Afferent, the city bus cramps to the curb and brakes
through
Solipsistic muteness with an exhaltation startled and
choking
[People are play-things in one's reality! One must
look
Into other eyes or he'll be reminded that he is a user
too]
As the sun-god, Aten, blazes upon the terminal's
Scraped concrete--its graven image--
Making the place an Amarna,
The shelved rows of the poor men
Hear the sound humbly grazing
Through whispered reverence over
The glass-speckled pavement
In a gradual dying echo,
A cigarette succumbs to the voice as
Carrion brought to life; all the tattered people
awaken;
And a man spits toward the tire of the bus
But misses.
[Religion is a lie! Everything is a lie!]
And as he watches his own spit vanish
From the hard crest of the world,
And silently scrapes his lunch pail against
A corner of a metallic bench as if expecting the pale
To bleed...and hoping it would bleed...
He tries to remember the angles
He and his wife stood to project
The intermingled shadows that both
Had labeled as their marriage.
[Marriage, that sanctified legal rape, fosters
The child-man to be a destined societal function
As he grows up in the family unit]
He enters the second bus:
Its coolness sedating the skin that
Overlaps his troubled mind.
His thoughts pull together
Like the light, cool flow of the air conditioning.
He feels a little pacified
[Come to thyself, human, the refuge from lies!]
He knows the shadow's intangible depth:
Its vastness having overpowered him these months
Until he could not reach the logic that told him
To find himself outside its barriers.
As he stares out of the window
he wonders why she has left.
How could she have left without indication
When he has remained angled toward work
So that he and his wife can stay alive?
In the bus window he sees his diaphanous face--the
windows
Of the Hilton, where he has a job in maintenance,
Piercing solidly through its head. He rings the bell
The idea of her not home, and legally annulled
From his life--her small crotch not tightened to his
Desperate thrusts--makes him feel sick.
He gets down from the bus.
He goes to work.
He suddenly knows that he is not in love.