Not Listening

Sometimes I listen to the news on the radio without
paying attention to the stories. I listen to the voices,
how many and how loud. I hear accents and gender,
temperement and interest, but no news.
This comes from listening too much. The way
you can eat too much and taste little but feel
the chew and swallow, the heaviness in your gut
and the swelling of your belly in your clothes.
I'm full of news and words. A bag of memory
in by brain is swelling with slanted questions
and irrelevent answers. A man makes his voice
swing a fist of indignant contradiction and laughs
too hard. A woman speaks in a language and
her voice fades to another woman speaking
another language, English I think, and then
the sound of traffic and whistles and words.
When I get up and turn the radio off, I feel
like I've walked out of a room with a patient
still talking about the reasons he needs me,
and I've discovered he's hurting me and that I can't
help him. So I stand in the hall, listening
to the sound of his voice that I'm not certain
isn't just the echo in my memory.