Transit
Michael J. Menges
Pace by the open-aired prison with a bus-stop sign symbolizing bad and slammed lock, as
Winds, from the arctic and echoing reverberations of stabbing, poisoned darts
From my girlfriend’s mother, mother-out-of-law outlawing me from my windless, warm
flesh and sheets,
Penetrate my brain’s flesh, and I hope, tense-slanted, hope, envisioning for sanctuary
from the acid-wounded hurricane.
With resentment grabbing my elbow I toss my soldier’s coins
Into the smooth metal jagged maws imprisoning my pay, and I march down the aisle
with roadblocks of flesh and cloth obstructing and
I grasp my chess clock enveloped and concealed by the brown pouch,
Ready to swing and lash if any swaggering mean-eyed hoodlum wants
me to feed his ravenous fare-boxed wallet.
The stinging of gusted needles from the grayness of buildings,
skyscrapers and sky scrape my imaginings of
Warm kisses and soft exhilarating fleshly touches tingling
happily my blood which at this
Forlorn outpost of a miniscule, (as my position in the firmament
is also too tiny), signpost
Seems to be drained as by mosquitoes of seconds,
minutes of emptiness holding the wind.
Lying on a green-and-orange-squared gaudy coffin,
Dying, to the air giving out chloroformed breath,
a puzzled boy,
Age about seventy, moves, not by himself by but the
processionless hum of the bus’s engine, and
I, like a vulture, thirstily plunder his coroner’s
liquorish medicine.
The August globed, heavenly (outer) space heater outside
and the liberation ofrom weighted medication anchored in
the bloodstream inside
Resurrect the outer-spaced voices from the bus engine hum,
maybe? Transmitted to the gray-haired lady’s
Interference-loaded receiver of hopeless static, and her
lips respond with careful, audible garble,
Enjoying the lightened burden and, oblivious of embarrassed
eyes watching while averted, and relishing the half-heard
staticked argument.
Above the child, wanting to run in the bus aisle, pinioned
by his father,
Is a poster blazoning the Bible, and I reflect of Absalom
and
Me, and half symbolically caught by my loving, cloying mother
and
My father stabbing me with word darts, invisibly concealed
gloom and bull-shit “caring.”
Downtrodden and defeated by the evanescence (of love-glow),
like the cars fleeing reverse of the bus’s direction,
I watch the lady and the bus driver play (with an invisible
rope) tug-of-war over the fare,
While unfairly the bus stalls, like my future visions, stopped
by intransigence (his) and unvanquishment (hers),
Until a screaming-inwardly (or is it mine inside, I hear?) man
throws the dollar in for the two-block ride of the crazy,
undefeated embattler (hers).
The blue and red flag sleeps in the dust of the over-elongated
back bus seat, longer than a bed,
While the torso-bearer of the emblazoned jean-jacket stares
paraleyes’d at nothing me.
My nerves sing to my stomach of dusty dreams turned to cyclones
and under-elongated pockets of non-money among million dollar
skyscrapers and of
Eyes of timid reaching for me she fearfully groped in our equal-
shared double bed looming over my jeans.
“You born white--what you complainin’ ’bout.” black and white
duel with swords of roar and outrage over a standup-bus seat,
While in the avalanche-ruined pueblos monickered apartments
flowing sluggishly past I hear the silent pugilistics
of a thousand growls and shrieks.
My nerves shriek, not sing of five minutes ago sitting peacefully
on the park bench, remembering her silent importunings, and
Beg for ten minutes hence, tromping the clamor into the pavement.
