*This is only the l'envoi of the poem "Ballade Of A Talked-Off Ear." If you're interested, you can find the complete poem online quite easily.

Ballade Of A Talked-Off Ear

L'ENVOI

Prince or commoner, tenor or bass,
Painter or plumber or never-do-well,
Do me a favor and shut your face
Poets alone should kiss and tell.

-- Dorothy Parker

Ryan loves New York. Ryan loves talking about New York.

Kelly learned these lessons the hard way when she agreed to take him back. She expected that he would eventually grow tired of talking about “the City - that’s when you call it when you really know it” and settle back into shutting his mouth and watching television with her.

But he doesn’t. He talks all the way through “Gossip Girl” and “90210” and all the other shows that really matter. He loves talking about how he ate sandwiches at four in the morning and she dies of boredom because, seriously, who cares? She could walk into her kitchen any time of the day and make a sandwich. Sometimes she half-wishes he had choked on one of those sandwiches. That would be a story she’d like to hear more than once. But he never did, so she has to settle for stories of cab rides and meeting C-list celebrities in clubs. He never met Beyonce, so it’s easy for her to tune him out. Sometimes. When he isn’t talking about other women.

“I want us to be honest,” he says the first night they’re ‘officially’ back together. “No secrets, okay? I want to really be able to tell you about the New York experience.”

What he means by “tell you about the New York experience” is “I don’t want you to get mad when I talk about all the girls I hooked up with.”

She figures this out on their second date when she orders red wine at the restaurant and he laughs and starts talking about this blonde he knew who spilled wine on herself and then they made out. All of his stories end with him either making out or having sex. She figures most of the sex stories are lies because she knows him and knows that he has, like, totally no game, but she can believe the making out stories because sometimes every girl makes a two-martini-mistake.

Honesty appears to only be a one-way street because whenever she mentions Darryl in any way, Ryan coughs loudly and tells her to “stop dwelling in the past.” But then something else reminds him of some bimbo he made out with in a cab or in a public bathroom and he goes on another tangent about how New York is “so alive.”

She recognizes that he isn’t really talking to her, so she starts texting friends whenever he’s talking about the city.

Whenever he starts talking about the girls, she texts Darryl and tells him she misses him.