Greyhound Chronicles

 

Find yourself smack

 Dab between someone else's present

 

the cold shoulder of your own future streaming past the window

shooting into the present past and future

 

you can see

hear them speaking

snoring

farting

f*****g

in the closet that passes for a restroom

 

no sense of privacy

no sense of individuality

 

in the time it takes to get from point A to B

to C to Z

you become a friend a confidant a sister a brother

 

a somebody who becomes a nobody the minute your feet hit the pavement

forgetting the mixture of body odor, laughter, family lines when you settle yourself home

back to being your lone self and no longer the loathsome travelled

 

they are faces

voices joking laughter

 

you will never hear again

names that you will never know

languages you do not understand but their friendly smile tells more than the papers they dig

from their over full bags when border patrol makes its rounds from back to front

 

if your memory is long their voices will follow you

but stories will not change the trajectory of your time somehow

 

 

still remember the teenage ex-gang banger sitting next to you chattering for two hours because the boredom of the rows of seats does not suit his ADHD fueled brain, a 16 year old "old lady" and baby pictures of this baby's pride and joy he speaks of shooting and being shot of deportations and immigration illegal and legal bouncing over and under the boarder a papered boy who can be threatened on both sides of the border knowing fro experience that no one wants him here nor there when he is there he is suspicious for the price on his head here the thought of Mexico hangs over his head as one authority after another threatens to put him over that invisible line where he does not belong though he has spent all but the first year of his life North of the border

 

but you jump ahead in your memories because his lack of couth,

lack of privacy hold in your mind

stronger than the constant traveler

who disappears from the rows

after 2000 miles and 2 days

he was with you from the beginning

again showing pictures of babies and

little girls bitching and striving for

understanding from the one who got

away never having seen beyond the

deserts and mountains, going to sleep

with his face pressed against familiar

landscapes to wake up to the green

of his first real spring – how to explain that this is only one version,

 

having seen only the muted tones

of the desert dumbstruck by the

jewels of green and pink that sprout

from bark and mud, only one version of beauty

having left the other behind –

no longer being able to see

 

the mirage in the desert becomes endless sand and rock;

try to explain how the endless green ends every year to be covered in white and drenched in mud and cold and all that comes with seasons

try to explain this to a lifetime of dirt.