The most telling word in this poem is the one tucked into brackets. In the title, «I (still) adore you», "still" is almost whispered, as if the speaker would rather not admit that the feeling has outlasted whatever ended it. The poem is a short confession of love that survives separation, though it never says outright why the two people are apart. Its central idea is a painful paradox: the speaker can no longer bear the song that holds their happiest memory, yet that memory is exactly what keeps the devotion alive.
The opening lines place the feeling in the body rather than the head. When the two are "near enough to touch," the speaker's "body forgets the regrets / buried deep / in my mind & in my liver." The liver is a surprising choice. We expect the heart, so naming a plainer, less poetic organ makes the regret feel physical, something stored in the flesh and not just thought about. It also gives the line a rueful, almost wry note. Whatever the speaker regrets, it has settled in deep. The verb matters too: the body *forgets*, which suggests that closeness works faster than reason or memory. Proximity overrides a whole history of second thoughts. The staggered layout supports this. "Each other" and "buried deep" are pushed onto indented lines, so the page itself seems to hold the two people at a small distance, or to sink the regrets lower than the rest of the text.
Then the poem shifts to a scene. "Do you remember when / we listened to that cover song / below a muted sun." A cover song is someone else's words sung again, and that fits a couple who borrow a voice for something they can't quite say themselves. "Muted sun" is a gently odd image. Muting belongs to sound, so the light is imagined as a volume turned down, and the whole afternoon seems hushed and suspended, like airport waiting. They are "waiting / for a plane to take us away," and the poem leaves open whether "away" means together or apart. In hindsight, given the "final summer" at the end, the phrase carries an uneasy shadow.
The happiest moment gets the poem's one real touch of music. "Just you & me / singing / & free" nearly rhymes, with "me" and "free" chiming across the single word between them. In a poem that otherwise avoids rhyme, that small echo feels like the song briefly breaking through. The ampersands, used here and in the opening stanza, fuse the pair into one unit, so that "you & me" reads as a single breath.
After that comes the quiet turn. "I can't remember a more beautiful / moment / between us" can be read two ways: no moment surpassed this one, or the speaker is no longer able to recall anything else. The next line repeats the phrase with a different meaning: "I can't listen to that song / any more…" The first "can't" is praise and the second is pain, and the repetition shows how closely the two are linked. The ellipsis lets the sentence trail away, as though the speaker can't finish it. The extra-wide indent before "any more" pushes the words toward the edge of the page.
Yet the poem refuses to end on loss. "But I will always adore you" is the most direct statement in the text, and "adore" is a strong, almost devotional word, more reverent than "love." It is set against "final," the other heavy word of the last stanza: "in that final summer // of our happiness." The sentence breaks across a stanza gap just before "of our happiness," so that the word we most want arrives late. There is no full stop. The poem simply stops, as if the feeling hasn't finished.
What makes it worth reading is its honesty about how love behaves after it ends. It doesn't blame anyone, explain a quarrel, or promise a reunion. It shows a person for whom a once-joyful song has become unbearable, and who loves anyway. The pen name, "wordsforghosts," seems fitting, since the poem speaks to someone who is present in memory even if absent in life. That, at least, is how the text itself invites us to read it.