i am never so alone as when i am waiting for the bus

JESUS FUCKIN' CHRIST ARE YA GONNA STOP FOR EVERY FUCKIN' PEDESTRIAN DUDE?!!! i look up. there is a person crossing the street, neatly traversing the marshmallow stripes. crosswalks always make me think of marshmallow fluff, which i haven't had since i was a kid. there is a minivan behind an SUV. there is an older woman with a leathery face and a brown ponytail who is gesticulating behind the wheel. she is the one who shrieked. i laugh out loud and turn to look at the young woman who is also waiting. she is wearing an olive drab jacket that looks vaguely military, a coarse sooty gray skirt, red rimmed black sunglasses, and cherry red lipstick. she is leaning against the belmont's puce colored brick, her earbuds black & in. her head tilts slightly in my direction but she does not smile, she does not grin. we won't be sharing this moment. it is warm & sunny. i can see my bus just up the street and i sigh with relief, for i am never so alone as when i am waiting for the bus. 

unzipped memory

there are so many new people at work. i was never particularly good at remembering names and it only seems to grow more challenging as i age. attractive woman with wavy brown hair says hi to me at the end of my day. when i was in college i was friends with a guy from maine who had also served in the military. he had a thick maine accent, which is similar to a boston accent, but don't tell them that. his trick for remembering names was to call everyone buddy in that thick maine accent. BUD-DAY! he was popular. everyone thought he liked them. sometimes i like to see how long i can maintain a relationship with someone without using their name. for some reason this amuses me. but i like this woman, i like her energy, and so i confessed that i had forgotten her name. sarah, she said. oh great, another sarah to add to the pile. we need to start giving people nicknames, i said and she agreed. that guy over there? she pointed at a round scruffy bookseller. i remember his name because his last name is zipper. zipper's a wonderful name, it's already a nickname! zipper. suddenly i remember playing with one of my brothers, jumping up & down on a bed, wrestling, when i knocked him off the bed and he cut his cheek on the corner of the iron bed frame. he had an inch long zipper scar on his cheek. he told me that when he would go out to play there was a teenaged guy who would sit on his porch learning the bass lines to police songs but whenever he would saw my brother he would yell out in a thick boston accent, which is nothing like a maine accent, every masshole knows that, he would yell out: ZIP-PAH!

quote from a poem by antjie krog

my werwels loop uit in lig

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/23650/auto/0/THE-LONELINESS-OF-SKIN

quote from antjie krog

"the different life he might have led, had he grown up in a different and more just society. what would he and many others have become if they were not schooled in racism, indoctrinated through religion and educated into violence to protect an unequal social order? and how much of this violence perpetrated by past generations has remained in today's young men?"

-antjie krog

quote from Andrey Zvyagintsev, Director of Leviathan

"Imagine a situation where I work for a firm which belongs to a larger holding group which belongs to a certain person in turn. I don't need to be told how to vote. I automatically assume my vote has to align with whatever the wishes are of the larger thing that ultimately I belong to."

-Andrey Zvyagintsev, Director of Leviathan

stop the pounding heart

when something is so convincingly true and yet you know it's not quite, it's not quiet even though you can't hear anything. occasional furtive glances instantly withheld & punished, bursts of braces, her smiles braced to conceal teeth, lip offered instead. she lives in a kingdom of skin, given all the touch she could ever want, but she must always obey him & Him, and she can only ever be skin, lit within by the faintest light that is always just about to go out, a delicate fire tended by prayer. a dream in which everyone is held and everyone agrees on the story but you can only remain as long as you believe. i wonder where she got her doubt, what provoked the longing to be someone else, in spite of the pain when that psychic cord is cut. to live the rest of her life strangled by the narrative threads that keep them warm & together, or to dangle, cold & naked.

maybe sunshine if it's not too traumatic

maybe sunshine but 
out there it's all toasted 
bluster. sometimes 
their entrances arc too 
dramatically. still 
learning to stick 
my landings after 
spinning on each 
interaction's uneven 
bars. we service 
psychopaths sometimes 
but you only know it 
when you feel their cold 
brusque breath. woke up, 
stretched & poured 
the contents of this mind 
onto the floor just beyond 
my warm pillow. found 
a barista box, abandoned 
in buckman, the neighbor-
hood, upon glancing at 
the moist gray light
seeping through glass, 
has apparently decided, 
to stay inside & snuggle 
instead with a book & some 
tv, so says the lonely barista. 
last night i heard the rain 
smacking the window 
in the other room kept 
beckoning me up to investigate 
a frame filled with silvery 
infinitesimal drops each 
one glinting in the unromantic 
security light. felt like 
a child hiding in his bedroom 
while mom & dad fought 
in the living room, the slapping 
rain landing like a body 
with a thud i look up
from my sunday paper 
at the suggestion of january 
sunshine usually looks 
too young to sneak past 
the sky's bouncers, floating 
there with burly arms 
folded across pillowy chests. 
reading about post traumatic 
stress, i realize that i still 
refuse to sit in public 
with my back to the room, 
as if i might be attacked. 
i recognize it now 
as an old roommate 
i still live with.