Labyrinthine

Lips aquiver,
Arm akimbo.
He leans foward and creates fire.
Lights my smoke.
Cracks a joke,
And then starts talking about some bloke,
Named Tyler, Larry or Hussein.
I don't know, I wasn't really listening.
I was lost in the shape of his body,
The fall of his clothes against his skin,
His shoes on his feet,
His eyes in his head.
The little things that are big enough to take up the whole world
if you focus on them.
I'm sure that whatever he was saying was fascinating, really.
And not just for the words he spoke,
About this bloke,
Named Harry, Kyle or Mussolini.
Whatever. I mean, I'm sure he's dreamy,
But I got caught up in the way his mouth formed the words,
The way the sounds were punctuated with little flecks
of spit that spattered on soaked concrete
as if to drown the sound upon impact.
The little things about speech that have nothing to do
with speech at all.
Almost labyrinthine, really.
I don't think that anything was meant by it.
Nothing out of the ordinary was said or done.
Nothing was overly cruel or fun,
But he leans forward and waves a hand,
As if to say 'look, here's the thing
I'm talking and you're not listening'
And I kept my silence in silence,
And watched his words meet words that weren't heard.
About some guy, some foreign, fucked up guy -
Named Boris or Steven or Stalin -
Somebody far away who had some things done to them.
Or did some things to somebody.
And served as an anchor for these heedless, empty words.
And then at last the ashes of the conversation
Fall from our mouths and are ground underfoot,
And we go inside to pretend to be people we're not again.

Thank God for that. For a moment there I thought I had noticed something relevant.