The Art of Love as Converse

Why so insistent upon the polyglot, my friendly friendly? Why be charmed by /w/s? It’s just a party bowed under the radar. Will I place the pearls before me? No but you’re givin me an idea.

We were caught amidst the seven Roman hills, flicking the burning ember to a parched throat. Do I detect a note of jealousy for our dandified companion? That is both hilarious and endearing. As you know I am a sucker for the juice, and my hearts are polyglot, my hearts…

But why do I court the spoken-for ships? Ever since you said you never wrote love poems I have secretly made your empire my business to conquer. Don’t tell me I paid the stage on its polar nights! I begged to get you on the stage, I roused bears from their wintry sleeps!

But soon I realized the true art of love is not in kissing but in conversation. Well, it is in kissing. It is in conversation. But the mouth is such a cavalier renegade what insists on sucking hellspont, and so the desire for love remains unfulfilled. The third of this partite is Love, which solidifies the first two functions—(dative and vocative) the giving-to and the calling out.

Your letter, Antonius, a touch, and two kisses on the balcony. But we’re not in Monrovia! Your ends, so heavily stopped, berate this touch as an exile sloughing off its Tristia. Ovid on the Black Sea, far from Rome. The error, probably Corinna, betakes itself to the sea where minerals suck at the sun lapping at our ears.

Where I espied you, marigold, all gold like Hermes on the loam, ascending the Olympian mount, wings at your feet and at your wings. Thanks for having a hand at my form—beauty suffuses. What moribund bouquets are we become! Here’s glot for you: algolagnia.1 For the wind puffs our smoke so high there's never any private...even Webster has lost its license for the lexicon...
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1Either masochism or sadism; algos (Greek 'pain')+ lagneia (Greek 'lust').