At the beginning you were all that I wanted

Charming, innocent, self-effacing

Each phrase chosen with such thought and care

Each word immaculately turned out

Precisely placed upon the page

Every stanza neatly stacked, in logical order

I was seduced by your beauty

You drew me in to your world of words

Controlled me with language

Dazzled me with rhetoric and hyperbole

I was puzzled by such unusually advanced punctuation

Restrained by your lexical chain

Soon I was out of my depth

Unsettled by your syntax

I didn’t notice your subtle use of adverbs

The cunning way that you’d slip in an adjective

I often missed hidden meanings

Secreted within a sentence, behind an Oxford comma

Your surreptitious use of homophones and homonyms

Carefully camouflaged conjunctions, confused me

I didn’t know the danger of words

The power they could invoke

You pounded me with your ideas

And carefully veiled subversion

Lines delivered with such economy of words

They penetrated my very soul

I didn’t notice the silent letters

The double negatives

You had me at every subjunctive

At each clause, I trembled

I could not move

I was no longer free

I am beyond help