Susan Daniels Poetry

if you would listen
to my voice
and not the tape
hissing in your head
from a thousand conversations

and none of them
with me

if you would hear my words
and not talk over them
before my mouth opens
arguing with yourself
using the language
you think I would say
to fill in the space
of my silence

the problem here
is supposition,
how you assume
the reason for our distance
can be solved
in a series of steps,
or how it
should be
something I hold
in my hands, and can be
laid down and picked up
at will

it can’t
and this love
is not easily blown away
like milkweed seeds,
scattered by the wind of our words
and floating off in it

any more
that the reason it faded
can be brushed off
like dust from our palms

but still

it dissipates