The irony.
That’s all I can think about when I look at him. Bad listener has these great big ears like satellite dishes pointing left and right, you’d think he could hear a water droplet in a creek, the pecking of a woodchuck a hundred feet away, the soft song playing in a restaurant you walk by on a busy street. Anything but your voice, I guess. In one ear out the other. Bad listener is absentmindedly dragging his wrists on the metal lining of the witness stand. He’s a court summons dodger. Bad listener fell asleep watching the game with a brew on his lap spilling all over the seat and the carpeted floor. There is the sense you get looking at the uncomfortable position he’s splayed out in on the couch that he had been watching the TV not too long before, with eager eyes and bated breath, and in the blink of an eye the sandman had come down from the heavens and snuffed him out.
There’s a gauze film over bad listener’s eyes, and his gaze isn’t at you, but right past you, like there’s someone oh so much more interesting I wish I was talking to right now right there. When he opens his mouth before you’ve finished speaking the morphemes roll off his tongue with the clarity and cadence of having nursed a sentence born ten seconds ago in his brain. Didn’t know that house had enough rooms to spare a nursery. It might as well have been ten years. His thought had been born, had a first day of school, college, worked a job, fell in love, retired, was in the hospital now. Bad listener kept the ventilator plugged in on it till he could blurt it out and then let it flatline. Bad listener cuts your ideas with his words like vines with a sword.
I’m done with this. I grab the sword. I point at my own ears with my free hand. You better start putting those goddamn things to work or I’ll slice them clean off, Van Gogh. Please just listen.