Can't Listen To Poem by Margaret Alice Second

Concentrating on Madame La Pompadour's mournful
face while she elaborates on her aches and pains so
that not a single rational conversation on world events
and theories or books is possible, such as I enjoy when
talking to Sister Sunshine & the Mother Abbess; is a sore
Christmas-lunch-trial for me, a sinner finding it difficult
to show love to her fellow human beings

I love all people in principle and the IDEA of loving and
helping them sounds so good, but the actual application
of this principle in reality is beyond me, I just can't settle
down and listen to their rambling gossiping - raconteurs
without the art of irony or satire - so please let me learn
how to listen in the RIGHT way, I pray: please send me
intelligent, loving, conscious energy - teach me

To push my own ideas and theories away to concentrate
on my fellow human beings; I love conversation in writing,
no desultory idiocies and description of pets offered in an
inexpert way: I love talking on paper - because when it's a
verbal interaction with body language in facial expression
filling in the details and my imagination doing the rest - I
lose interest finding it all so one-dimensional -

Especially when someone drones on in an unlovely voice,
it is so difficult to like voices deliberately made to sound
unmusical, while the speaker dissects life in a negative
way… now I'm rambling, let me stop - are you fed up
with me as I may sound like those I can't listen to?