still on hiatus but

on warm days or nights, my neighbor Richard sits out front, on the landing at the top of the concrete steps leading up to the brick apartment complex where I live. The building looks like a fortress or asylum or an old British boarding school. In the winter the radiators clang, ghosts in the iron, and wooden doors swell up, refuse to close. Now that it’s springtime the crocuses and daffodils are blooming. The cherry blossom tree in the grass lawn circle too, where kids wheel around on trikes. Richard is an elderly gentleman though I can’t tell how old. I think he has a grey mustache but maybe I’m imagining this. He sits in one of the white plastic chairs from the lawn, smokes a cigar, and always smiles and asks, How are you? like he’s really happy to see you. Tonight — balmy, still 65 out, people porch sitting — he saw me coming up the stairs and said, Stay outside! I told him I would come back out, that I’d be going for a run, and he said, So full of energy! and I was I was. On my way home, even a few blocks away, I could smell the smoke on the wind. There’s so much in the world but I suppose I just wanted to tell you this.