(This is what I look like on a greyhound bus.)Poems written for my this semester's poetry class. Obviously based on the afore-written-about people, but it was an interesting and weirdly difficult experience to make up some details.Smoking in Helena
The bus driver in blue, chews his sweet-burning pipe,
Paces under the mute station lights,
His face is long-gone handsome and furrowed with impatience,
He wants to make it to Great Falls before midnight turns too far into tomorrow
Maybe his wife is waiting, maybe just a mealy Motel-Six --
Still, you can’t leave pretty girls with freckles and third babies on the way
In a closed up capital city,
So we’ll all smoke together for a while.
The bus driver makes mean jokes that are funny, too
While Charity, Marissa and I sit on cold black benches
Our hands brush as Charity passes white wisps of cigarettes,
We try not to drop them or burn each other’s fingers,
Trading DNA with strangers, with pregnant Marissa, Charity
Who used to love meth, now with her big brown folder of children’s drawings,
Community saved her life, she tell us as we watch the dark.
And we wait for maybe an hour, suspended like this,
In all atmospheric intimacy, swapping spit, passing poison
We release white puffs onto the black,
There’s nobody else here to breath it in.
The bus driver says we’ve got to go,
We say we’re sorry to leave her like this,
We hope for car lights to take her home,
Marissa says it’s alright, and she holds her cigarette close,
Green sweater taut over her stomach,
Cheap red luggage clustered round her delicate little shoes.
---
Moonshine country
I‘ve never tasted moonshine,
But I’ve curled up on a Greyhound bus, cutting though the Montana dark,
A slight hell-raiser from Great Falls
Named Asia in the seat behind,
Kicked out and heading East to find a boy
Watched out for the moment by a thick, tattooed man called
Spider, heading down South to see his mama
-- And Asia was talking about moonshine,
How she sat a table once drinking glass after glass feeling fine
Then she stood up and fell cold on her face
Then this boy took her home and they spent four days together,
That’s all it took, and she’s New Hampshire-bound, leaving the West
And I hope it’s true love, because I like a bad idea to turn into the meant to be
But I just don’t know if Asia’s country song would end that way or not.
--
(If I'm ever gonna write good poetry again, I may need to take another bus trip to Montana. And this time I will take more photos! I almost entirely dropped the ball on that -- maybe I was sleeping too much?)
