Waiting Bus 5

Driver,
I am learning to taste again,
Persimmon and rock salt,
Cardamom and pomegranate,
The morning after I had my first cigarette,
My eggs turned ash.

Driver,
When everything slows down,
I am strapped to a passenger seat and shot
by four men with four cubans
flying from their lips.
From four corners, I am shot through the head
Like caning on a straw chair.

Driver,
The crowds arrive like cracking
walnuts. And I sit; We sit.
Me and Kostas, an Athenian diner of a man,
On church steps. It’s a wooly day.
We watch the demonstration protest fruit.
Kostas says, message and platform fruitless,
They have missed the irony
That the age of the peaceful protest had long died in war, says, I am half
the man I will be tomorrow,
And I am inclined to agree.

Driver,
Only yesterday Winter hit
hard and hugged me. Oh please,
Like you’ve never seen man
crucify a Lexus with swordfish. Rang up my numbers guy and told him ‘Run it again.’
He said: This day-before-yesterday phenomenon/I am afraid
further discussion would have no value.

I find it salient to mention I am my own numbers guy

Driver,
There is so much paint,
On things that aren’t paintings.
And when everything speeds up again,
The bullets cruise through my brain and hit the opposite gunmen,
And in that moment it was like Kostas, so powerful, tugged my arm so I spill
200 years into a future where New York has fishbowled
into the Hudson because skyscrapers threw the city
Balance off and where the midwest is rubbed off by pumice. And it is here
I have the vision that in the atrium of a waiting room, a left lung reads People
magazine, calls to an ill brother like an orca to another orca,
And right then all the lungs in the world hop out of their bodies. In solidarity
marchsinglefile. Nurses stand outside on their break and break.
And maybe this is

The saddest thing, Driver:
I can’t stop playing
Psychiatrist, Driver,
Because who will
If I won’t?

Driver,
I slept myself awake
To remember a younger day
When Kostas told the affliction of common man:
That man is only man when called so. That I should call more often so I called,
but it was more like the flatline of grating plum. Kostas he preaches:
sometimes you need a vacation
To get away from your vacation.
And Driver, Please weatherman to me again because I can’t see
Out the window. Explain water cycles
or reincarnation. Simply
how a man leaves
his suitcase at baggage pickup
and it just keeps going.
Like Kostas never picking up no

More, Driver,
There’s an ashtray in your car
and maybe I am finally full, too. Here I am spilling
My guts: The ashtray has half-past fishbowled so pray

Tell, Driver,
Me and you are just bodies of water. And this bus
is just a waiting room
And Plato walked the gangplank didn’t he?
The problem is I have forgotten
how to drink, but I am learning
To taste, Driver,
The problem, Driver,
I only know myself by who is sitting next to me.