2 22 24 the afternoon train
I was on the late afternoon train
with a drunk skinhead
who wrapped his tattooed baldness
in the chubby embrace of his puffy short arms
as he slept through the dull urbanity of the mainland
and I felt the shallow blandness of his culture
with a new level of melancholy
as if I were the spider
confined in his green ink web tattoo
never getting to taste the blood of a fly
or feel the hapless wiggle of a trapped grasshopper.
