If It Were I (Not the Echo)

If it were I, not the echo in hush, I’d not dissolve at the bend of your dusk. Not when the moon stitched her seams in reverse, Not when your soul began speaking in thirst. I am not driftwood you were no flood, yet still, someone fled when the stars turned to mud. I’d have lingered in the pause between clocks, Tending the garden where your silence talks. Not every breath is meant to be named I’d have known yours by its shapeless flame. You needed someone not bound to the spine of fleeting chapters I would’ve read between time. You needed not hands, but gravity still, someone chose wind while you begged for a hill. I would’ve stayed in the space dreams decay, carved a home in the marrow of your “almost” days. But the ghost you believed in was never the seer I was the shadow that chose to stay near. So if you now measure what true never did remember: I was the fire that wouldn’t forbid.