Subway Ruminations part like 7

Living in New York City is about trust.
Being surrounded by people.
Always people.
Packed like sardines onto the morning A train struggling to get to work
Or spread along stoops and corner stores late on a week night counting down the hours until sleep
Stopped on highway 295 packed neatly in what seems like an endless grid.
Every time I get on the A train I'm trusting that maybe this time I won't get groped by a stranger or that no one on the subway has a knife and a history of child abuse.
Every time I walk down the city street at two in the morning I'm trusting that there's not a group of men much larger than me ready to cat call me or follow me home.
Every time I get on the highway I'm trusting that the driver in the car packed so neatly behind me is watching me as carefully as I am the car in front of me and when the car in front of me stops suddenly I won't rear end them and the car behind me won't rear end me.
It's exhausting.

Rage

Rage and fear are my hair
Tangled in knots and painful to pick apart
Even with conditioner.
Sometimes I think my hair is so snarled it will always fold into the knots.
Even when I brush through it it kinks where the knots were,
Snapping into split ends so anyone can see where the knots were.
Rage terrifies me.
That someday I will yank too hard on the hairbrush and all that pain and hurt and anger
Will come flying out
Medusa's snakes
And petrify anyone unlucky enough to be in the line of fire.
It terrifies me when I see other people brushing their hair
I'm so scared of all the coiled up rage and fear and bad stuck in my own snarls
And shocks me when their brushes slide through their own
Glossy locks without resistance
I wonder at their ease.

An ode to the women I could have been:

The lawyer wears good suits and shaves her legs twice a week. The last time she was outside for more than twenty minutes was last March but I envy her collection of high tech sex toys on her bedside table.
The festival goer has done acid twice and pays for her hobbies by selling tarot readings. She feeds herself with her parents' money and she's not sure what's next.
The one who went to grad school to study classics hasn't worn shoes or a bra since high school. She can quote the entire first act of dante's inferno but she prefers the purgatorio. She creates colorful fantasty worlds in her head but her thesis always feels dry and emotionless. Her grand parents are rather proud of her.
The farmer gives the best advice. Her back is twisted and she doesn't remember the last time her muscles didn't ache. She hosts a monthly story telling event in her small community. She falls asleep as soon as she lies down in bed.

The one who went on birthright is still in Europe. She au pairs with a family in France and hasn't been back to America since Trump got elected. She cries when it rains and she loves to dress up and go out clubbing. 

The one who stayed in her home town lives with her two best friends. She spends a lot of time staring out the windows and she never learned to dance but she hosts themed dinner parties. 

I wonder if I could learn how to live from them, or how not to live. Eighty years, one hundred years, seems so short; not long enough to fit all their lives into mine. Not long enough to fall in love, to lose my keys, to study, to write, to make art, to stare out into the rain and cry. Not long enough to visit Europe, return to my home town, hitch hike cross country, live in a big hippie house with all my friends and lovers, go broke, get rich and do it all again.

I never knew them but I miss them in the quiet seconds. And I love them. I hope they love me too.

A haiku for those who manspread on the subway:

Close your fucking legs
You inconsiderate ass
Think of someone else

Written while mastrubating

“Im not sure I want to be with you. I just want to fuck you.”

She murmurs in his ear.

Because tonight she’s the queen of the fucking nile and men are lining up to look into her coal lined eyes for just an instant and what’s the harm of a few casual lays?

Because when she unrolled the carpet at Ceasar’s feet he got on his knees and begged her for mercy.

She didn’t ask him to invade Troy for her

Just asked for a few minutes of pleasurable respite

Because if she were goddess born,

Doesn’t that make her fucking holy too?

She just wanted to get laid, she never meant to bring Troy to the ground.

She wanted to grab fistfulls of pomegranate seeds and let the juice drip down her chin.

She wanted to rip the apple off the tree and devour it seeds and all.

As it says on the battle march from the subway to my office,

“God < Cum”

If I were a goddess

What would you leave at my shrine?
Leave ticket stubs from trains you missed and just passed test scores. Line my temple with used up lipstick tubes and pens you stole from somewhere; you can no longer remember where. If I were a goddess you would leave the goofy condoms at my shrine. The ones with the pictures of endangered species that say things like "Fumbling in the dark?/ Think of the monarch." Leave keys you found in the street and uncompleted to do lists.
Leave not quite used up metro cards and not quite enough canadian money to make the exchange worthwhile. You would place pretty gold pins
In my temple, the air would smell of bitter citrus from all the orange peels you would leave in offering. And instead of incense you would burn hope and let the smoke waft up to the domed ceiling.
If I were a goddess people my temples would be small. Just one of those little things sandwiched in between rows of tenement housing. But in the winter there would always be a wood fire burning and somehow the light of the day would shine in, summer and winter, through the cracked windows patched with duct tape.

My temples would be bus stops and rail stations and street carts. 

And sometimes in my temples you would be visited by drag queens and grandmothers. Librarians and teachers and farmers. Sex workers and artists and poets and migrant folk. Pay attention to these visits. You have been blessed by a manifestation of my spirit, in a form purer than me.
You would leave bits of yourself, or other people. They would be a torn photograph or a page from a diary. You would leave green things and growing things. Arugula, nasturtium, bean sprouts would grow in a menagerie of pots and jars around my shrine. Tree of heaven would surge to life from the cracks in the sidewalk outside and virginia creeper would caress the walls and ceiling. 
My shrine would have no place for sickly looking orchids or delicate bonsai trees but bunches of rugged kale would curl up in odd corners and in the summer stray sprigs of goldenrod would litter the open floor. 
You would leave your lost and my shrine and you would leave your found at my shrine. You would lament, weep, and fall in love. You would sing loud songs of abandon in worship and you would fuck for the pleasure of it and that would be sacred. You would bring the smiles of the cashier and the homeless man playing guitar on the f train and you would leave the grief you felt when your first true love left you. And you would take my love.
When you leave my temple in worship, pockets empty, heart full, my love would walk you home.