People choose to give their opinions
When you never asked for them
It’s hard to have compassion
When it feels like you never win
It’s hard to hold onto the good
When you hands are tied behind your back
And life refuses to cut you any slack.

I need to take a break
Just a moment to breathe
I’m trapped within these walls
With people who can’t be please
It seems like nothing is done with any urgency.

No one to count on
If you want the work done
Everyone looking to cut corners
Even in conversation.

As if you’re in the way of their agenda and tasks
The questions they ask
About your day
Only have to do with what they want to say.

Conversation can’t be completed
Because people are always competing
To have the last word,
To be heard,
Even filling up the air time with uhms and errs
Reserving their speech

All you can do is listen and wait
And you begin to remember
You called them first
Barely able to spit in just a few words
You were the initiator, when did this reverse?

Now you regret ever calling at all
Thinking you’d be happy with silence
Than little fillers and empty language.

I once told a boy, who didn’t stop talking the moment we met
“You have been talking this entire time.”
I felt awful, like I was a little out of line.
But you should have seen what happened to his eyes,
It was like he snapped back to reality
Then quickly apologized, not even having realized
It was twenty-five minutes of a personal monologue.

Now I give most people the benefit of the doubt,
If after ten minutes I have said not a word
I’ll interject, and I’ve learned
There is no polite way to interrupt
The experiences I have had thus far
People didn’t even know what they were doing
Which to me, seems frightening.
These are the same people we see driving or operating.

Then some,
Just like the sound of their own voice
In those cases, they are a lost case

As a practical joke,
By them a voice recorder
Once you give it to them and they look a little confused
It will be an inside joke between me and you.