We’re out front at 4 am. 

I drink espresso. Another other guy smokes cigarettes and a third guy who’s attendance is spotty smokes weed. 

We don’t greet. 

We don’t chat. 

We don’t even live together. 

We just happen to be awake at the same time on the same street within viewing distance of each other. 

But at 4 am, when the only sound is rain, rustling leaves or nothing at all, the presence of another human being across the street can be more distracting than a crowd at midday.

We’ve stolen each other’s solitude. 

But instead of complaining, I feel like a poet. 

Because a few mornings past, the one guy, the cigarette smoker, did not emerge alone. His two kids burst out with him, yes at 4 am, to observe the first snowfall of the year. They were in their pajamas and screaming at the quiet snow. But as they all filed back inside, dad, I noticed, hadn’t managed to squeeze in a smoke. 

Meanwhile, the weed smoker, several doors down from the family man, who never actually stays on his porch but who walks up and down the street checking and re-checking his phone and paying no attention to the stars, just couldn’t stop coughing. 

And I thought, this must be what it’s like to be a poet: 

to sit with snowflakes and to have people scream and cough at you

to be ignored like the stars 

or to only almost exist

like smoke from an unlit cigarette.

And I lamented (that’s a poet’s word, right?)

that if only I were a poet all the time 

there would be nothing 

ever

to complain about.

JM.