Transfer

City Hall has a new garden in the yard,

Under the cedar is a fig tree, rosemary, rainbow chard, leeks,

and a man pissing,

I stand in the wind without an appetite

I don’t think it likes me very much

Two lesbians are kissing, or maybe they are just two women,
I can never really tell,

I feel lonely.

the fourteen to Lents hisses to a stop

I get on slowly like I don’t care about schedules

The lights are bright inside, illuminating the bleak glances

I sit where I can face them

try and spark up a conversation about talking

I mutter the obvious, something about the chill of the night, and wait,

no one takes my queue

call it trifle

I have always talked about weather to strangers

it is a hors d’oeuvre,
a warm up to the meal

I could ask “What made you want to cry today?”

now they want to talk about snow, rain, thunder

This is the same bus, on the same street, in the same city

but everything is changing, this could be Detroit for all I know

frustrated with the lack of communal chatting

I attempt to feel smarter by reading a dumb book

it could be worse

I look at all the dumb people reading smart phones,

they make me think of the gorillas in the Seattle Zoo,

fingering the glass, trying to touch my finger on the other side

but there is no substance in this, this is not contact!

I turn the pages with sex appeal, maybe someone will see this

and know I am not self-conscious, at least not on the outside,

I look up as if pondering the meaning of life

and to think that the 80s are over

this time machine, stops at all stops, future, past and present,

I live on the lines of maps

at the center of nothing I can recognize anymore,

the Copper Penny tells me it never forgot the Organ Grinder

we still remember the jingles from Tom Peterson,

and Gloria too, Wake-up, wake-up,

Eastport Plaza once had water tube-slide, 

stood high into the sky, I never got to feel the rush. 

my father, Rich,  told me we were "poverty stricken goddamn it!"

I always thought that I would slip and slide when I got bigger, 

when I was rich,

I get off

my transfer, folded, becomes a bookmark

in case I lose I my place