THE POEM I SHOULDN’T WRITE YOU
jerry KWATCHEY@kwatcheyjerry128608
1 day ago
#poetry
THE POEM I SHOULDN’T WRITE
If I write you this poem,
it will not arrive as words
it will arrive as a temperature.
A shift in the room.
A soft trembling in your breath
that wasn’t there a moment ago.
Because what I’m about to say
is not affection…
it is impact.
I would begin gently
so gently you wouldn’t notice
how the softness is breaking your guard:
“You…
you are the silence I didn’t know I needed,
and the chaos I’m no longer afraid to feel.”
Then the lines would deepen,
pulling you into their gravity:
“Your existence rearranges mine.
Not loudly.
Not violently.
But in that quiet, dangerous way
a sunrise rearranges the darkness.”
By the third stanza
your pulse would already be betraying you:
“I don’t want a part of you.
I want the version of you
that you tuck behind your ribs
when the world feels too sharp.
The version you don’t show
because it feels too sacred.”
Your fingers would hover on the page,
unable to move on.
Then comes the line that finishes you
the one you’ll read again
and again
and again:
“If loving you is a risk,
then my heart has already signed the papers.”
And finally
the quiet strike,
the one that seals the poem into your bones:
“I write this knowing one truth…
No man after me will ever say ‘I love you’
without feeling like a student
repeating the lesson I carved into you.”
A Reflection from the SIMU Collection.
