Two critics on a corner in DC:

By Maddie Hall

He told me that I was a critic

But I did not know that he was explaining me, 

Gifted and afflicted

And was he right because I had quietly presumed what made him tick

But now weeks later I am still parsing 

the nuanced idea he was unwittingly carving 

For are you not just a collection of things

Existing as everything and nothing

For yet something, 

You take in your reality

For me does not hold the same gravity

And though from the same design uncut,

Who was he when he asked me but

Who was I when I answered but

he left me no real chance by his meander

Except a craving for a query grander

He did not tell me I was a critic, he explained to me

while his smirk encouraged me

Despite our strangeness, he knew me

Reinforcing my necessity for skepticism

in an environment stale with passivism