
Best Listener

The dog of myself
walking the dog of the dog
through the dog of the world.
I’ve been talking to myself
a lot lately. Too much, probably.
I am my best listener. No one
hears me out like I do.
The dog of the dog stops, pees
on a tree, and suddenly
I have to go, too. “The good
stuff, too, is contagious,” I say
to the dog of myself zipping up.
The danger, of course, which is
posted on the trail–Steep Decline
Ahead–is the more you talk to yourself
the more you begin to resemble
a guy on a park bench talking to himself,
eyes wild, fly open, gesticulating
at his own inscrutable privacies,
barking at the dogs of the people
of the world passing by.
PAUL HOSTOVSKY is a poet living in Boston. His latest book of poems is Mostly (FutureCyclePress, 2021). You can find him at his website, http://paulhostovsky.com/.