A doorway, a crowded room, and a question lobbed gently across it — so, what do you do? — and inside the Poet something dims, the way a saturated photograph fades when the colour is drained out of it. They had walked in with the whole world feeling vivid, every face carrying a private weather, and now they are being asked to answer in the grey, flat tones the moment apparently requires. The Poet feels small talk almost physically: not as boredom but as a desaturation, a sudden draining of the colour they live inside, and they stand in the doorway already missing the richness they brought through it.
The Grey That Falls Over a Vivid World
A Poet experiences the world in vivid colour — the texture of a mood, the undertow beneath a polite face, the ache or wonder hiding in an ordinary afternoon. So the trouble with chit-chat is not that it is dull but that it asks them to pretend the colour is not there. To answer how are you with fine when you are, in fact, awash in three contradictory feelings about the morning is, for a Poet, a small act of self-betrayal. The surface layer of talk demands a flatness they do not feel, and every cheerful, weightless exchange is a tiny erasure of the rich inner world they cannot switch off and will not gladly hide.
This is why a Poet so often goes quiet in casual company while seeming, to themselves, to be roaring inwardly. The gap between what they are feeling and what the moment will let them say grows until speech feels almost dishonest, and so they smile, offer the expected pleasantry, and retreat behind their own eyes — present in body, drifted off in colour, watching the conversation from somewhere just behind it.
Drifting Down to the Riverbed
Left in small talk too long, a Poet does not push back against it; they sink beneath it. Mid-sentence, a word someone uses will catch a memory, or the light in the room will turn a particular shade, and the Poet is gone — followed an image down to some quiet riverbed of their own while their face holds a pleasant, vacant smile above the surface. They surface again a beat too late, having missed the question, and apologise, and feel the familiar flush of being someone who cannot do the easy thing everyone else seems to manage without effort.
There is real tenderness in this drift, and a real cost. The Poet is not being rude or superior; they are being pulled, helplessly, towards the deep water they prefer, because the shallows give their imagination nothing to do but wander. But the room reads the drift as distance, and the Poet, sensing it, floods — a wash of self-consciousness, the conviction that they are strange and badly made for this, the certainty that everyone can tell. Their shadow does not argue its corner; it overflows inwardly and pulls them further from the bank, until the casual conversation they only wanted to survive has become a small, private flooding nobody else can see.
The One Colour They Are Hunting For
And yet a Poet is not, at heart, an enemy of talk — only of talk with the colour bled out. What they are starved for, in every grey exchange, is one moment of vividness: a true answer where a polite one was expected, a flash of someone’s real strangeness, a sentence that admits the day was actually hard or actually luminous. Give a Poet a single drop of that and the whole conversation floods back into colour. The drifting, half-absent figure becomes suddenly, startlingly present, and offers an intimacy and a tenderness the small talk never dreamed it was capable of reaching.
This is the quiet secret of a Poet in casual conversation — they are not waiting to escape it but to deepen it, scanning the grey for any flicker of the genuine:
- A look that says you, too, find this thin and would rather speak of something real.
- A confession, however small, where convention asked for a pleasantry.
- A shared silence that feels like company rather than awkwardness.
What Lingers When the Talk Is Over
So the Poet leaves a roomful of chit-chat the way you leave a film shot in washed-out greys — relieved, a little hollowed, carrying the faint grief of beauty that was available and went unspoken. They did not hate the people. They missed the colour, and mourned, privately, all the vivid things that could have been said in the time it took to discuss the weather. The way to meet a Poet, then, is to risk one true and saturated sentence early, before the grey sets in — and watch the whole tender, luminous inner world come flooding up to meet you, in every colour the small talk had asked them, so quietly, to leave at the door.
