Neighbors
It’s my neighbor.
It’s the one my landlady warned me about.
It’s the unemployed anthropologist.
It’s the one with the 5-tier shoe-tree
outside her door
because shoes are forbidden
from entering
her home.
I see her sometimes mounting the stairs,
or in the check-out line in the grocery store,
or down by the trash cans,
and she returns my hellos
never.
I can hear her through the bathroom wall.
She’s masturbating again.
She does it under the faucet.
She does it in the evenings around 8.
I exit the bathroom,
go into the other room,
and start going
over the piles of German
bureaucratic paperwork I’ve been bombarded
with lately:
Sehr geehrter Herr Powers…
I wade through a couple pages with the help
of Bing Translator,
then take the plug out of my laptop,
take it and my piles out onto my balcony,
and sit down
with a bottle
of French red.
It’s warm out here for a September night.
I can hear dishes clanging in the Italian restaurant.
I can hear the muttering of Germans on the sidewalks.
I can’t hear my neighbor masturbating
from here,
but after couple minutes, she appears,
a lonely
silhouette
on her balcony.
I’m done saying hello
to her,
I tell myself.
I slouch down a little more in my chair,
take a big swig of wine
and attempt to conquer
words like Unterhaltsberechtigten
and Zahlingsmodalitäten, and Vermögensverhältnisse,
but it’s no good.
I can’t go on.
The night’s too beautiful to waste on bureaucratic German.
Should I answer some of my unanswered emails?
Should I start in on a poem?
Should I have a couple drinks at one of the bars down below?
I look up.
My neighbor is looking.
She looks away.
She goes inside without acknowledging.
She’s right.
Small, superficial
courtesies
aren’t worth the trouble,
and we know well enough where we stand
with each other.
We don’t.
Horror Sleaze Trash 