It Ain’t Mine Neither

The ugliest thing
happened on the L today –

A woman was yelling in my train car

Anyone ya’ll spare a quarter?
Been robbed.

And everyone pulled smiles in at their sides or
shifted through their bags or brushed at their hair. Silence,
but everyone looked.

My mother was killed,
up on 95th…

A train car frozen in empty clang,
punctuated by the sound of a few coins in a cup.

I’ll pick pocket in here!

She got angry.

I been robbed, it ain’t your fault, but
it ain’t mine neither!

Now, everyone is thinking they would give her a dollar,
that they would give her everything, but it’s too late –

Now would be only for a lie

I been homeless, it ain’t your fault, but
it ain't mine neither!

And she hurried out the door between cars,
taking all of the pride with her.

The Sound

I had thought earlier

that it would be nice, maybe

to take the train today,

to look out at all the stops and all the people

living so anonymously from me,

but from the sidewalk the train passes above, like a jet engine so,

loud that I look to the sky for sound,

for all the planes that are coming to bomb us –

When will they bomb us?

too quickly

the lungs beneath the heart

exist

sitting in the air,
cold legs dangle and

we move in this way –

in one blink

we breathe warm,
we breathe from lips
and

in no hurry

in one breath –

exhale

in this way
beneath the heart we move

in this way
we exist

Drunkenness

1.

It will snow.

2.

I am a long walk home and

the hair will run wet down my face and I know

that it will snow.

3.

From the sidewalk,

I am looking for a quiet place, private

in which I can vomit in at least some semblance of alone,

for an alley or a doorway to double over in.

4.

Doubled over, I am saying this again and again –

Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know,

I don’t know…

Angry

For too damn long
I have wanted the boughs of silence
to count for the everything that they should

for deep rooted dreaming, for the power of birch
oak, elm and evergreen speech
to move in the winds of others,

for the smell of juniper to ring clean
and rid what rests at the cliff’s edge waiting.

Yet I wait,
as the leaves may wait, as the branches may wait,

as the trees wait –

their silence loud in stubbornness –

their immortality, seemingly, forever our image of always.

And when the sound of a single crumbling comes back,
from any distance,
I will rise up and speak for the waiting, for the angry.

If you were to listen you would hear –

I am not forever.