november shuttle bus

i am reading Canada in a shuttle bus that is patchily air-conditioned, dimly lit and stacked with a unique amalgam of queers, auditors and drowsy people. we are moving at a constant speed of sixty three miles per hour. my head keeps swaying, my shoulders tilting, my legs split in a maneuvering discomfort. i release a cough and look to my right, incline my shoulder and let my shared seat-partner drool and dribble a speck of saliva onto the fabric of my shirt. salmon-stripe, wrinkle-free, tidily hemmed and fading. she is black. speaks Ebonics. a business lady in her thirties. her hair is neatly braided, with streaks of burnt brown, almost chocolate colored, although it appears a peculiar blue in the green lights along the bus ceiling. moments before the drop of saliva lands on my shirt, without a thud, without a ripple, it glistens with a jarring twinkle, rough at the edges with fourteen bubbles. i follow the trajectory of this pearl drop from her lips to my sleeve, carelessly instantaneous, traction-less and unmoved by my breathing. her upper lips are chapped around a plump, waxy tubercle. one millimeter, crater-like dents lining the vermilion zone, extending to the node; coursing its way to the tip of the philtrum. the drop appears from the extreme nodal crease on her lips, gains momentum and falls, gravitationally. within a matter of seven milliseconds, the drop has diffused into the lattice of atoms -- my pasture of fabric, on the edge of my body, in mini-trails and fetal paths, reeling in anoxia, scurrying along in tentacles, riddling and flushing a puddle of fleas, ticking and jogging in bristles of dust, a dying matador, a suffusion in tertiary voids, mellowing and stripping in the tragedy of disappearance. this is the life of a saliva bead as framed in the pocket of a dictionary; a liberated gestation of nanoseconds, to the shared demise of tragedy. a peculiarly universal phenomenon, traditionally unobserved. aimed to entertain on the lip of the black lady, my shared seat-passenger, resting before business. her name is nyomara. it hardly matters.

i fell asleep shortly after. and woke up, twenty seven minutes later, to the sound of a crying infant -bordering seventy decibels, shrill and constant. i get very irritated sometimes when i hear infants cry. it's excruciatingly loud, desperate, and so piercing. i want to jab a pacifier into the mouth and say, can you shut the fuck up, please? but i realize, in the polite society where i live, this will be considered rude, selfish, aggressive and unthoughtful -borderline maniacal. it is a pity that given the constraints of our code of civilization i am not allowed to feel, sometimes, the way i truly feel, especially about a little child. or i am allowed to feel, but shunned from expressing it. the immediacy of concern and my upbringing, best left unquestioned, glides past moments where i bite my inner cheek to maintain the codified propriety. sickening and staged, most of the time.  but i am helpless, and lonely in this domain. if i have a child of my own to deal with and raise, perhaps, my feelings towards a screaming infant may change. till then, however, i will maintain that this development of evolution, this crying to be heard, this congruency of defenselessness, this modality of expressionism of a voiceless, wordless, living meta-summation of chromosomal hiatuses, is no different from that of a barking dog -similarly defenceless, speechless, unable to communicate in a constructed vernacular you and i rehearse. possibly a scandalous analog -the rational and the irrational beings of the one tree of life. but is your baby, truly and decisively rational? answer me sylvia. 

i have the vision of a miniature me, nano-sized, possibly tubular, sitting down, hunch-backed, at the neck of my aorta. the ascending branch, behind the sinus, perpendicular to the orifices of the coronary arteries. en route a micro-systemic shuttle of immunity, complexity and the belligerence of hormones, unearthing a cross-talk, bendable to nature, glorified and typified by the philosophy of adaptation. googly-eyed and insincere, dictating to a self-duo, trafficking and policing the physiology, the morphology, the blueprint of the body worlds. living in an umbrella, talking to my self in a series of echoes, ribbing and rippling the frustrations of a physical circuit, walking in circles, breathing in loops, fashioning and dressing in the renewal of the constitution; this is my internal turnover, this is the photograph of the internal me, unedited and untouched. the relevance of capturing the ballad of my blood cells is something that makes sense to me. it helps me know my other self. my clockwork self, with a mind of its own. playing hide-and-seek with viruses, my nano-me in a nano-world gives shelter to my soul. gives comfort and reassurance to my vitriolic mind, burnt out and charred in the ferocity of my life, in the dielectric of my world; our worlds, perhaps, the shared distribution of economics and pottery. my nano-me in a nano-world, in nano-tongues and nano-views, searching a transition to a hidden life, a floating city, and the meta-soul of screams.