When To Become A Better Listener

From the days when my days started
with me reading the morning paper
my world started with 'the media',
though such talk was way too posh
for the people I knew, noshing down
their reduced vocabulary, where
we did not recognise as 'reduced'
the words we made to seem normal.

Five decades on from the Red Top press
as my daily diet of nearly new information,
the landscape I now track has changed,
beyond all ability to comprehend how it is different.

The media before me divides the world it presents
between people who 'emit' who they are that day,
and people who 'receive' who other people are,
with little awareness that that is the role they are cast in,
in a media world of makin one sided communications
look like weak attempts at reciprocity.

When power is the fact that we all acknowledge
the weak become the audience for the powerful
who hold court on the world as if that is their role.

What the weak have to decide is when the strong
are talking to themselves more than anyone else.
Having decided that, they can end the audience,
and spend more time listen better to each other.