The Subway

Walking to the station, I smell chlorine summer air.
It returns me to her veranda,
longing, longing to be in the pool,

Those were times full of taking
for granted. When no matter the ugliness,
we were together
still ascending.

Now, as I pass through the station
 I am clumsy. A busker sings,
"Here Comes the Sun".
He is communicating with
my struggling step.
I feel those vital notes
passing through my organs,
resting like butterflies
on my secret soul.

I get on the subway car.
I consider it exploding.
from sweet lilting,
back to the personal burrows
in which I have stock-piled
a thousand deaths.

the pattern of my life-
a frantic scurry between obscene light
and caverns of destruction.
 

ButI look up
and a woman is smiling over a book
about Capital Investments.
She is imagining her life with money.
She is not inside, or outside of,
her own death. 

She’s gloating,
that woman with her book
and her dreams and her light.
yet I can’t resist her peculiar, quiet smile
or her short summer dress
and unconsciously opening thighs.