Speak to Me
Published July 14th, 2009 | 
I saw this online ad recently for a “speech pill” that caught my eye. As a result of my cancer, I have a speech impediment. It’s not quite as bad as it probably should be. Provided I speech slowly and limit my vocabulary I am, as the speech therapist said, “fairly intelligible at a conversational level.” However, I’m not likely to fill any lecture halls in the foreseeable future or get any gigs as a featured poet/speaker and, aside from rare appearances at open mics, almost never speak in public anymore in any official capacity. As such, when I saw the add, even though I suspected the drug wasn’t what I thought it was and probably didn’t work anyway, I admit to being curiously and momentarily hopeful. Stupid, I know. But, when you’ve been damaged in some way, you tend to grasp at straws. Turns-out the pill hasn’t nothing to do with speech defects, but is an anti-anxiety drug being market to people with stage fright. Oh well . . . like I said . . . stupid.
