Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

Riding the train makes me feel like a joke poet who moved to a city to find inspiration , but somehow is always brought back to the midwestern town where I was born and bred and bedded.  These thoughts come to me most often on the train.  These thoughts and others. 

Today riding home I saw two different couples. Both of whom I would have ignored except their displaced similarities brought me back to small house in a wheat covered town steps away from where Burroughs died. The woman in each pair was picking at the man's face pulling out the toxins with her over-manicured fingers.  I don't ever want to love like that again.  I have been that woman , though my claws groomed short for faster and quieter key succession.  I was wide eyed and innocent and a year later leaning over a man lying face down on a bed I bought from a discarded furniture store , pulling all the ingrown hairs out of his upper thigh - months later he discarded me for another - changing his mind about me in my own discount store bed. 

My grandfather had an eyelash that had grown too long causing tears to drizzle down his face in the waiting room of my orthodontist office.  I pulled it out and thought about how he made the best pumpkin pie in the world and how he would slow dance with my Grandmother in the kitchen after dinner. I would do anything in the world for him.  I thought about the grey hair in your ears and how I would never touch them.  I want them to stay just as they are because they make me smile. 

I  saw a blind woman on the train during the morning rush hour transfer. A young stranger took her arm and led her down the platform.  It made me think of the time I told a boy he was ugly because his teeth were rotten and my father making me wish I were dead with his words.  I loved that boy too.  If he is out there , I want him to know that I am still sorry. 

I saw a man pull out a knife as I was riding the train after midnight and my stomach turned because it made me remember a man I used to love, and me sitting in an emergency room in Queens covered in blood after he was stabbed and just praying that everything would be alright as they wheeled a woman from the waiting room through the double doors, delicately pulling a sheet over her eyes. 

The train takes me places.  As far away as I have run the line seems to always carry me back home.