Most people would say the risky moment with a stranger is the first hello. Jay Mortimer's speaker disagrees: "I don't see the danger in talking to a stranger / only in knowing their name." The danger is intimacy, because once a person has a name and a place in your life, they can hurt you by leaving. "Eighty-Sixed" is slang for being thrown out or struck off, and the poem asks whether love is worth that risk. It argues both sides, and in the final lines the argument stops being theoretical.
The opening sounds almost playful. Rhymes pile up inside the lines, as in "danger" and "stranger", "greeting" and "meeting", "cry" and "die". The beat is bouncy, close to a skipping rhyme or a pop lyric, and the content is bleak: a greeting leads to a meeting, "and so begins the pain." This tension runs through the poem. The tidy rhythm suggests someone who has worked out a neat theory about relationships and is trying to keep feelings at arm's length with cleverness.
The theory cracks on the page. After "hide away from wanting to know –" comes the capitalised, isolated word "OTHERS", which hangs between the lines like something the speaker can't quite say. Then the lines shrink and scatter: "scared they won't be there when // you fall." The gap before "fall" makes the reader feel the drop. Fear and the fall are shown by the layout as much as by the words.
The poem's central image is violence disguised as a game. Relationships are "Russian roulette": "sooner or later someone will lose." Then comes the boldest metaphor, "Trust is a bullet, ready to be fired." A bullet is usually the thing that wounds you, but here trust is the ammunition you hand over, and the other person decides whether to fire. Every mention of risk then works two ways. "Take a shot" can mean having a go and can also mean being shot. The odd phrase "no safety vest needed" muddles the picture, since a vest that protects against bullets would be a bulletproof one. The slip may be accidental, but it suits a speaker who is half-bravely, half-nervously mixing up protection and recklessness.
The rejection scene is the most human moment. A phone rings and a voice says "I won't be back," then "I've chosen a new path." The speaker seizes on the repeated phrase "Without a care!", and the exclamation mark makes the hurt sound like outrage. What wounds is the other person's coolness, a break-up delivered like a change of address. Notice too the rhyme of "alone" and "phone": loneliness and the means of delivering bad news sit right beside each other.
Midway the poem begins to stumble: "choices, choices,choices / can you get anywhere you / want to go? Perhaps / not." The missing space after the second comma, the line breaks that cut off the thought, and the one-word line "not." all make the speaker sound out of breath. The poem then seems to find its answer in "Risk is the only way your mind won't / be depleted," with the heart "keep[ing] beating when love can be achieved." This is the idealistic climax, since a heart that keeps beating is the opposite of a bullet's work.
Then comes the quietest and most devastating line: "that is what i once believed." The lowercase "i" and the past tense deflate everything before it. The poem had been speaking in general "you"s and philosophical claims, and now it reveals that the philosophy was lived. The last lines, "you've eighty-sixed me and / there's no fixing / failure", bring the title's slang back as a personal accusation. It also echoes an earlier rhyme, "life is life, it can't be fixed", which sounded like a shrug and now sounds like a verdict. The closing word, "failure", stands alone, and the poem leaves it unresolved.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about the gap between wisdom and experience. It is easy to say that love is worth the risk, and harder to keep saying it after the phone call. By letting its rhyme, layout and metaphors fall apart as the feeling grows, the poem shows what the speaker means by being "eighty-sixed", and it does so without telling us how to feel.