Four Lakes Avenue

This silly suburbanite light burns bright.
Stay the day away here where summer heat beat discretely, once.
Backyard barbecues lose shoes in the sand,
and ampersands bland stand on daily events spent staring to blue skies.
Retirement highs draw old eyes nigh.
Now autumn comes.
Worry lines are vines on neighbor-face edifice wishes.
Leaves turning colors...
till brown, on the ground, they turn to one another.
I watch them watch me,
mailbox locked, stocking up pictures of family till,
lonely, still,
their homely worlds fall into night.
So goes the roll of suburbanites.
In the company of leash-free canines, they peek through venetian blinds
till completion finds them in their homes and
stretchers retch paths past lawn gnomes.
The ambulance stance in the boulevard, hard to ignore,
but this community of neighborly immunities is made to endure.
This place in transition,
missing bliss half the time
is greatly perforated by overgrown lawns and for sale signs.
The little place in the middle is mine.