such that a teen looks hard then looks away as I board the train
I dedicate his industry to indifference
manufacturing chaos
the traincar speeding away is a cell–wall between him & me
more porous than I’d believed
my mirror cracks along predestined but undetectable faults as such
I cut my finger tracing pattern practicing what I can’t incorporate
as lessons as sounds my ear didn’t know it heard will
nonetheless be reflected in my changing cursive
the sudden worthlessness of deciphering syllables
such that at the plane window’s thick beveled edge
clouds and the few houses
far beneath them
snap into existence at the same instant
in unison defying my belief in solidity & making me aware
of how I depend on it for image–construction as such
I wait to see if the next words I type will choose
either to abandon my sense of the real
or be abandoned by it as I snap
into existence then out again
such that my car’s radio nets for me a song I’ve never heard
riffing versions of a private nickname I suddenly discern
is shame
making mine bearable
if I sing along loud with the window down I’ll find it
is directly overhead an airliner that’s descending too fast as such
in one of its window–seats I await a surgery
that isn’t warranted
along with other children who think this is valor
this makes us adults
such that I send an email to my friend
but nothing I’d typed into it is in my outbox when I look
only what language wrote
yet even in that door–less inscrutability
I find wild flowers growing past cliché right through
cracked floor boards I hadn’t noticed as such
always variations on the meanings of what I’d thought inescapable
even a triteness like ‘window’ might be pressed to open
a sky of fierce color & wandering shapes
where the woman who might have already become me is traveling
such that this mirroring effect isn’t only a BART window
in the tunnel when I ride to SF it’s the material of world
that ontologists say has “a withdrawn core
inaccessible even to the material itself”
any word I’ve over–used was once my ally but am I being more true
to its nature if I’ve made it inexplicable from over–use as such
the “I” that I speak from I bury her
in loaded guns lost teeth decapitated dolls’ eyes
which I pretend to watch
as if they were my eyes in BART’s mirror