Camping In The Underground by Suzy Devere

I was a thousand miles away from home, and you, and tigers. We’d never been
apart. We’d never been together. We’d never been at all, but there was
something angry on the subway floor that let me know the weather was gunna
change from the center up; something burning down there that seemed hotter.
Waxen sanity melting, I began to question what seemed to me unknowable
things, like the exact location of the sun (maybe beneath instead of above?
maybe Heaven’s hot? Hell weightless, cool and breezy?)…

then my mouth opened and I heard an echo of myself as I yelled out at an
imaginary you across the tracks:

“MY GOD, IT HAS COME OVER ME!
I want desperately to mark you!

–AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!–”
(i yelled this as an aside, aimed straight
at the Pakistani subway vendor, saw his lips
mouth a reply of “what the fuck?”
so went on even louder)

“MAYBE YOU CAN’T HEAR ME!” (and then I turned my head
and settled my lunatic stink eye on a
helpless looking lady in a Mary Poppins hat)

“I said I want to piss on you like a feral cat!
to take you in with one deep and catastrophic breath!
a tectonic breath that snaps the plates beneath us both
and brings us shaking and gasping
to the endlessness of fucking!
to the endlessness of sex, of making love, of colour!

my God, fucking endlessness…

no delineation
forwards or back
up or down
i want you without anything imaginary between us!
or real around us!
i will be your
second skin!”

And then, just as it came, you can bet it left. Silent, this time with my cheek
pressed against the dirty subway tile, a new sensation of bugs made me
queesy. I could feel their myriads of centipede feet crawling into the knots of
my newly matted hair.

Machinations of an approaching train; drugged double vision and feet shuffling
quickly by, my head rang with dissonance. Threads of messy sound wrapped
around me like yards of stretched out gum. Did you know people’s shoes make
melodies that don’t always match their ankles?

Then I wondered if I’d said any of this aloud, any of it at all? Not caring either
way, I decided to close my eyes and go back to sleep. I slept badly until i heard
the glorious “ping” of coins falling into the empty can I’d set by my head; “ping,”
and a swig, and back down I lay to lure the luxuries of dream.