(A poem written in real time)

Empty beer cup and a new bottle opener on a blue May
Evening. Cessnas an Cubs
Circle as endless drones
With no map or meaning.
In this settled night, a lone boy bounces a ball off a croquet mallet:
Tocka-Tocka-Tocka, The ball,
The court, the mallet,
Tocka-Tocka-Tocka,
Until he tires of this solitary habit. Him with his mallet,
Me with my pen.
Now and again, he swats it like a baseball,
Across the court and into the fence- Both of us to silence after. Soon I hear:
Tocka-Tocka-Tocka,
As he retrieves his ball from the corner,
Tocka-Tocka-Tocka,
As I strain for words like a sad ape obsessed with a flea:
And finding none.
Soon the solitary boy with the ball leaves the courtyard
To the silence in a isolated
Moment in the American Fabric.
Into this mask of
                Light and darkness,
        Shadow and Imagination
A playwright, looking for a chorus, a melody.
Summer sounds and the race of engines. And the voices
Overtake the silence in the hours of ten 'til one.
And tires and arguing,
And sometimes the cops,
Or an ambulance
With bored fireman
And two paramedics.
And there's a drip in the hallway from the roof.
And I guess its not bewitching, All the noise for a small pocket of silence.
And I play Brahms,
And the police turn down my block, As the moon lurks pale
In the back of my eyes.