On a Bus

there you stand, close enough to breathe the same hot air, right in the thick of your beautiful humdrum existence — bitter breath from last night’s wild tipple washing over me like cheap communion wine, your forehead glistening under the dirty fluorescent light, alive and shining with the honest sweat of another ordinary morning.

follicles of hair in all those bygone shades poking through the pores like tiny salt lollipops, stubborn and real, and that widow’s peak, a dark perfect triangle pointing down toward a face I’d kill to be allowed to look at this long. your lipstick blazing bright red, glossy and wet on a soft Cupid’s bow, trembling just inches from mine as the bus lurches through the city’s roaring veins, and God help me I can’t look away.

close to you standing, my heart hammering in the crowded now, two strangers locked in this fleeting electric flesh-and-breath symphony — closer than lovers for thirty seconds, and we’ll never even know each other’s names, the whole mad world rattling on outside the smeared windows.

her red mouth, inches—
closer than lovers, nameless—
then the doors hiss open.