Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

– we both peter out when speaking,
saying but I don’t know, or something. Why?
In your family talk is for the jousting men:
you write. You listen. You read. You step back from an opinion,
always, as if saying – why bother? I could be wrong.
Which I don’t think of as being shy:
you simply haven’t the need, to set the world to rights, of a man.
And what of my own habit, of cutting myself off, less
out of fear I’m talking crap, than just in case
I won’t be understood? I was the special son:
bigged-up, hot-housed, second-generation
precocious; unique, and, therefore, alone.
For what we’ve both learned is how not to threaten,
how not to seem to know more than our place.