Riding in the bus at night

Waiting for buses in the dark, tedious, in this hard, cold air. Black ocean sky above, black ocean walls surround, closed in, it’s sinister. The bus appears, sneaking through the curtain towards me on the frozen street. All tattooed up with advertising’s dirty gang signs telling me I’m ugly and nobody likes me. Buy something, watch this; see who you need to be. This lumbering, tired, been on this track all day and night, rectangle, easiest thing ever to draw in “elemen-tree” school. Leans over on and rolls up alongside me, over dramatizing its, too-long-to-come-to-a-halt, and then the whole air-lock door procedure, a proclamation, heralding wore-out gallantry arrived. Ostentatious, this chariot coach, refuge at least. An arctic, blue hand slowly constricts, grins at paralyzed fingertips, sore toes. In the clean, black, night-sky, pure, like what space must have felt like. Thoughts of terrified monkeys, their trust betrayed for nationalist hubris. What were the stars to them? They’re all dead though, the stars and the chimps, and this street but for a manufactured, modeled, moded, machine, skidded, crunching snow under clumsy tires. The indifferent gaze of an indifferent pilot, tired, proletariat eyes,. What does he see in the stars? Does he think that he’ll be dead like them soon? Boarded, relieved of the terrible grip of unforgiving, indiscriminate, predatory, climate. Set down with strangers, some of them like stars, died but didn’t know it, their shine slowly draining out of them here on the bus with strangers.