End of Shift

Inflated insensitivity clocks out at 7:30,
hoisting its Michael Kors bags on twin, still-painless hips,
and smoothly bouncing past a faded blonde, head in her hands,
crouched on the curb and muttering prayers to her feet,
because death – even when anticipated – is vulgar and unexpected,
isn’t it?
They cross the driveway to the parking garage where,
at the end of every day,
parking spaces,
fought over just hours ago
with such indignity and indignance,
are now littered with misery
and missed opportunity.
I don’t have the fight in me to argue with their self-pleased conversation about people whose lives they know nothing.
It splinters the air, and my ears, like the crepitus in my own worn knees
and hips,
lingering and malingering ahead of me to my car.
Reaching the rooftop, the skyline’s hazy film blends blithely overhead
into an undercurrent of explosive cowardice, rude and ribald,
rife with the feeling of having looked up those same words
over and over, but never remembering their meaning.
Astoundingly, one stops to take a selfie –
appearing in context like Mussolini
in such a place
hanging upside down from a meat hook,
vaguely decayed and indecent.
Before selfies, there was the magical realm of impermanence called a mirror
(and good luck)
when moments like this were fast forgotten.
But now, gilded in gray as an evening dawn,
carefully filtered impudence is our window of opportunity
to see what’s left of our souls.
These wishes of the wild and wayward are all alike,
vacant faces of intoxication on a Saturday night subway train.
I can’t imagine why they want to remember such emptiness,
staring blankly and backing out of the last parking space,
away from the poorly disguised gibbet in my rearview mirror.
Still, I pity their inability to see through it yet,
end of shift.