Most sit out front with no front teeth

but lots of heart

                    and smokes

Their cars in many stages of undress
I’d showed up with mum and dad

(while I still had one)

                    and a wheel chair

They’d got sick of carrying me

          up the stairs
We nodded to Housing and the sunlight

          coming in the front windows

and the next door lady gave me a key-ring

          she’d made herself from leather

She gave the neighbour to my left a cut

above the eye with a smashed bottle
She would sit on the wall between us

and chat about life depression drugs

Certain days were bad

          the ones that reminded her

          of her murdered boyfriend

then she’d swing a baseball bat

at the night flying fucks

          and striking out

The ones who dobbed her in

to the coppers were the worst
But she was kind enough to share

          her music with me

through my bedroom wall

          at 3 am – a thumping

good time
I’d chat to her feet dangling

from the wall while I dug

in the garden – and in the end

she was saved by a dog

who hated the volume up

and my sleeplessness exchanged

          beats for barks

He wanted up and out

in the morning for walkies

so the benders had to straighten out

and while the pup didn’t take to men

he took his owner to a nice new house in the burbs

          with a larger yard
I’m following in her footsteps by moving out –

my place now a parking lot

for boxes – the washing machine untethered

          and the frigid air finally gone

The shelves unburdened with fresh ignorance

and the smell of the mould they’d tried to paint away

                                                  infusing everything
And although I was prepared

to leave behind the trees my dad had planted

currently in mid mad blossom

          Azaleas and camellia sesanqua

fuscia-pink and holed up making their last stand

I wanted to bring the tiny pomegranate tree

he’d given me just before he died –

the roots still struggling

to live up to their name

                    still settling in

                    not yet branched out

                              into new fields

                    somehow address-less

I would have – and I tried –

had made a small attempt the night before

with the wrong kind of shovel

          flat and square and useless

but it must have left some kind of mark

a trace of something wanted – something loved

          which was enough

to drive some random neighbour

to yank it out that very night

grasp it by green matted hair

and there –

all gone