Flux at 2 p.m.

The only breeze comes when a train flies by;
My neck is weeping sweat waiting for you,
And you are not on this train, nor the last.

The hellish scrape of brakes and sliding doors
Disgorges all the actors, here to bow
Their final call, abandoning their

Script, unblocked and roaming free in chaos.
They pour through every turnstile, quick as fish.
The mothers, infants, colorfully dressed,

The sad, perspiring, quirky men who need
Something desperately and who search
The pavement, rails, the columns caked with gum,

Their shoes shuffled with the endless silt
Of cheerless fith that clings to everything
Despite the furrows made by sliding feet.

The orange, yellow, rose and neon trainers,
Mixed with milky slippers, tinseled turbans,
Rhythmically repassing, surfacing

And dipping in extravagant arrays:
The green and black and red of Africa,
The Pink and pierced, shot through with bondage studs,

The inked and tanned, the dyes and shaved, the bald
In spirit and the bald in deed; the lucky
And the cursed, the thin-lipped and the pursed

The deaf from birth and deaf from MP3s,
The schooled and cunning idiots, the teachers
And the taught, the tight, the overwrought,

The fanciful and fierce, the rock-faced sleepers,
The hamstrung, fleeced and powerless, the dreamers
Dreaming still, though passing through the bars;

The wrapped, the nearly nude, the tremulous,
The bibulous, the epicene, the droll,
The multigenerationals, the old,

Lost souls who float above the pale and scowl,
The flat-necks, flatheads, flat-chest, flat foot; birds
Who warble, fluttering and thrive in throngs,

The needsome, argumentative and hasty,
The flexed and beautiful, the plain, the nasty,
Bodyproud, bejeweled, or bethonged;

The beaked and hatted, hated and reviled,
Devout, annealed piously circumcised,
Ingenuous angels, surrogates for dogs,

Clean-eared, corn-fed, D.A.R. with pride.
The halt, the lame, infrequent Frequent Fliers,
The toothached, mustached, wizined luchadors;

The staggerers, whose blood is liquor pocked,
The itchy and beguiled, the unearthly
Comatose, the frantic, well-worn heels,

The pedicured, insurable pedantics;
Ingenious schemers, lovers, those who have
One day left on ear and yet don't know it;

Those whose fortunes lost, will be rebuilt,
Those who never will regain the days
Of unalloyed success, and now resign

Themselves to smiling, thinking about death.
Their eyes alighting straight ahead, their gaze
In gelid ranks seek out the stairs;

They teem, unintroduced and leave as strangers,
No trace of them at all when they are gone;
The silence is a frightful hum and glows,

The hot air unrelieved, far off the echoes
Parch the walls and split the paint, spitting
Tiles on the floor, and still I don't see

You.