He told me
not to mumble
as I spoke.
That it made me
sound unsure
and it made me
sound clueless.
I needed to enunciate
my confidence
in every syllable
and not become a victim
of tripped tongues
or limp lips lost
between facts and questions.
I desired to tell him
my mumble
wasn’t created from nerves,
uncertainty, or laziness
of his preconceived notions.
The creation of my murmur
formed under
the weight of every other
person’s name
that I conversed with before him.
The layers of their lives
clamored upon my tongue
and down my throat
until each fact slammed
together into slurred sentences.
The exhaustion
of my vocal cords
caused every word
to fall into each other
until they cracked and splintered
into incomplete, quiet
children trapped behind
the locked gates of my lips.
the introvert in me tried
to ration out a piece of me
to all the people I chatted with,
but in the end;
I was never a teacher
or good at division.
Poetic Trials 