How do they do it, people who talk
rapid-fire without stumbling, turning
(they say) even their own painful
vulnerability into delightful repartee,
moments of public embarrassment into
charming sentences on the page or
as speech bubbles? You fumble so much
sometimes, your awkwardness inflates into
seeming oversincerity into false step after
false step while your mind calculates what it
might cost this time— Strange, this reluctance
to confess your simple hungers, the same ones
everyone has shared from the first moment they
came, bawling, mucus-spattered, into the world.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
