Commute

When it come on, it startles me.
This realization of how many of us there are.

The subway car pulls up to the platform and I watch their
faces slide by, these people, who walk the same streets,
breathe the same air.

Their fingers touching the same metal poles,
and handrails, the same doors

Coming in. Coming out.

It is all of us, we alone.
I wonder what they are searching for

and I hope they wonder what I am searching for,
before the train clanks and heaves,

this vehicle of mankind.

The woman waits, pulling her hair out of her mouth,
the breeze underground can be strong.

She sighs and rubs her eyes.
I am you, I think as I pass her,

and we can trade lives. I can live inside your little world,
and with you pull poems
from your teeth.

You live inside a room I can’t imagine, and have never been to.
The moonlight probably falls on the floor there, long and elegant.

The woman on the platform leans toward the train,
leans the way one must lean into pain.

Keep it, and then give it away, like breath
and keep passing that way from one of us to another.