From "Boxed Wine & Pavement Road Poems"

Bus 82 to 12th St. BART and Monsterville
Spring, 1999

Auto-conversant black man
finishes fondling his boom box
and launches into lengthy diatribe
animated yet not quite intelligible enough
to understand.

Low today.
Low and lost
and beginning at last to consider that perhaps
I have made an error
in coming here to live and work.
Hope for work today
dashed again when Friday's two calls
dissolve into:
missing the calls
thus missing the job
and the other job doesn't start til next week.
So I risk missing more calls today
as I head out
all dressed up and no place to go.
If only I felt as good as I look.

I hop on the first BART to arrive in the station
hardly a glance at its destination
what do I care?
No job, no home, no money
an apparent bad string of luck
my hosts judging me
critical of my job search method and
perhaps resentful that I have
so much as a talent to market.

My hosts are monsters.
No, really.
Mr. Monster drives a car called Monsterville
and Mrs. Monster
she's painting monsters all over her car
and they have a web site called Monster-something-or-other
that's all about monsters.
Well, it didn't take long hanging out with them
to one day look at them with the proper cock-eyed glance
and sure enough
I see monsters. Mrs. Monster, says Mr. Monster,
She's the one that will say yes when she would rather say no,
then resent you for it later.
Seems the Mrs. resents me for not lowering
my job search standards
and taking anything that pays.
Judged on that level
I guess they figure I made one very poor decision
the day I walked out on the Providian interview
when I heard the words:
obligatory urinalysis.
I don't even smoke pot.
It's a personal invasion issue.

The burbs fly by in the listless
and somewhat garish afternoon sun
as the Fremont-bound Bart does its thing.
After my momentary euphoria last night
in which beer, Julia Roberts and half
my $50 from Rocky played a part,
I awoke this morning ripe for trouble
unless a job came through.

No job came through.

Mrs. Monster left for work
with hardly a grunt in my direction.
An hour of Internet job search frustration later
Mr. M popped in,
home early from work.
I broached the subject
of Mrs. Monster's disenchantment
and heard it confirmed.
I'd known
but hearing it from him
just made it worse.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit rolls on
and I sink lower in my seat
hiding from the monsters
closing in from all sides.