I stand outside the subway as a man in a bunny suit lopes past me down the escalator stairs, hops the entrance carousel with pink ears flopping like a little girl's laundry tossing on a line in the wind. Security guards chase him with their night sticks raised over shaven heads. I hope he is never caught. I wait by the edge of staircases and the mouths of tunnels. I run with other young men who burn their ears with their own songs - bleating, sorrowful words that rise up like summer stalks in the mind. We leave the city each week to taste the open air, sleep in meadows with the smoke of pungent joints tousling the tendril shams of our haircuts. We drive ourselves insane among the bees and drunken clouds of gnats as scrub jays dive through the tight scrawl of thistle at the edge of woods. The whole golden countryside blares like an opera beneath a blue wing. At the end of July we catch a ride to the coast in the back of an old man's wood-paneled station wagon. We pick glass from our feet and clap our bloody hands to the strum of folk songs that creak like an old ship on the a.m. radio. Sackcloth and wine, blood sport and empire, we are atheists singing outside a boarded-up temple. Thirty miles per hour in this deathless car bounding with song and the taut sails of our stench, the old man lowers the music and lifts his chin to stare at us in the rearview mirror. Flashing his false teeth, he asks us to pray for the thousands of office workers that stand in hallways, looking for the lit door to their previous lives.
Gary Sloboda lives and works in San Francisco and has published a handful of poems in small magazines and journals, most recently in Rattle. Currently (actually, for the last year) he has been trying to put togther a progressive rock band and continues to write as much poetry as possible.