1 train, 168th Street to 42nd, June 24th, 2014
We’ve got talent in the subway house! She sat down next to me and my poet meter peaked. I asked. She agreed like a pro: “It’s what I do everyday.” She wrote and wrote and I rode and rode well beyond my transfer station. She writes regularly – essays on “myself or things” – and she interns at a literary magazine. A recent college graduate.
I sailed through town today
big bag like a sail – unfortunate fabric
and size
makes me unwieldy
and
lost…in the diner I sank a little
obviously, since I offer only bad
puns about ships
?
summer winds are very fine but
this sun is all too bright and
I would drown in the light if it
didn’t mean I might walk into traffic
blinded
now I understand the comforts of that
diner; definitely a ghost ship: 
sunken, ancient, only a single
propeller spinning…
3 passengers, including myself,
and it felt like we’d signed up
to disappear briefly.
might as well have, I believe it:
the radio played ghostly disco mixes
of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”
over and over again (it felt like, when
actually it only played once),
the television kept crackling,
the sidewalk scene through the windows
was painful to look at, as if
it were a mirage evoking painful
memories.
I couldn’t write in there.
I suppose this all makes the
place
‘unreal’
more proof: my plate
eggs, yolks glowing
slimey sausage
tasted so… not bad not good
like
sand, like Persephone’s pomegranates
like Hades faux feast that actually
tastes like sad
it was a completely futile meal
but I am still wondering why I left
the restaurant
it felt kind of safe in there
it felt bottomless and sunken
it was something I could wrap myself in
I could put down my bag
terrible sail it was anyway