Train-train

The world is rolling around one more time,
giving me another chance to do the things I’ve
successfully deferred every day so far.
I go to the market
and a girl climbs into my eyes like they do every couple hours.
Reasons to fall assemble easily:
because of the way she’s smearing jelly
between two cookies with a dull, shiny knife,
because of the way she almost kisses the glass display case
when she breaths on it to clean it,
because of the way the flowers in black plastic barrels
surround her, eager to be gathered up and delivered
to her arms. (If it’s at all about love, it’s as much about
ferrying the flowers to their respective destinies)
Two models sit near me
looking just like how models are supposed to look, but somehow
they are not attractive to me, their beauty too flagrant a reminder
of the imbalance of things. I suspect I am not the kind
of man they require and silently rescind myself.
I prefer the jelly girl,
whose beauty is subdued by a kind of helplessness. She shares an
oppression with me, being meek enough to have arrived behind that counter,
at the mercy of the clock spinning her toward a boredom of her own choosing.

I should talk to her. Instead, I watch the
steam rising from my coffee, continually refreshing
the idea of death, which remains unconvincing.
In case I’m wrong, I should talk to her.
A hundred million years from now
none of it will have mattered
as right now all of it matters so much.
Every discarded moment piles into
an ever-rising crest of Now.
Now is here. That much is clear.
Go talk to her. Go talk to her. Go talk to her
(My mind is always giving an ineffectual pep talk,
I seem to be a sightseer touring all the various guilt trips of life).
I can’t think my way into the brief lapse of thought
we call courage. I’m entrenched. I've done all I can
to make myself impervious to chance,
to ensure safe, undisrupted passage down the corridor of each day.
I’ve plied my aloneness into solitude,
where shrewder ones have learned to
accompany it with people.

The familiar, gloomy conclusion
revises itself for today’s dilemma:
If I talk to her, it won’t make me any less alone.
Once again I have bartered bravery and the dim possibility
of elation for the patchy cloak of thought.

Starting home, I am pleased to feel
my feet hijack my body. They take me
on a detour by her booth.
I clutch an alibi: I’m only looking at the cakes.
I pretend to look at the cakes
while actually looking at the cakes
when I feel her walk up
(I've endowed her with such magnitude).

I brave a look at her.
She smiles at me.
I may have twitched
something back before fleeing.
I cherish the smile all day on into the night.
It justified the whole thing somehow.
She smiled at me. I've seen it.
Tomorrow I’ll say everything to her.