"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

 "The poem addresses the conflicted nexus of emotions that often accompany aging, particularly the tension between experience and relevance.  The author expresses this  conflict through subtle contradictions within the text of the poem. The opening stanza refers to "listening" though the remainder of the poem refers exclusively to speaking.  The poem is well crafted, and from the POV of an educated, introspective, and self-actualized individual (" a world I once knew well"), juxtaposed by a self-deprecation of the speaker's lived experience, casually referred to as poorly remembered, outdated, nattering lore. Words themselves are described as anodyne, lost in a vacuum of inattention and disinterest. Yet these words are also referred to as stones projected with intensity towards a target.  While the third stanza evokes a theme of resignation with the closure of inevitable mortality, the final line reveals the conflict as unresolved. By attributing the proverbial slings and arrows ultimately to a failure in perception, any Socratic parsing of the cause or effect of even the sincerest of intention becomes a tautology."