The Drummer Begins To Drum

If this bus spun and smashed or plunged and burst into flames, strangers would be flung together. Random people – interlaced to congregate, crisscrossing from busy lives to meet at this one, central point – would either die or survive together. Suddenly, we’d each be real, meaningful, three-dimensional to one another. We’d be people, not just strangers taking up a seat.

Once your stop arrives, you disappear forever.

I really do like being a public passenger. It’s such a gentle, deliberate way of being a watcher; I gaze out the window

[and sometimes I remember you doing the same. Your face was reflected in the milky glass, and you had to know I was staring]

                                                      and ponder passing life.

I sit on the bus and think about you and rain and personification. I think about words and songs and people’s clothes, and the ghosts in the fogged-up windows and the ghosts in the seats from bygone trips. I watch the gap at the bottom of the door, and shiver at the road whipping by.
I sit on the bus and think how nice it is to not be interrupted.

I’m no one to anyone here.

Someday I might just catch a bus to nowhere, and end up wherever I end up. Catch a bus to leave, and catch a bus to return.
Set out nowhere
and come back home.