Bus Boy
The swipe of his SmarTrip card was my sunrise,
the days did not awake until his
suit and tie waltzed to the back
of the H4.
Commutes became consumed by him,
the curiosity of songs
that graced his cochleas,
my twenty-minute soundtrack.
I no longer had to imagine,
as we turned bus seats littered and lonesome
into leaf-laden side streets,
when everything natural was dying
except for us.
We were bound by our literary worlds:
discussions of dystopian fiction
and his mother’s poetry, over fritters
and endless cups of coffee.
In the night we created burrows
out of what were once boundaries
between strangers.
But December is cruel as it is cold,
a tempest of circumstance to which I stood
powerless and unconvincing.
Today his absence echoes at 18th & Park,
the hiss of metal coming to a halt
collecting bodies at the corner:
interns, mothers with their strollers.
A pair of frantic, desperate eyes
from the third to last row lingers,
but the door has closed.
The bus has already moved on.
