The daily Greyhound bus
Pulling into the station
Is full of vagabonds
And girls with scars
Who think that fame
Will heal their bruises
Swimming in the sand,
These spiders become slaves
To the rhythm
Of non-existence
Without putting up
Much of a fight
Blatant avidity
To their empty vices
Chains them, implacable,
To dirty shrines
It doesn’t take long
For these wanderers
To fall under the crown of damage
Like crash test dummies
Who sew their veins
With rusty needles
And bent spoons
Speedballs, taxicabs
And weekly hotels
Are the linchpins
To which these spiders cling to
Until a deus ex machina
Comes along
Beneath the mockingbirds
With a belly full of whiskey,
Hubert took the last exit
Between obsession & madness
While coloring in his scars
With a magic marker
Trying to get out of Brooklyn
Trying to get out of his head
Until he was miles away
From tree-lined streets
And among the orphans
Lying tangled
On the boulevard
Hubert resorted to panhandling
For a cheap room
So he could upgrade
From musty motels
To pay by the week apartments
Playing to a different beat,
Hubert’s a bird of paradise
Without any feathers
Michael N. Thompson is the author of the poetry collections Dancing Inside The Mouth Of Madness and This Hollow Pierces. His poems have published by Nine Twenty Two Press, The Toronto Quarterly, Pooka Press, Citizen’s Voice and Heavy Bear Magazine. Michael lives in San Francisco.