Misunderstanding

You wrote my stories in your journal.
I didn't write them at all. I lived them, twice:
once in the doing, and again
in telling them to you.
Stories, not acts of the flesh,
were our intimacy:
a passion of words clothed in the soft
silky fabric of our kitchen-table afternoons.
You took them with Scotch whiskey.

You wrote my stories in your journal.
Years later you would hand them back to me:
"Remember that guy you went out with...,"
you would say,
describing some night I no longer recall,
a meaningless date over and gone as soon as
I had shared its every detail with you.

You wrote my stories in your journal,
as if they were some text yours to keep
when, for me, they were
slow delicious teasing, like a dance,
a growing drama, a give and take,
a pushing and pulling of narrative until finally
great gasping spasms--denouement and laughter--
and all of it, as with the flesh-bound,
gone after the climax.

You wrote my stories in your journal.
I didn't write yours at all. I ate them whole,
like wads of cotton candy
spun from nothing and air.
They disappeared on my tongue.
A sweet craving lingered.

You wrote my stories in your journal.
In taking notes, you thought
you learned me like geometry.
You defined me with theorems and formulae.
Years later, you tried to name me:
"This is who you are...," you said, and
described someone I never was.
You didn't notice my surprise.

You wrote my stories in your journal,
but you never read my heart.
I am not geometry, and
my stories have changed a thousand times.