Commuting ladies wearing sensible pantsuits, reading Eat, Pray, Love on the train.

How long does it take for me to feel like I am here?

I noticed a small puddle of bird shit on the armrest of my seat.

I did not change seats.

I can feel the bones in my face now.

The second the pen hits the page I am absent.

The space keeps moving, with or without me.

This is so much like fishing.

Stay here until you get something.

The sex workers and their pimps are escorted outside.

If you have enough money to eat at TRAXX, you can stay here all day.

Janitors: ABM Janitorial Services.

Talked to a cop. He said I could sit here as long as I didn’t bother anyone.

Two weeks ago, she found a human leg at the Highland Park station.

Lightweight, collapsible autonomous poem-objects.

We should be able to carry everything on the body.

Simultaneous absence-presence.

Self-elected invisibility is the greatest subversion.

The drunk guy followed me into the bathroom.

7:43 p.m., coffee, $1.65

Do we really want this space to be anything other than what it is?

There is nothing stylish about this.

A sleeping woman has her things searched and discarded at 9:28 p.m.

There is nothing stylish about this.

wedding vows, scribbled onto a sheet of notebook paper

an essay I wrote in 2003 about the categorical imperative. I got an A.

many year’s worth of “community organizing” spreadsheets, graphs, flowcharts.

fourteen plastic containers I insisted on saving, however only sat in a pile under my desk

one hundred or so images, cut out of a book, that were valuable when they were chosen

I fed a bird three grains of rice and then he flew away.

A man across from me adjusted his suitcases, then we made eye contact.

He walked through the crowd, turning to look back, asking why they were following him.

She said I thought I was better than her.

I found a hundred dollar bill, its falling out of his pocket went unnoticed and I gave it back.

He handed me three dollar bills, two dimes, and a penny; our hands touched.

I waited behind her for my turn to use the electric hand dryer.

Our legs touched, side by side on the metal seat and we didn’t move apart.

The man stood at the front desk, folding napkins then stopped to answer the phone.

“You love your culture. I love my culture, but you have to learn the language. That’s what my father and my uncles said when they came in through Ellis Island, ‘You have to learn the language in order to make your way into the new world.’ They said it in Yiddish, but they said it, nevertheless.”

Culture Clash:
Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy
Richard Montoya

http://azethnicstudies.com/banned-books

The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies.

The Tempest, Prospero, scene ii, Shakespeare