I don’t know what to say to you people.
This situation is not natural.
Nobody talks to each other this way in public.
The signs you see from a bus window at the stops are different
than what you see from a car. The skinny can’t fathom the fat,
their gasping for breath and their trouble finding clothes.
And by the time the great shrink back
there’ll be no trace left of the little.
Driving through a snowstorm, through a fog like through a tunnel,
making out the world through a huffed-off section of the glass.
Driving through a sandstorm swerving
across the parallel.
People don’t talk to each other this way. When they can,
they’re more inclined to clench their teeth on each other, or their arms, clothes, debts.
Driving down undulating sheets of rain
with a question mark instead of a head.
With the upside-down Spanish question mark
that opens the clause, a road in a tunnel of hard rime.
A period at the vanishing point of parallel lines—