The poets must admit
non-speaking behaviors are the most significant.
Poets are helpless witnesses
to things like sex and murder. Uneasy dreams,
stranger than life, voiced inside the head
fixate poets as they wake. And poets do lie awake
but awake they remain, unable to write,
adrift forever, upon an ordinary bed.
The poet is embarrassed by a smile.
The poet fails to translate the shriek.
Sighing, they know they never were romantic.
They speak. They speak.