Analyzing The Poem 'Listen' By Charles Simic

In this journal entry, I shall discuss and interpret the poem of Charles Simic called “Listen.” The main topics brought up in this poem are our relation to life, the indirectly related happenings around us, and the indifference we feel to future consequences for our actions up until the point we see the magnitudes of what we brought for ourselves.
The first couple of passages in the “Listen” talk about our relationship with life. “Make-believe and real,” describes our idealisms we hold onto that seem to only work in our heads, or another planet, versus the harder reality we face and bear through. In some ways we live only in our dreams and ideals, or try to match ourselves to them, to make life seem easier or to cover the trauma and difficulty of it all. We prefer our dreams and ideals over the hard truths we have to bear in life. We pretend the world is the way we want and ignore the things we can’t handle.
We covet, growing more selfish and superficial as being more important than making a practical difference in our or anyone else’s lives. The number of followers on social media we have and the importance of new expensive gadgets cover being able to afford less and help as a way to distract us from looking at our own lives and realize our unimportant we really are as only one person. Our distractions we take stop us from taking the more valuable hard road, keep us in an “all for one” mentality, and stop us from working as a community with each other and the earth around