The Neighbor Will Not Stop Playing the Fiddle

The neighbor will not stop playing the fiddle.

I hear them playing literally every day even after ten o’clock

at night which is in Berlin considered quiet hours

even on Sundays which is in Berlin considered

a sacred day of quiet when no one is allowed to vacuum

or run the wash and all the grocery stores are closed.

The neighbor will not stop playing the fiddle.

They begin to fiddle at random times of the day

sometimes just after lunch other times at six twenty three

in the evening.

I’ve even heard them begin to fiddle at nine thirty

in the morning while I’m in the middle of my morning coffee

checking the email during my morning routines

or at nine thirty in the evening when I am considering

laying down in bed to catch up on love island.

The neighbor will not stop playing the fiddle.

They play for one two three even four hour periods

which leads me to wonder if they ever work

or if they even have a job because they will not stop

playing the fiddle.

It’s as if someone has installed an old time radio

in the building that is glitchy and constantly turning on

for hours before someone hits it across the side of the head

like we use smack old electronic apparatuses

when they were refusing to do their one intended job

back before we knew anything about troubleshooting

which we used to think sort of worked in a woo woo way

to make the old time radio shut off for an hour

or two before it suddenly decided to come alive again.

The neighbor will not stop playing the fiddle.

I have complained a number of times to the various authorities

of Eastern and Western musical institutions

about the long bowing and the sad waltzes

and the potatoes and the constant shuffling

but if I am being entirely honest here I would have to say

that in my entire career of living in different flats

in different buildings in different cities especially this last one

in Berlin where I would wake up in the middle of the night

only to hear ugly and persistent techno beats

at three in the morning fueled by coke and darkness

which I would eventually surrender to and join

this unknown neighbor fiddler who keeps fiddling

is getting better and better and I’m just a little bit afraid

that one day I will wake up and read in the news

that Isabelle Faust or Genevieve Koester has died

and in the early afternoon I will wait for the fiddling

to begin but it will not and the bones of the apartment building

will feel hollow and an ominous silence will fill up

all the empty chambers of my heart with nothing.