this is a list

This is a list.

Like all lists, it is incomplete, full of

forgotten things, blank spaces, accidental omissions,

or intentional;

nonetheless, it is a list.

These are the people I think about, at night, unordered,

that do not know I exist.

There is a man who works out at three o'clock in the morning

in the basement of apartment buildings, offices,

neon-lit all-night gyms.

He’s not the same man, of course,

but it’s easier if he is.

He has the glazed stare, the universal shield

of semi-private space behind public glass.

And there is the woman who washes her dresses at midnight

in a Brooklyn laundromat, her socks in Chicago,

who watches the Seattle rain as she washes her underwear.

I sit inches from this woman in the same sickly yellow light,

the light endemic only to laundromats and elementary school gyms,

and her face is unreadable; mine is blank.

I watch silhouettes in windows, masked behind expensive shutters;

I imagine them happy (except when I don’t).

Perfect lives playing out and I know they’re lies,

but I’m drawn in, peering from the street,

giving them everything that I don’t have.

Cars like ants on the highway: I linger on a bench, maybe, or a bridge,

eyes flicking between headlights.

Each one has a destination, a story, a life,

here on the web of highways crawling across America.

I-90 through Montana on a Tuesday night,

or the inexplicable pre-dawn traffic jam in Georgia.

This is a list: it is incomplete, but it includes

the people on these trains, moving silently,

from south to north, east to west.

Some gawk at the mountains, like I do,

or stare at the endless desert;

others press their faces to the grit-smeared windows,

hoping for glimpses of the sea.