Train Rides - Part 1 The Painter
Train rides with unrecognized faces are like sharing a small shitter. You can't read because the babies want to shit their moms. You can't sleep because your shitty legs would fall asleep first and atrophy for want of space and shit. You can't die lest you let the pleasant old lady sitting next to you steal your shit. The only good thing about them is stealing into everyone's and everything's shitty life and space. False acquaintances and lost smiles, claimed by anyone that catches you smiling - an emotional free fuck. A series of my observations on daily train rides shall hereby be tagged under 'Commute', and 'Philadelphia'.
1. The Painter
I didn't know if or why he was a painter. But his shirt seemed painted. Like a coloring book - the ones with numbers in them, so you could join the dots and marvel at your infantile expertise over numbers. Or not - if you're not one for math, when you stray and meet the 23 with 100, and line your own way till you interpret the color book artist's shit as your own. The painter seemed the second kind. In carefully filled angles and arcs, his shirt bled into colors that could run and ruin everything nice if forgotten in a community laundromat.
The ends of uncooperative cowlicks of hair, cowlicked out his fedora in sleep-made rebellion. He complained of the crowds in grumbles - me and him both, as the lady next to him vivaciously struck her comb through her stringy hair that cracked in protest, adjusted her bosom, farted in slow progression, and got down at the next station to meet her date for dinner. The painter left the train behind her.
1. The Painter
I didn't know if or why he was a painter. But his shirt seemed painted. Like a coloring book - the ones with numbers in them, so you could join the dots and marvel at your infantile expertise over numbers. Or not - if you're not one for math, when you stray and meet the 23 with 100, and line your own way till you interpret the color book artist's shit as your own. The painter seemed the second kind. In carefully filled angles and arcs, his shirt bled into colors that could run and ruin everything nice if forgotten in a community laundromat.
The ends of uncooperative cowlicks of hair, cowlicked out his fedora in sleep-made rebellion. He complained of the crowds in grumbles - me and him both, as the lady next to him vivaciously struck her comb through her stringy hair that cracked in protest, adjusted her bosom, farted in slow progression, and got down at the next station to meet her date for dinner. The painter left the train behind her.
In timed sucks he would perhaps reduce two lonely mint chews into sweetened, fresh spit and swallow, closed-eyed. Small walks up the stairs, stomping on his lungs in huffs. He would un-rubberband his apartment keys, sweaty in the midst of his blood deprived left palm and thread it into the lock, a needle. A few frivolous trials later, the lock would give up in clicketty disgust and let him in, to loneliness.
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