Them Again

I don't have to call them,
I never know when they'll buzz,
the pests, then they can't
stop talking, like taxi static
on the phone behind
whatever living voice
I'm trying to hear.
And now they're back.
A headset twitters
near the famed Korean
who rides our bus repeating
"Remember me, remember
me to everybody"
that streams into wingbeats
when blackbirds slap trees
then pretend to leave. I never know
where they'll be, my skittish
talky dead, in dozens sung
by girls skipping rope,
Mama told Papa don't be so bad,
or deer bounding down court,
Get back, pick him up!
They talk their talk
and claim me: my father
who hardly spoke at all;
a brain-fevered friend
cussing Jesus in tall cotton;
another who lived to quarrel
and still can't shut up,
like fanatical mosquitoes,
ladybugs clogging the screen,
or gossipy mob of moths
stuck to the underside
of our incomplete existence,
batting their opaque wings
at our brief blackbird world,
so much noise and so it goes
when this big-nosed redhead,
before getting on,
sucks and dumps his smoke,
jet-trailing through the door—
he hacks and he hawks
and he sets them loose again
to crowd me, saying the same
senseless things they say.

~W. S. Di Piero
Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems
Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher~

I thought that this was a rather interesting poem and I'm posting it to see what others think.