METRO(polis): 705

Cadillac? How about that?

This firetruck-red accordion
on wheels is picking me up
on Cadillac and Venice:
an alien car-
toon of a comic hoisting up
the King of Cars on a boule-
vard known for speed demons?
It stops, kneels
to kiss curb and begins to belt
a succession of beeps for me
to embark on my blerp blerp blerp.
I pause aloud, step
into thorax of accordion and
there are zero seats, zero.
But,
there are two Babyzilla Destroyer-
Strollers, eight cotton-candy-on-a-stick
vendors, 18 blind wenches on sentient
Rascals, 64 Identical Eminems, jabbing
bars into black books, and 3,421 unicorns
with security guard uniforms on.

In other words, this bus is thick,
always and forever, with the promise
of raises, increases, and aumentos.

At least they turned the tundra on
is what everyone is thinking, except,
maybe, they are also thinking
variety is the spice
of strife, both in genetics and
interpersonal singularities.

Maybe, they are thinking, I
thrive in a province of fossils
and ride a beast to work?

Regardless, Crenshaw creeeps
up repositories of things that have
transpired, some singular
and devastating and some just
this side of a yawn at work.

Like, I read somewheresss that
Puerto Rican women are closest,
genetically, to the ideal of perfection
in a geneticist’s playbook.

It was an article wielded by a woman
wearing Sphinx earrings who told me
her information baton is at the heart
a battery of inconclusive printouts.

METRO(polis): 105

I might blow the whole pot of my morning commute on this one transfer.
Might spot bus as my Expo car pulls up to the stop at La Cienega
and biff the tempo of the movement, might turn the corner as the 105
is already onto its next gesture, next angina of time compounded location.

The 105 swoops through Coliseum to MLK to hook up with Crenshaw
and thus Vernon through Santa Rosalia Drive, a nest of Black communities
hanging on by scruff of the starch in uniforms and scrubs and stiff walks
in purple dawn day after day after day for what (to be pushed out to Lancaster?)

I’ve caught the jackpot connect and avoided the squinty wait in pure sun fuckery
on Venice smack dab in front of the Keiser Wellness Fortress with the overpass
of the Ten impudently whizzing blurs past the offramp of the West Ten a los pedos
a garrison of homeless centurions hidden by the hungry concrete shadow.

Today, the 105 unclenches pneumatics and exhales into idle, and I enter the silent
wagon of thought this bus represents in all the quadrants barreling clean periphery
down La Cienega from Sunset to Rodeo then vectors left on Vernon and doesn’t heel
until the Long Beach Blue. I am on one line thinking about the trajectory of another line.

I’m on the eastbound Expo because I don’t always take the 733 to Cadillac;
sometimes, I might debark Robertson, and Expo-line it to La Cienega and Jeff.
whoop down four flights of steps like a deranged ibis before sprinting to foot
of self-storage galpones and the non-descript front of a See’s.