Noisy Mornings

When I wake in the morning it’s too quiet. My wife
is lying next to me, asleep.
The radio is silent
and I enjoy the rolling thunder
of the approaching garbage truck
when it rounds the corner.

Lids are clanged and cans being thrown aside
when my radio shrieks.
I squash its hysteria
and the cat jumps onto my hi-hats,
and it’s like a drawer full of silverware
is being shaken out
onto the floor. God I love
the sound of the world shifting
into another gear…
My wife throws aside
the blanket. “I’m late,”
she sighs, seventy years behind her
and the future approaching us head-on
like a truck on a one-way road, a rack
of bright lights atop its hood,
its horns blaring to get
the hell out of its
way.

The Worst Things About You

You love the best restaurants,
the waiters bringing you vintage wines
as if you were the food critic
for The New York Times
while we wait outside by the food truck,
wolfing down their cheapest burritos
and you love driving your sports car,
whizzing by our rusting station wagons
as if they were street sweepers
pushing your debris
from last night’s party up the street,
and you love to cook in your penthouse
with the Manhattan skyline,
where your soufflés never fall
and where you sport a new fiancee
every six months,
and you love skiing
the highest slopes in Tahoe
while I shiver in my small apartment
and you love the latest
electronic gadgets from Asia
and you love flying
in your personal jet to San Francisco
for a rock concert in Golden Gate Park,
but what you love most
are the pals you knew in high school
that you keep contact with,
through emails and texts,
witnesses to your
life.

Bob Bradshaw is searching for a hammock to spend his retirement in. His poems have appeared in Apple Valley Review, Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Eclectica, Ekphrastic Review, Pedestal Magazine, and many other publications.

Bob regularly appears in Dodging The Rain.