area code 203

after the parade
I hurry on with a door I could not open
I laugh the way people laugh
spying from their phones

the rich commuters and strangers
board the train to New Haven
the home of plummy proudness
and steady habits

(where the pay phone was invented)
and their small nods of civility
through the train window
a bendy body in a borrowed bed

a man hanging from a rope leaning in to whisper
with an open mouth holding a megaphone
wide echoes of men unwashed
surrounded by cardboard                 white vertical lines

these porous boundaries quickly dissolve and
blur far behind me like a picture taken by children
from a moving car in winter
a brilliant stream of accumulated useless objects

souvenirs of the unforgiven         woven
into the steady sound of hammers droning
with my eyes closed in this shimmering
plain oddness of a wordless moment