What is wrong with her?

“What is wrong with her?” an outsider asks

The answer is:

Nothing outrageous, in a moral sense

She just has a brutal conversational style 

That breaks a bunch of social rules 

Most people rely on

She tells you the heist
The way someone tells you
Where they parked:
Left, then right, then “anyway,”
Then left again

You nod through extra facts
Victims learning manners, character, grit
Through rain, third cousins, the color of the van

Through the part that should be blood
But comes out beige

Why read the room when you can inhabit it?
Hoard your particulars there
Until your thoughts can’t move

Anxiety takes the long way
Around the point
Loneliness stretches a sentence
Into company
Maybe what’s wrong is the air
When she starts

That the story is hot, sputtering steam

From the broken radiator we’re tied to
Soft social rope one could chew through 

But we agree not to 

Out of fear she’ll catch us

And when she finally stops
You breathe, laughing, guilty, grateful

“What is wrong with her?”
A kind of rescue, too