"Long time coming" is the kind of remark people make to fill a silence on the phone: warm, a little vague, easy to agree with. Mark Maxey's poem opens with it and then quietly disagrees. The other person speaks as if the two of them have been walking toward this conversation along one road. To the speaker it is "an intersection," a point where separate routes happen to cross and might just as easily part again. That small correction, packed into three short lines, sets up the poem's central idea: two people can share a conversation and still stand in different places about what it means.
The poem never says who "you" is or what caused the distance. The clues are small ("I'd prayed, hoped and waited for this," "a distant remembering," "healing time"), and they suggest a rift that mattered to the speaker. The text leaves the kind of relationship open, and that restraint is part of the effect. We get the feeling of the call rather than its backstory.
The first stanza explains the awkwardness in spatial terms. Parallel lines run side by side and never touch, and lines on "different planes" could not even be drawn on the same sheet of paper. The clumsy, hyphenated "paths-parallel" seems to stumble as it is read. The phrase "struggling to find the niche / which only brings more awkwardness" describes a trap, because the effort to find the right tone is what spoils it. Yet "I was awkward and so were you" is the one moment when the two people are plainly alike.
In the second stanza the imagery moves from geometry to food, and it becomes more physical. "Regurgitated words not yet digested" is unpleasant on purpose. It could mean old history coming back up unprocessed, or the speaker's own half-rehearsed lines, and the poem doesn't choose. Then "its all here on a plate... running over... spilling" suggests more feeling than the dish can hold, and the ellipses slow the spill down. Still, "we don't bring our awareness to the table." Everything is available, but nobody names it. The table is also imaginary, since this is a phone call. The "partial lunch hour" is a meal shared only by voice and only in part, so the metaphor shows the shortfall: not a feast, just a portion.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. The lines lengthen from the clipped opening into a looser sprawl, as if the speaker is talking himself into saying more than he planned and then reins himself in. "I can say" appears twice, and each time it works as a hedge, a way of rationing what is admitted. "Embarrassing as it may" leaves its idiom unfinished, so the syntax itself falters. The word "again" turns up three times ("connect again," "converse again," "talk again"), hopeful and rueful at once, because it quietly confirms there was a break. The line "and that is line" reads like a slip for "fine," at least judging by the sense. If so, the shrugging "fine" suits the tone, and the unpolished surface fits a poem that declines to dress things up.
The ending keeps its expectations low. "Healing time may bring more... or not" promises nothing, and "at least it was a chance" is the language of someone lowering hopes in advance. The final sentence is in the past tense, as though the call is already over and being filed away. The last word is "again," not any larger word like reconciliation.
What makes the poem worth reading is that honesty about the in-between. Many poems about broken connections jump to tears or to a clean resolution. This one stays with the half-hour that actually happens, when both people care and neither knows how to say so. The opening contrast also keeps working to the end. A path has a destination, but at an intersection you have to choose a direction, and the speaker leaves that choice open.