Smoking in the dark on my back deck, clearing the day’s thoughts from my head.
A neighbor breaks my web with the buzzing of his leaf blower.
Annoyance sets in at his intrusion into my peace.

Then sympathy, thinking how bad it must be inside his house in order to be out in the cold and dark clearing leaves. Images of a nagging wife; whose words cut into him better than any knife that may be in her kitchen. Kids that think him dumb. I envision his slumped shoulders and near numb fingers.

Then I think that maybe it isn’t because he has it so bad that he swipes the handle back and forth, back and forth, but because he has it so good. He is trying to get in one more task, like an over packed suitcase.

He lives each moment as if tomorrow might not come, or comes too soon. I see arms circled around his waist during his so-long kiss off to work. I hear a whispered promise of a night of closeness, once the little ones drop off into dreams.

He stops playing his instrument and the music ends. I am left in the dark, my cigarette spent, haunted.

TAMMY NUZZO-MORGAN, Ph.D. Graduate, was 2017 WWBA Long Island Poet of the Year and Suffolk County Poet Laureate 2009-2011. Founder /President of TNSPS, she is  editor of Long Island Sounds and author of 6 chapbooks of poetry.