The Poet on satire encodes what confidence erased

Watch how the confident foot forgets the floor — not lost, just filed under given, the way a word said ten thousand times stops meaning and starts being air.

The stumble is the sketch: a flicker, a knee that remembers something the rest of the leg has agreed to forget. Small enough to file. The walk resumes.

The fall is the sentence, plain, unchosen — you meant to cross the room and instead you learned the room. No metaphor in a broken hip.

The performed fall is the sentence read aloud to the person who wrote it.

The clown does not slip. Slipping is what happens to people who still believe the floor. He falls the way a translator falls into the gap between two tongues — on purpose, and precisely, and gets up speaking both.

This is not the floor arriving. This is the floor, subpoenaed — called to testify about the distance it kept quiet about for years, the whole time your walk called it weather.

Somewhere a town eats mushrooms once a year and calls it maintenance, not confession. The clown does this nightly, for money, which is its own kind of faithful.

After the fall, the walk resumes — same rhythm, same tilt of the hip — but now it walks like something watched, which is the only cure for a walk that was never sick. Only asleep. Only sure.