The View From Row Six

The bus swayed into a turn at 4th and Main,

and the light caught the passenger in 5B.

There was a mole, dark as a drop of rain,

just above the collar for the world to see.

The barber’s clippers had left a clean track,

showing the pale, shivering skin of the nape.

It’s a vulnerable thing, the curve of a back,

where the heat of a body tries to escape.

I looked at the floor, at the gum and the grit,

feeling like a voyeur of the mundane.

We are all just spines and the skin over it,

waiting for our stop in the soft, gray rain.