Metrocard to Purgatory

In the Purgatory of the New York City subway,
progress seems ostensible. Things appear to change –
doors all close and open – figures enter, sit,
and wait to exit, which then, variously, here and there,

they do – but while they’re sitting, offer
such a range of strange abstracted and distracted
looks betraying their unconscious fractured drifting
points-of-view, one wonders just exactly who,

or what, they are. If ever there were need for
evidence that we are random dollops of detritus off
a star, surely what we look like sitting in the subway
would, for proof, beat all the rest by far.

.