Everyone is Speaking

Everyone is speaking
Nobody is listening.
Therefore, I have chosen a poor profession.

Everyone assumes to know 
What someone is saying.
Do they know?
Do they really?

From my long diatribes,
I have learned to enjoy poetry
Because it gets me out of my own thoughts
And I can invest time in someone else's.
It lets me escape my own egocentric predicament
And that's the enjoyment of poetry.
Of really writing in general
Is being able to listen to someone else's ideas.

Agree with them.
Disagree.
Why does everything need to be agreed or disagreed with?
The purpose of art
Of poetry
Is expression.
Yet everyone wants to express
And nobody wants to know
What that poem is really about.

I can't make money in a culture
Where everyone wants to simply
Live in a vacuum of their own ideas.
A reverberating echo chamber of simplistic truths
Espoused by minds that you can't even be sure are alike.
Do we really share blogs with one another
To hear what others have to say?
Or do we have them to read into
Other's thoughts what are essentially our own?

I chose a poor profession in the twenty-first century.
Great novels cannot be written
Because everyone would argue with them.
And I think things ought to be left as they are
And understood for what they say
Before we open our mouths and opine
Why that individual is wrong.
Or, more necessarily
Understand that truth
They wanted to communicate.