I love you here and now,
not secretly - for show;
I’m burning in your rays - neither before nor after.
I do not want the past, the future I don’t know.
I love you here and now, with tears and with laughter.

"I loved you" is so sad,
it’s colder than the dead,
All tenderness in me it will hamstring and kill, -
Although it was the poet of poets who said,
"I loved you once: that love, perhaps, is still..."1

They speak thus of the faded and the lost,
There’s pity here, a touch of condescension,
As for a king long from the throne removed.
There is a mild regret here for the past,
A longing slightly marred by apprehension,
A sort of faint distrust towards "I love."

I love you here and now,
without a stain or loss.
This is my day and age - I shall not slash my veins!
At present, during, now and in the course -
The future leaves me cold, the past won’t come again.

I’ll swim or wade or crawl
to you - then come what may!
Lugging my fetters and a heavy yoke.
Cut off my head, but never make me say
"I shall" after "I love", please, not even in joke.

About "I shall" there’s bitterness, alas,
It’s like a forgery, or some such disgrace,
A hatch to use when it suits you to go,
Clear poison at the bottom of the glass;
A slap in honest present tense’s face,
A twinge of doubt about "I love you" now.

My French dream makes no sense,
I struggle with each tense,
The future is all wrong, and in the past I stammer.
I’m pilloried, it seems, in every sense.
I’m locked behind the barrier of grammar.

This barrier, I guess,
is worse than any fence.
But we shall seek and find a way from this impasse.
I love you, dear, in every blessed tense -
Even the future, and the compound past!