Most poems about a lost love either beg to be remembered or vow to forget. Joshua Klink's speaker does both at once, and the title already admits the knot: "Remember Me If I Forget." Forgetting sounds like something that might simply happen, a lapse. Yet the last line shows the speaker working at it, left "to only struggle to wholly forget." The central idea is that forgetting someone is not a clean release but a labour, and it comes bundled with the wish to stay alive in the other person's mind. The poem never says who the other person is or how the parting came about, and it is more interesting for that. The feeling is left to carry the poem.
The first stanza is a chain of conditions. "If I choose to struggle to turn my back," the speaker will "pardon your sore disrememberings", a coined word that suggests the other person's forgetting is both clumsy and painful. The speaker's own refusal to look back is the first difficulty, and the "brutal bitters in the breath of our inner-bearings" is the second. That opening line packs in five b-sounds (brutal, bitters, breath, bearings, and "battle" in the next line), so it sounds like something spat out or bitten through. Then the imagery softens and widens: "Like footprints down by the sand of the seaside / Your features will part in the dark distance." A face fading from memory is compared to tracks in wet sand, which any tide will erase. The stanza ends with the smallest, saddest consequence: the other person will "hurt only when in lonely times I hide." Pain is no longer a constant presence but something that waits for the speaker to be alone.
The form carries this tangle. The lines are long and loosely rhythmic, with no steady metre. Stanza one rhymes ABBACDDC, so the pairs bearings/disrememberings and seaside/hide wrap around the inner rhymes (them/then, distance/resistance), the way the speaker is wrapped around their own contradictions. Stanza two tightens to AABCCB and leans on near-rhymes. "Close" and "host" only half-match, while sweet/meet and regret/forget land with finality. The word "struggle" appears three times across the poem, and "burning, burning" doubles itself, as if the feeling cannot be said once and be done with. The syntax bends too, with archaic touches like "if the ocean came not close" and "for as long as time be." These make the speaker sound formal and a little stranded, like someone speaking a vow they no longer fully control.
The second stanza turns on a change in grammar. In the first, the speaker is the one who acts: "if I choose." In the second, the verbs pass to something else. "It will leave me in burning, burning regret," and the same "leave me" returns two lines later. Choice has given way to being acted upon. The sea imagery returns here, and the lines can be read in a few ways. One reading is that the tide has not come close enough to wash the sand clean, so the speaker still "stumble[s]… on the eerie evidence" of the other person, the leftover traces. "Host" is the most open word. It could mean a crowd of memories or the presence of the other person, and the poem does not settle it. Against this, the sweetness of the past is shrunk to a single phrase, "we were once a thought that felt so sweet," and the poem closes by tying regret to forgetting through the final rhyme.
What makes the poem worth reading is how its strain is part of its meaning. Its coined words ("disrememberings," "voicers") and twisted sentences are sometimes hard to parse, and a reader may stumble where the speaker stumbles. That difficulty fits a mind arguing with itself. The poem's paradox also rings true: the person asking to be remembered is the one who has been trying hardest to forget, and the poem makes no attempt to resolve that.