the landscapers

early morning &
they get together to load up the truck
with the lawnmowers, blowers, rakes,
digging tools of sorts, weed eaters,
trimmers, hedge clippers & their long arm
grabbers---
the four guys in their late teens & early twenties
work for a man who lives a couple counties away &
he pays them at the end of the week
for the contracted houses which they tend to
each day.

the work is easy in the morning but by noon
as the sun begins to beat down & the hazy air
gets thick with pollen,
their eyes begin to itch & each of them try not to
gouge them out of their sockets,
doing their best to make it through the day.

the fun comes round mid-afternoon,
when they begin to steal the balls from the back yards
where the children living at the contracted homes
lost them---
they collect them as if they were trophies for the day &
amass them in a couple big garbage bags---
when the work day is officially over,
they begin to destroy the kid’s balls
with sinister smiles on their faces
laughing at each other
as they
crush, pop, stab & slash them,
as well as shoot them from the blowers into a nearby wall.

the whole while,
the landscapers joke using different voices to sound like the
kids crying & whining to their parents that they had lost their
balls.