Ride

I don't like poems. I said it several times. I don't poems for the same reasons why Psalms' not my favourite book. I may change my mind and it may begin with this poem, for the times I cried during a ride in a cab.

In the Back of a Cab

DAMIAN ROGERS

I lean my body against the door of a car I’ll never ride in again.
The dark shapes of the city collect and collapse
as I shut my eyes on a place I never made my own.
In the long line of stores and restaurants I’ll never visit
your name blinks on a sign that says it has your pizza.
I’ve never found my name on any sign, in any city.
So many people are moving around me on these streets,
invisible within the labyrinth of skyscraper and subway.
I imagine their mouths twisted with longing and fear.
Not one of them knows where I am.

They can’t know how I planned to save us all
with the secret of human happiness
which just this morning I held in my hand like a stone.

But today was too long,
now all I remember is a few lines from a song,
something about 20,000 roads
how they all lead back to me,
here, alone in a stranger’s car.

Maybe each of us, at least once, has cried in the back of a cab,
in the middle of the night, hoping the driver,
who politely pretended that we didn’t exist,
would devote the rest of his life to taking us home.