left? / Which side do you wake up on" twists the old idiom about waking up on the wrong side of the bed into a playful riddle. Only here does a question mark appear. Elsewhere the questions run on without one, so they feel less like an interview and more like thoughts spilling out. "I want to know your life" is the plainest line in the first half, and it works as a thesis. Even "Do you smile when you get hit on?" can be read as a flicker of jealousy, though that is an inference.
The poem turns at "Everytime you speak," where the imagery gets more deliberate. Words "spill like rain," a soft, abundant image, and each one becomes "another piece for me to gain." Rain turns into jigsaw pieces, and the beloved becomes "my little puzzle / One I like to piece." The verb is the telling part. A puzzle is solved slowly and for pleasure, and the picture isn't visible yet, so the speaker is content to keep collecting. "Gain" has a slightly possessive edge, but the tone around it is affectionate. Then the focus swings back: "your smile makes me wonder / Did I make a face?" The line works two ways, as a nervous "did I look silly?" and as "did I cause that smile?" Either way, the watcher suddenly becomes the watched.
The sound of the poem is loose and conversational. Lines are short, mostly six to nine syllables, with a speaking rhythm. Rhymes appear and then drift away: cry/sky, worried/hurry, rain/gain, degree/me. Some repetition does the work of rhyme. "Laugh" ends two lines in a row, once as something you do for others and once as something you need yourself, so the question of whether a joke is a "ploy" or a need sits inside the repeated word. The central pair is "it's all we have" and "you're all I have." Changing one word moves the line from a shrug about humor as a small consolation to a confession of devotion. The smile "after" the joke is what makes that shift possible.
The ending packs the most wordplay. "A muse to me you are" lifts the beloved into inspiration. Then comes "a perfection to the -im degree," which echoes "to the nth degree." The odd "-im" can be read as a hint of "imperfection," so perfection arrives through flaws, though the line leaves this open. The final couplet is the cleverest: "A nobody you are, / because Nobody is perfect to me." The capital N turns the saying "nobody's perfect" inside out. If this person is Nobody, then the person is perfect. The tone is humble and a little cheeky, and it lets the speaker pay the highest compliment while pretending to insult.
The poem's roughness is part of its charm. Punctuation is loose and there are small slips in spelling, but this makes it feel like something written out of real feeling, not polished until the feeling was gone. What makes it worth reading is its simple, original idea. It shows that a love poem can be built from curiosity, one small question after another, and that a pun at the very end can carry as much tenderness as a whole page of declarations.