Bus

yellow exterior and gray insides this moving corner of the world transcends time, and suddenly it is forty-minutes of blissful freedom, jarring each bit of gravel on the highway knocks your head into the window and each intertwined hum pounds escape a little deeper into your head like distant shouting asking how you ended up there but each turn of these oversized tires takes you closer to being left on the side of the road without a direction and at least when the words are getting lost in headache of chronic exhaustion you are not left alone in the quiet to become your own enemy — and then it is 5pm and you are running out of pages, caught somewhere in limbo between logic and fever dreams that make so much more sense than you can vocalize like sticky notes pinned to a cork board waiting to be connected with red thread but you keep getting distracted, trying to sew feelings into recognizable forms if only you had the fervor of a madwoman on her oaken desk to romanticize the journey, breadcrumbs of poetry, dime a dozen like cheap commodities, and yet never enough passion to inject into them anything like this feeling beyond sanity, and sometimes eyes go dry trying to understand where tears come from

| Kanwal Ahmad