The subway
Your sallow skin and metal eyes. Don’t look at me. You don’t look kind. All cold, with your three silver rings, one gold, and a crumby black leather jacket. Who is your sorry wife? Does she know you stare? Is she even still alive? Please, please don’t look at me. But you don’t hear. You listen to other things. You listen to the train, to the doors open and close, bing bing, but you don’t listen to me.
A man walks in with a cane and a woman. He stumbles breathless with a brown bag of change and a story. Homeless, cold, cancer and AIDS, we just want a place to sleep and a hot meal. Blindly he walks, his cane an antennae, searching, and his woman behind. A procession of suffering. . He shakes the bag of coins to the beat of their footsteps. The train stops again, the doors open and close, bing bing, and they’re gone. Maybe more luck later. Maybe more luck elsewhere. Maybe all the lucks run dry.
A middle-aged woman with short, cool-aide red hair shakes her head and purses her lips before sighing heavily through her nostrils. She looks sad, distraught. Perhaps she was reminded of her own decay when looking at the glazed eyes of the blind, dying, homeless man. I doubt it. Perhaps she is disturbed by her own callousness. Still, I doubt it. She is sighing in disappointment at the filth roaming the streets, human wastes, picking through her trash. Yes. She reaches in her bag and applies a brown-red lipstick using a little black compact mirror. The color does not compliment her hair.
The man across from me still stares but I suddenly feel an overwhelming sorrow for him. It all seems so sad. The people here, they’re waiting for something: something to end, something to start, they’re waiting to be found, they’re trying to escape. This city collects wanderers, offering them glimpses of what could’ve been, or to the hopeful and ambitious, what could be.
And then I stop. I’m being presumptuous. No, no, this man is just a pervert looking at me like a hungry dog. The doors open and I get out of the train. I hear him say “Bye sweetheart,” when I walk out. I look behind me and smile at him, through the windows of the closed doors of the departing train.
A man walks in with a cane and a woman. He stumbles breathless with a brown bag of change and a story. Homeless, cold, cancer and AIDS, we just want a place to sleep and a hot meal. Blindly he walks, his cane an antennae, searching, and his woman behind. A procession of suffering. . He shakes the bag of coins to the beat of their footsteps. The train stops again, the doors open and close, bing bing, and they’re gone. Maybe more luck later. Maybe more luck elsewhere. Maybe all the lucks run dry.
A middle-aged woman with short, cool-aide red hair shakes her head and purses her lips before sighing heavily through her nostrils. She looks sad, distraught. Perhaps she was reminded of her own decay when looking at the glazed eyes of the blind, dying, homeless man. I doubt it. Perhaps she is disturbed by her own callousness. Still, I doubt it. She is sighing in disappointment at the filth roaming the streets, human wastes, picking through her trash. Yes. She reaches in her bag and applies a brown-red lipstick using a little black compact mirror. The color does not compliment her hair.
The man across from me still stares but I suddenly feel an overwhelming sorrow for him. It all seems so sad. The people here, they’re waiting for something: something to end, something to start, they’re waiting to be found, they’re trying to escape. This city collects wanderers, offering them glimpses of what could’ve been, or to the hopeful and ambitious, what could be.
And then I stop. I’m being presumptuous. No, no, this man is just a pervert looking at me like a hungry dog. The doors open and I get out of the train. I hear him say “Bye sweetheart,” when I walk out. I look behind me and smile at him, through the windows of the closed doors of the departing train.
posted by Sophia at 5:33 PM
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