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Q52: a short lyric
they haven’t touched the bridge in over eighty years
that’s why
after the hurricane snuck in
the trains don’t run over it no more
you have to take the bus across Cross Bay
and in those thirty minutes that you have
after waiting in the cold huddling in around you
you’ll sit on a hard and angry seat
watching the world like a weary guest:
the old Russian women talking too loudly on the phone
that they barely know how to operate
in a language that all other passengers
but me
do not understand
and after the call is done
before the next appointments are to be made
their bodies will tenderly convulse
because the nearly dead are made to dance
for our forced mocking sympathy and our amusement like the dole
the men that stand pace anxiously
in the two step space that they’re allotted
before a workday becoming prison
leaves them slumped along the railing springing
like the wheels below along cement
the pimply adolescents and their pockmarked older siblings
read books they were assigned
while futile anger and frustration rages in digitized decibels
from their headphones
the aging allochthonous junkies who still make the trip
have come to pay their servile and pitiful respect
to scions of their old connects
from stories of seventies’ glory days
when shooting galleries replaced alleyways
and the cops didn’t have to pretend not to give a shit
the young and pretty neighborhood girls
they’re sitting, waiting, too
crosslegged and small and nearly blue
or gold, sometimes I cannot tell
because despite our same path here every day
we have all been detached, completed, from ourselves
these people just like me
are all I do not know too well
but try to meagerly
because this ride is the same one along which I’ll return
until the bridge is fixed
and we aren’t broken
lonely anymore
(for Claudia Rankine)
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