"Passerby"

Lunch, lunch, lunch.

Some people dread this time of social intercourse where we find ourselves

thrown

into cliques- packages, designs, embroideries on our skulls

not as tightly drawn as the cutthroat society of middle school, of coruse

not-

others, it is their saving grace from the long and burden-packed school day.

As for me, lunch is time to kick back and watch other people nteract.

Not that I don't join in occasionally.

It is every other day I am an observer,

almost a complete obsolete stranger.

It's quite entertaining sometimes.

One girl squawks about her lack of a prom date.

The other girl councils with hints and suggestions.

Another simply drinks her juice, in a perpetually apathetic way.

Body gestures, movements.

I suck them all in like some great sponge wallflower.

Two lovers at a table alone sit in their careful embrace and I smile at

them,

because we're familiar.

Others shout, laugh, trade CDs and joke.

They need to hear their own voices I suppose to make them realize

they do exist.

The posters of chalky grinning faces from yesteryear hang loosely on the

glowing vending machine.

I think me and this machine are quite alike. Silent creatures that slip in

and out, needed only for a momentary want.

I watch one girl mimic the squeal of her violin off her arm.

Somewhere else, a girl I once knew lets off a string of profanities, her hair

shaggy and unwashed.

It occurs to me there are ten hundred things I could do in the span of this

one useless day.

There are things I live for-

that will never be achieved.

It causes some worry,

because I flash back ten years and I am still watching,

somewhere to the side of the playground,

making a formidable hut out of small rocks.

Ten years in the future I probably would have put myself out having

made,

having it grand.

No, not the case. Tomorrow never works out like that.

The violin-girl, a friend who regards her references to me quietly,

scribbles away a pcture of a youthful Adonis and lets out a sigh of

unrequited agony.

I know that road.

I've been down there before.

The rest stops are accustomed to me.

Perhaps the caretaker knows my name?

At another table, milk squirts and tempers fly.

The faces that show no emotion,

likely chemically-induced,

mumble to themselves and scratch appropiately.

Turning back, the bell ringing, people heading off to their seperate

destinies that await them warmly, kindly,

I await with those I am comfortable with and follow their lead

getting somewhat lost in the maddening crowd.

A smell sweeps by that brings up memories of a dark bookstore and the

stairs.

I walk away in the end, alone,

straightening my sweater and knowing countless tomorrows await me this

way.

School- the mini-pantheon of society. Fish in a fusion of a sea, the flakes

that make up the snow on your doorway, or

stars that you pass by on a brisk night walk. some glow. some don't.

Trees in a forest, dots on a TV screen, multicolored to capture the image.

Welcome to life.