Past Perfect (edit)

[hamartia]

First Edit:

After that, in love became had loved.
We passed perfect and became plural,
found safety in separate phone numbers
and the life sentence of the relative clause.
 
I'd like to attribute the errors to their authors,
but time and proximity have married our idioms -
you write like me and vice versa,
my turn of phrase tucked neatly into yours.
 
Would that we'd had an editor, we lamented,
as we dealt the crockery into two even boxes.
Someone to unsplit our infinitives,
to give the piece the body it lacked.


Original:
After that, in love became had loved.
We passed perfect and became plural,
found safety in separate phone numbers
and the way our keys no longer matched like teeth.
 
I'd like to attribute the errors to their authors,
but time and proximity have married our idioms -
you write like me and vice versa,
my turn of phrase tucked neatly into yours.
 
Would that we'd had an editor, we lamented,
as we dealt the crockery into two even boxes.
Someone to unsplit our infinitives,
to give the piece the body it lacked.