A man buries his head in his hands
Beneath the bright lights of bookstore wisdom
And rocks gently back and forth.
There is hardly room for breathing.
The college kid who crept in late
Now clutches his pack to his chest
For lack of room or
For fear of feeling too much from what
He hears
And spreading it like a seed
That slips inside ears and noses,
Tickling,
Ubiquitous weeds growing like
Wild fire,
Wild in form,
Function,
Wildly informed of the true face of things.
People sitting on feet and hands,
Arms around knees and waists,
Backs and pants showing
Cracks, but no pulling up, no protecting
The individual from all the other individuals,
Breathing and sniffling and gum chewing
And crooking necks and hanging upside down
Over the stair rail, or stepping over crossed legs
And begging for a better view,
Begging to be involved, connected and protected
By the single solitaire sitting on one’s feet,
An arm wrapped around her knee
And her bare feet pressed against one’s thigh.
A woman’s wheelchair disappears under
Foreign (yet so familiarly human) limbs
Draped over the metal frame.
A cough is felt a hundred times over,
A clap is like the earth trembling
At our unifying giant mass
As it attempts to stand and falls back down
With a tremendous thud.
She breathes in,
My lungs rise.
He sighs,
All our shoulders loosen,
Fall to our sides.
We in one world
Breathe and listen.
His words enter like seeds into the giant ear
Of our giant body
To fester and ruminate in the soggy mess of perspective-
History
Gender politics
Criticism and critical thinking-
How these things so often distort the big picture,
The reality of thoughts, the trueness of feeling.
So we touch our palms to others’ backs
And for a brief time,
His back is our back,
And her feet are our feet,
And the heavy words the poet speaks
Enter our great ear.
We cannot carry such a truth alone,
We cannot discern it separately.
We carry it on our massive shoulders
That heave and sigh as one.
