What I wrote while on the 10:00 bus to Albany

My self defense rolls down the aisle.

Red roof S S, people want to be dizzy. There's a ball field and the sucking echo of a crowd is irrelevant. 10 years and 12 months to the day and she (summer) just got out on parole. She says that she would stop and say hello to some people but it's the 1st and everyone is in jail. The buildings are brick and friendly beneath the exhaust, green and ivy porches and trees so tall that they drink up the atmosphere. A japanese restaurant with brick stoop and broom, a woman with a headscarf unknowingly glowing alive beneath her blank slate face that serves to render the town both complex and beautiful in it's (her) creation for a split second. But still, there's something off. The way the porches are empty and the trees become common and fail to soothe until there is no comfort in owning and the love you feel is directly proportional to your passing through. I remember when I first came east and I got bliss off of that green vista, mentally fed off of clearcut lined gables and tempting obscurity. It's a short walk from the highway to the trees where you can sit perfectly still on muffled dirt where the insects are only 4 feet deep. An entomological timberline...

I wake up to someone handing me my pen and a large, somewhat gross drool line coming from my mouth, and I felt bad about that. Not so much for the stain as for the fear of contamination from an Albany bus, reverse trout upstream contamination, germs by osmosis. A stranger handed me my pen with a smile and I moved my bag closer even as I smiled a thank you and summer tells everyone about her new man who collects other women's panties under the matress.

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