One doesn’t intend to comment on
strangers lives, but when you wake
to a glass shattering on the floor
above you, followed by a scream
and then the words I refuse,
repeated, you know that sleep
will not return for quite some time.
They divorced and for a while
it was quite. The husband would wander
the neighborhood in white undershirts,
the wife presumably far away. Then
they discovered the phone and a whole
new kind of one sided argument erupted,
louder, with no broken dishes.
Our next door neighbors were happy,
and in love, which is a different sort
of problem. A different set of sounds.