"We all agree to miss the point" is a sentence that undoes itself as you read it. Agreeing should be the opposite of missing, since it means people landing on the same spot. Bill Cody's poem twists this so that the one thing everyone lands on is a shared failure to land. The title, "Zeroing In on Conversation," promises aim and focus, like a sight settling on its target. The poem then describes talk in which the target is deliberately avoided.
What the poem seems to be about is a group, perhaps friends, colleagues or a family, that quietly colludes in not facing the main issue. The phrase "at certain times" makes this a tactic rather than a constant condition. Then comes a gap on the page, and "to start again." Because of that white space, the grammar wobbles. We can't tell whether we agree to miss the point *in order* to start again, or whether, at certain times, we simply start again. Either way, avoidance becomes the way the conversation keeps going. Missing the point works like a reset button.
The most interesting structural choice is the parenthesis. It opens before "We work so well together, friend" and never closes. In ordinary speech a bracket marks an aside, something said sideways. Here the aside swallows the rest of the poem, so the sharpest statements arrive as if muttered under the breath. There is also no full stop anywhere. The poem stops rather than finishes, like a conversation that fizzles out when someone changes the subject. Whatever the intention, the effect is that the form acts out the content.
The tone is hard to pin down, and that is part of the poem's skill. "We work so well together, friend" could be warm or sarcastic. "Friend" sounds like the pat on the shoulder you give someone just before saying something uncomfortable. The poem never says which, so the reader has to decide, and that is one more small way of being asked to "zero in."
The pivotal word is "Ignore-ance." The hyphen splits it in two. "Ignore" is a verb, something you choose to do, while "-ance" turns it into a state, something you simply are. In that small break we watch deliberate ignoring harden into genuine ignorance. The word also looks slightly misspelled, as if it too has missed the point. It sits alone on its line and takes the weight of the whole poem.
The sound and rhythm support this. The opening line is nearly perfect iambic tetrameter: "We ALL aGREE to MISS the POINT." It is smooth and steady, almost proverbial, the sort of line that sounds like common sense. After that the verse thins out into fragments: "at certain times," "Ignore-ance," "serves a purpose." The lines shrink as the speaker's confidence does, like someone trailing into hedges. The only clear rhyme is "friend" and "mend," and in many accents "again" chimes with them too, which links the idea of starting over to both. The closing word is a surprising one. We might expect a purpose that none of us can "name" or "explain." "Mend" belongs to broken things. It suggests that the purpose served by all this ignoring is also a kind of damage, a tear everyone has noticed and nobody can repair. Friendship and mending end up bound together by sound, and the poem leaves it unclear whether the friendship is what needs mending.
The poem's significance lies in how little it needs to make its point, and in how it implicates the reader. The pronouns are "we all" and "none of us," so there is no villain and no outsider to blame. If you recognise the dinner table where everyone steers around the real subject, you are inside the poem, not watching it. It also refuses an easy moral. "Serves a purpose" admits that not saying things can keep a group together, even as "mend" hints at the cost. The poem leaves its thought unfinished, with a bracket still open, and that leaves the reader to do the very thing the speakers cannot: to finish the sentence and find the point.