all saints story problem

there's an old man in my neighborhood,
who cashed it all out this Halloween.

$1,000 in $5 bills
on his dining room table, stacked, waiting.

all evening he waited, marking the time
with the hiss and tick of his oxygen.

“hey, so are you guys out trick-or-treating?”
he yelled to mother and son from his porch.

I heard that like 3 or 4 people came by.

5 fungi

4 moons

3 fall haiku, looking up

a mourning dove hung
on the wire line one evening
like a long soft blade

we two lay supine
and looking up, the branches
burned? were not consumed?

then sleep under the
smoke detector’s speck light, to
wake in giant moonlight.

teenwolf exodus blues

when an overfriendly recent divorcée of middle-age pulls up in her maroon Camaro and decides to buy the home you’re renting, this is when you begin to notice other “for rent” signs around town.

when one Sunday afternoon she backs a truck up the lawn to her door and moves in, you close the blinds for a while. but when you see her swinging brooms and hand-trowels at the swallows nesting in your eaves, you begin writing down the phone numbers you read on those signs.

and when she repeatedly mentions to you her plans to “leather the walls”(?), rip out this and that, pour cement and spray the poppies, you make some of those calls, evacuate your trees and start collecting boxes.

when she, with arms and painted nails already outstretched, asks to hold the baby, be sure you can think of something quick. anything will do, really; “terribly sorry, we um, just vacuumed” or “that’s ok, she’s still pretty light. see?”

when daily you hear her fussing and barking around back with her grandkids and several gentlemen callers you turn on some music and start shuttling your furniture across town by the pickup-load.

now in the mean time, as she plants a graveyard of withering Memorial Day mums out on the corner, brews a tea of dead willows in a trashcan on the lawn, leaves a big cardboard box of storebought carrots to rot on your porch for weeks and begins erecting chainlink around the perimeter, this is when you make it clear to visiting friends and neighbors that these “projects” are not your own.

later, after digging your potatoes like a starving Dutchman, when she then tells you about how lucrative her new work-from-home weed pulling business is becoming, this is when you gather your last hoses and pick any remaining pumpkins.

when finally she goes out and buys a new toilet seat with your security deposit, you dust off your feet and cut your losses.