Name Dropping

Name Dropping

Those words that are closest to your voice,
they can come tumbling out,

can be loosened by almost any conversation.
You don’t have the energy

to guard them, so out they come, handkerchiefs
knotted together and slipping

from between a magician’s lips with the hand
of a volunteer. What words

do you say so easily, too often. Names of places
you have visited, maybe,

or have lived in: Big Sur, Bellingham, Venice,
Block Island, Lincoln Road.

Friends that you allude to, their language
that you borrow and parrot,

or their manner of speaking, their joke you take
and make your own. We drop

names like this only because our heads are full
and we use our mouths to hold

what won’t fit anywhere else within us, and even
then, can barely be restrained.