If You Were To Write About Me Poem by sandra geisell

If you were to write about me,
then know that I write about you,
sometimes at dawn, sometimes
before I sleep.

At night, when the wind breathes
and ruffles leaves of notebooks that sleep on my desk
the memory of you pirouettes across my room—thick and drowsy
and emanates like a beautiful forgetfulness
that only you would understand.

Do you know that I think of you when you’re not around?
I look for the smell of your hair, the voids
of your vacuum eyes;
I scribble each painful exaggeration about fire
about the hour-lasting kiss that in poetry suffocates me
not because I’ve been smoking too many cigarettes
but because of the intensity of your skin, and the tiredness
of your gasps for air, as though you’ve been tired your
entire life.

Your words close on me like a shattered poem,
and the speech that lasts until morning
is engraved like an immortal soul to the pen.

I watched you as your fate
drove you away from me like a
tinfoil sunset in the horizon,
blinding the cracked statues that croon
towards the arriving death of day
at midnight,
at the entire minute of desolate nothingness
where I stop thinking only to see you.

So if you were to write about me,
then know that from where I am,
I shall always reply to you in figurative sentences –
at the heart of the streetlight in the corner
where your shadow draped my skin –
at the heart of the city where I shall go
to cafes remembering you.