Your Greyhound poem

You will forget the brown stains on the fuzzy blue seats
The torn covers and springs creeping into your back
The smell of strangers too close to you
Their abused, drug-beaten lives they must spill all over the bus

The taste of old pastries and powdered cheese
The hours when you’re stretched thin waiting
To just stop, so you can move your spine, your knees
Any movement of muscle and bone, please God I can’t take another minute of this

You will forget how a stark, empty station at 4 a.m.
Can make you hate Baltimore or Milwaukee
Cities that meant nothing to you, with a dead-sick fury

But you tell them all back home, every time
When you woke not knowing if this was North Dakota or Montana
When you saw the kind-faced man in Butte, huddling his Styrofoam coffee cup

So you might as well only remember
The pleasure of yellow lines being swallowed for hundreds of miles,
Sharing your bag of chocolate with Asia, moving from Great Falls to New Hampshire
For a boy she barely knew

And always remember, (since it’s just as true
As angry, exhausted people in Chicago lines,
Sleeping on cold black benches, getting grifted out of 20 bucks
By one hard luck story or another)

When you’ve made friends with every face on your bus
Even if you’re keeping to yourself this route
Remember when the driver is steady and patient
When it’s midnight and the skies over Lima, Montana are turquoise-lit

Over one brooding yellow Motel sign
And you can’t get the scene in a photo, but you fix it in your mind
And the diner’s decor is pink-precious, but the girl at the counter is an angel,
The bus driver laughs with the fry cook over nothing much

And you take your black coffee and your rhubarb pie back onto the bus
And you should be sleeping, but you couldn’t possibly