SLAM!

"How It Isn't"  [13+]

It's not that living here makes you important, that's just how it feels
because there are so many other self important people here,
handmade celebrities-- and I am no different
as I screen my soap opera on the L train window, watching to see myself
as no one else will see me in the blackened glass
as my personal show hurtles toward an inevitable conclusion,
gaping at my own face and watching the weariness
accumulated over a day of being my own star.
I am the protagonist in this series, the fabled honest and true heroine,
smart, strong and witty in my own image.
The reflection shows me the quiet girl with the story within,
from a distance etched in a blank background,
that phenomenon with a long and tangled back story
in her own leading role,
studio headphones blaring the requisite soundtrack,
a validating ballad of Bjork resting on a cloud of vague unassuming curls
framing a weary pair of eyes, narrow slits
in my reflection, my mouth, always poised no matter the pose,
whether I'm reliving the dank piss rank of the Spring Street station
or the woozy fumes in my walk up Hudson, intersecting the pilgrimage back to that
Promised Land across the river,
recalling things etched in plaster dust and sand
and itching like exposure to fiberglass on my palms.
The train slowly fills with other episodes of the same show,
and the air tastes like perfumes in conflict, Old Bay and Chanel No. 5
and soon the window across from me has been crowded out of view,
jostled away by the starlets packed in around me
not even realizing the part their suffocating presence is playing
as I wrestle through a sea of arms
as I contemplate the guest stars of my day, and my supporting cast,
as I catch one last glimpse of the film that is my life in the door window,
before the doors slide open and
the channel changes.