The Megabus

A row of soft, emerald lights
shrink down the long aisle of coach bus seats.
I push myself against the glass of the window
to peer out at the sea of matted hair
and lumpy hats.
It has been night for days.
I sit wedged between the window and
a rhino with a sinus infection.
Across the aisle,
a man dressed in sweats
made completely out of rope
will not turn his music down:
it is a polka cover of Ass N Titties,
featuring crackling static from his paint-chipped flip phone.
A couple in front of me suck each other’s faces
like battery-operated toilet plungers
taking on shit-clogged canyons.
(This kind of affection does not need
to come up for air.)
The Megabus seems to be stuck
in some Chinese finger trap of the space/time continuum
and no one seems to notice.

Each time my cell phone would reach 3:59 AM--
multiple times I observed this pattern--
the numbers would reset back to 3:00.
At first I thought my phone was broken,
but I began to notice us pass
the same barns and billboards
over and over.
Was I was mad?
A prisoner that loses grip on reality?
But the sun never rose!
I tried to shake the rhinoceros
but she would not wake.
Her thick, gray flesh and long tusk
made it impossible to crawl over her;
the plungers suck suck sucked away;
(this kind of affection has never
watched The Twilight Zone;)
N ASS N TITTIES N ASS N TITTIES
squeezebox sputtered.
Maybe I did go mad
looking out at them black hole corn fields,
at the same pair of eyes on that billboard;
how they lined up perfectly
with the reflection of my own, once
every hour
for a split second.