“I’m listening,” she said.

She has this way of making
everyone she speaks to
feel important. It’s more
than just a steady diet
of Miss Manners; it’s in the way
her attentive eyes twinkle
with thoughtful and probing
questions. They charm him
into thinking that his words
carry the same profundity
and philosophical flair as
Kierkegaard or Sartre.
Reality serves a blander dish:
social media — the catch of the day —
with a side of status updates. His words,
driveling on like an arterial sprinkler
broken in the middle of a drought,
spurting worn out maxims and
zealotries that more than miss the mark,
leaving behind a lawn of dead grass
and ill-advised prescriptions
of overgrown weeds. His words
are thin like the threadbare
sock whose likeness has long been
discarded and forgotten. His words
become a song that scores
the mundane lives of wonted stature
and last night’s score
for a sport she knows nothing of
and cares little about,
yet her eyes still sparkle and
suggest that she is, indeed,
listening.