barriers

our speech is fraught with ambiguities
that baffle efforts to communicate
what's clear to me in my soliloquies
means something else when whispered to my date
we only hear what fits our mental maps
dismissing other sounds as aural trash
if not a single meaning, two perhaps
selected from the ambient hiss and crash
it's comforting to think we're understood
that other minds are really like our own
to doubt this link inevitably would
mean we're immutably each all alone
for carpenters, a stool's a place to sit
for doctors, the same word denotes a shit