The Small Talk

Love the small talk

crawls in like a magnet
segment drops into the sequence
inside the layer of skin
of a spacecraft

Love the important words
that remind us we are like them
and they, they are like us
and they are scared and stupid
staring out from the leaves like children

The small talk holds the
line between faith and business
it restricts the ways in which a brutal killer
will end fictional lives
it is the casual remark dropped in
eighteen episodes back now blasting into view

Those little phrases
those little bastards