I’m roused from late morning slacker sleep
by the sound of blows and smacks
and bouncing stones.

I get up and head for the window:
where’s that coming from?
I see a young man

on my side walkway
tossing rocks at the windows
of the house next door.

It’s the original doorbell,
the first alert ever devised,
and apparently it still works

because I hear “yo”
from an unseen mouth
and the man heads down the walk

to the street and then the next yard.
A few more indistinct words, the door closes,
he’s gone.

Earlier in the week
my landlord fixed
my own winter warped front door

so it would lock again.
We joked about replacing
that pane of thick glass

with the bullet hole in it,
agreed that it gave
the old door character

and so
was better
left alone.

It now closes
and locks like new
and my doorbell works

so I guess
we’re in tip top shape here,
unlike the house next door

without doorbells,
the house which still
has the scar on its driveway

from last summer’s
Molotov cocktail incident.
And of course

we’re nothing like the street
over the hill from us
where yesterday the bomb squad

had to come and get that thing
off someone’s spare tire
so they could go to work.

All in all stones clattering
against glass next door
means little more to me

than a moment of broken sleep
which will be lost soon enough
in the sound of my renewed snoring.