“Terms of Endearment” by Danil Rudoy is a 48-line rhymed poem from Love Is Poetry, dated Spring 2019 and May 2020. Six eight-line stanzas move through fascination, irritation, artistic inspiration, erotic intimacy, ambition and a final gesture of self-command.
Terms of Endearment
Hard to dismiss her
Habits and hair,
Whimsies and whisper,
Silence and stare.
Heat is like Hades’.
Pressure? It races
Up and the rate is
Eight hundred paces.
She is a goddess
Born to inspire
Poets whose progress is
Stuck in a mire.
Yet, if the pushing
Turns into shoving,
She is no cushion
Woven for loving.
Reckoning firmly
All of your blunders,
She uniformly
Flashes and thunders
When, with a grin, you
Offer her spearmint
Gum to continue
Terms of endearment.
Rhymes form a strange gem
Passing her lay test.
When I arrange them
Hardest to greatest
Something is missing, –
Crucial, I swear! –
Lost in the kissing,
Sex, or elsewhere.
Missions are chosen
From the beginning.
Life’s so much more than
Women and winning.
We’re like a star slut
Kept in a lobby,
And our fates are but
Nobody’s hobby.
Still, with the same eye
Turned to delusion,
Gently, I say my
Words of conclusion,
Frail like a glass hall,
Soft like a prayer:
“Call me an asshole,
See if I care.”
Spring 2019, May 2020
Love, inspiration and self-command
The poem moves between attraction and resistance from its opening catalogue of “habits and hair,” “whimsies and whisper,” “silence and stare.” The beloved appears as a goddess of inspiration whose presence can also produce pressure, quarrel and judgment.
The later stanzas widen the argument beyond romance. Rhyme, artistic progress, mission, fate and self-command enter the same field as kissing and sex. The final insult is delivered with deliberate softness, giving the ending its tension between tenderness and defiance.
Critical reading
A detailed critical reading of “Terms of Endearment” on Prose & Poetry examines difficult love, poetic inspiration, repeated sound, erotic diction, ambition, mission, fate and the poem’s final gesture of self-possession.
Related reading
Read Chain of Lies, then continue with Goethe and Me. The wider English poems by Danil Rudoy page places both works inside the collection’s sequence.
Text and citation
Copyright © Danil Rudoy. The poem is published here as the author’s canonical text. Short excerpts may be quoted for criticism, scholarship, teaching and literary discussion with attribution to Danil Rudoy and a link to this page. Full reproduction requires separate permission.