"Nights here are quiet..."

Nights here are quiet, if you can ignore the crickets.

If you can’t, Natick should not be your town of choice.

Unable to sleep, you’ll chain-smoke, thinking

about money or schoolwork, her scent or her voice.

You’ll get to know insomnia on a first-name basis.

The electric bill will double before you can strike a match

to light a candle. In twilight, you’ll greet strange faces,

resembling yours in some way. You’ll feel detached

from any sense of reality. You’ll have to stop and retrain

your body to walk in the dark, aware of the landscape.

Your ears will catch everything from the horn of a train,

to someone’s soft breathing, to a far-away handshake.

You’ll get a job at store twenty-four, across the station,

drown boredom in tabloids and steal snacks from the shelf.

At dawn, the analog clock will start testing your patience

Sometime around noon, you’ll learn to talk to yourself.

You’ll scribble poetry on the margin of some magazine,

With a headline about Brittney gaining twenty pounds

And it won’t take you long to see that the grass is green,

And Chardonnay tastes better with no one around.