DREAMING A WALL He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims his are redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believes his bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker. He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, taller and fuller, too, but not enough to screen out the nameless faces next door that he calls liars, thieves who’d steal his juicier fruit, kill for his wetter rain and brighter sun. He keeps a steely eye on them, mocks the too cheery colors of their homes, too small and too close to his own, painted white, with room to spare. He curses the giggles of their children always barefoot in the yard, chasing their yappy dogs. He wishes them dead. Closes his blinds. Refuses to let light from their windows pollute his eyes with their lives. Denies their silhouettes dining at the kitchen table, laughing in the living room, the goodnight kisses through every bedroom. Slouched in his couch, grumbling over the news he dismisses as fake, he changes the channel to an old cowboy Western. Amid the clamor of gunshots he dozes off thinking of his dream where he stakes a line between him and all his neighbors, stabs the ground as he would their chests. Forms a footing cast in blood-red earth, bends steel bars as he would their bones with his bare fists and buries them in concrete. Mortar mixed thick with anger, each brick laid heavy with revenge, he smiles as he finishes the last course high enough to imagine them more miserable and lonely than him alone inside his wall, sitting on his greener lawn, breathing his fresher air, under his bluer sky.