The First Year Back/Commute

This would be 2003-2004.
The Presbyterian church clock in the distance
dooming away the early hour.
I should be out of the shower by now.
Towel dry and deoderant and Boss cologne.
Not enough time to check E-M,
barely enough time for anything really...

Out the door at 5:25AM.
More night than dawn as autumn stetches out,
winter spooning its chilled ass.
The streets like stray pencil lines,
checks and graphite dipsy-doodles...
a casual convergence.
I'd have Harold Budd or Simple Minds "Empires and Dance"
on CD Walkman.
Marking off the intervals per song...
How many tracks 'til I'm off Highland Ave?
Or mid-way down South Street?
And here I am on the commuter rail platform,
time for a three-minute ditty.

The houses I'd pass
with the TV lights flickering in the upper windows--
the Weather Channel or soft-core porn?
Pre-planners or late night insomniacs?
One house close by the station,
a new abode with a single SUV in the drive...
big frame windows and a plasma TV screen.
Always the tint of driving flesh and mascara,
a solitary watcher reclined in a sofabed.

That same street the cats came out,
feral wild things.
You'd spot one or two the moment you turned onto the street,
a black smudge staring you down...
then casually wandering into the adjunct woods.
Someone fed 'em.
I saw an old man with shopping bags once,
there were even feedbowls lined against the rocks.

The 5:54AM train pulls in and I get on.
Prefer this one to the 6:30AM.
On the latter train, the packed train...
there's a disfigured woman.
Reconstructive surgery after some car accident?
The seats are always misleadingly empty before her.
She has Raggedy Ann mop hair
and wears pantsuits. Always a matching cheery color--
like rose or teal.
The color of some children's room.
And there's a man always with her-- a brother? a husband?
A very goldilocks Lewis Carroll type.
When the train pulls into South Station,
she always barrels ahead,
past the faces of the other commuters
so they only see a hunched back?
And the man gradually follows after.

If I'm lucky the train's on schedule-- 6:20AM.
15 minutes to run through Financial District &
Downtown Crossing,
catch the 6:35AM 354 bus to Woburn line.
The coldest I've ever been,
a late January on Federal Street.
The wind literally giving me a headache as it batters my brow.
"Wear a hat!" my dad always says,
usually as I'm already out the door...
but I have such "fine" hair
a wool pullover and my day is done.

Dunkin' Donuts and a corn muffin on payday.
The wax bag in one hand as I count the quarters
and feed the bus meter.
The bus always frigid, the cold of a supermarket meatshop...
only warming when it's hit the highway.
I try to read a few pages of the paperback I have,
a detective novel by Lawrence Block or
a collection of horror shorts. Nothing too involved
as I usually nod off.
But the bus ride to Stoneham is relatively short,
and I'm soon dropped off alongside the highway.

There's an Asian girl who gets off with me.
I eventually learn her name's Christine.
She works as a lab assist at the dental company,
the building over from my own.
And the year wears on, and I eventually catch up to her,
chat...all cool-like.
Her parents run a convenience store in North Quincy.
She doesn't care for her job.
Doesn't like Halloween.
But when I ask her out she looks genuinely horrified,
I've over-stepped some fellow commuter boundary,
I've made the following mornings
and the Tuesdays and Wednesdays after that
uncomfortable.

I walk up Maple Street to work. Get in by 7AM.
Another hour 'til the work day starts.
I punch instructions in the coffee machine
(I graduate to tea)
and plip-plop and done.
Breakfast and the internet and Movie Magic Screenwriter.
And long-term planning.