Preachers valued poetry, not only for its affective power, but also for its capacity to signal changes in voice. Verses embedded in sermons audibly mark passages wherein the preacher ventriloquizes the voice of Christ or scripts a prayer for congregants to use. This essay analyzes the verses in a macaronic sermon for Good Friday on the theme Amore langueo to show that preachers deployed vernacular poetry as a stylistic marker of "familiar conversation," or intimate speech. It demonstrates the success of this preacherly strategy by identifying traces of sermon verses in The Book of Margery Kempe. Kempe attended sermons often enough to have acquired an intuitive understanding of their formal composition and rhetorical techniques. Kempe's Book participates in sermon culture by incorporating themes and forms related to the genre. Stitched into The Book's prose is a web of poetic verses, which have generally passed unnoticed in Kempe scholarship. Kempe composed these embedded verses in imitation of preacherly discourse. The lyrics represent her prayer dialogues with Christ as a kind of intimate speech, befitting her relationship with him as beloved daughter and bride.