of course people work outdoors
I see many different who do work
carpenters    trash collectors
delivery people    painters
children dragging parents behind strollers

more parents push
fluttering children

a man braces himself
fluttered    broken
a dead tree failed   fell
a man repairs the board fence
after the rotten tree fell

here   the mail as delivered
before the arriving severe heat

impatiens in its clay pot
how it needs water
it fails and sighs
abject creature

handyman on the ladder
handyman took the dead cables

although they have jobs
although hours repeated
broken repaired   fail sigh

the people have jobs
work night spectacle hours
they walk by wilting    abject
day after Labor Day in the morning

impatiens wilting
how it needs water
as I am   almost entirely water

day’s mail   gate creak
the man leaves the porch

I wonder over men who hold water as money
other people forced to earn
men who pry as their morning caviar
I can’t imagine these people

two young men in grey
trying to find    forced to earn    work
young men pacing door to door
they walk off uncertain
work
they can imagine or can’t
are they trying to find other people

David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Sprawled Asleep was published by Nixes Mate Books in 2019. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Solstice, Kestrel, Paterson Literary Review, subTerrain, Constellations, Jerry Jazz Musician, Nixes Mate Review, Lily Poetry Review, Last Stanza, and LEON Literary Review, among others, as well as several anthologies. His poems “Interview” and “And You” were included in a special issue of Magma (UK), focused on teaching poetry to secondary school students. He lives with his wife, the visual artist Jane Wiley, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.