Subway Ride, Spring 2002

The train moved me, clothes kept me seated. I watched the tunnel walls blur and my face appear, nicer on black plexiglass. The people carried off like I almost was in the old childhood dream, my mother’s hand, the tornado in the parking lot. Flooring soda and rain, a humble poser, a composed consumer. Come back to me, I whispered to the purifying wind in a country I’d visited years earlier. Come get me, I said to imaginary John Lennon in the passenger seat of my 1984 Volvo. Nothing grows anywhere, I noted in the slick urine grime connecting two underground stations. As for my wallet, it was light in my hand, fictitious, I didn’t deserve it — I held it up in the crowded terminal like a magician’s pigeon. Or I hid it between my knees on the jerking seat. Nobody wanted to touch me, or nobody who wanted to could reach me here, shaken like a screaming child under wet stairs.