poem of the day 02.15.10

a voice of reason

he is outside on the street
shoveling the ice and snow

ten-thirty at night
he’s breaking the quiet
with scrapes of metal on concrete

we keep going from the living room
to the bedroom
trying to figure out where the noise
is loudest in our apartment

how we’re going to sleep
with this asshole clanking away
in the dead night

it sounds like he’s burying a corpse outside
the way the shovel clangs
when he hits the ground

he must have no sense of time

from the hallway we hear voices
it is his wife arguing with someone
a tenant who must’ve
complained about the noise

we hear them arguing
then we hear her outside calling to him

she is shouting for him to stop

he keeps going until a last patch of ice
is broken up and discarded

the he lights a cigarette
as her foreign voice melts
with the madness and moonlight

we smell the tobacco
as a bus makes its way up our street

he says something rough to her
she shouts again
then he tells her to shut up

irony in its purest form

at least the shoveling has stopped

they both go into the hallway
you can hear them going back and forth
for a few more minutes

her yelling
him hushing her

then there is silence
nothing but the buzzing of the streetlights

the night returns to what it always is on this street

ridiculous and incalculable
in its foolishness