Ron Kolm | I Am You as You Are Me

I Am You as You Are Me

 

 

When you said

You wanted to follow me

Everywhere I went

For an entire day

Videotaping

Every movement I made

It should have set off

An alarm somewhere

But I said, “Cool.”

 

Then you wanted

To film me

In my apartment

Doing routine chores

Dressed in your dad’s

Bright red pajamas.

They seemed clean

Enough, so I said,

“Let’s do it.”

 

So it should have come

As no surprise

When you phoned

And threatened my life

For a complicated

Imaginary wrong.

I guess you wanted

To rearrange the original —

Edit me in the flesh.

 

 

______________________________

Ron Kolm is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine and the author of several books including Swimming in the Shallow End (2020), A Change in the Weather (2017), and Night Shift (2016). His writings also appear in And Then, Feuerstuhl, Local Knowledge, The Opiate, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press). A collection of his papers (some 35 cartons of correspondence, notebooks, objects, chapbooks, signed first editions and runs of literary magazines) was purchased by New York University and is now part of the Fales Library’s permanent archives.