12.27.2022

I spend more hours a week with them

A ghost train just passed through me like a magician's saw 
Bursting my favorite reveries into one
     
                                                                        Endless reality. I didn't mind. 
I could idle here forever in my car, straddling 
These wrist-thin train tracks, decades defunct. 
                                                Before and after and beside me, other drivers 
Wait for the traffic light that will mean we can inch and creep. 
I spend more hours a week with them, and a cart-pushing Tibetan, and 
        those three 
Natives picnicking under the overpass with malt liquor and sunflower seeds, 
Than I do with good friends. 
                Sometimes when particularly gridlocked, there's time to step out 
And root around through all the other limbs and severed incarnations 
On the asphalt; all the years of office windows 
Smeared horrifically right up against your sleep. 
                                                                            Eventually, though, the light 
Turns to green enough times and the traffic 
Herd rumbles forward into a world 
No one has figured out yet how to love any better for more cash or a faster 
        phone. 
But it's there; you can smell it beneath the axle-grease heat of summer and 
        drone of galvanized surf, 
                                Where once bison blinked patiently to cross back home. 
 

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