MBTA Bus Poems By Liam Day Callie Crossley Show April 2012
#10 – Panopticon Some routes cross the city, some circumvent it; some, like blood, work from its limbs to the heart and back again – from City Point at the gate to the inner harbor to Copley Square in the shadow of the Hancock Tower, the slab of blue glass redolent of a tombstone. From so many places in my life, so many places surrounding the city like an army in siege – Chelsea, Somerville, West Roxbury, the top floor of the Victorian in Dorchester converted to a condo during the bubble before the bubble that just burst, leaving us, like a patch of floating garbage, underwater on a mortgage we secured with almost nothing down – I’ve watched its panels catch the sun’s last light. Mornings, I hop the bus at Andrew, ride it for a short stretch over the highway, it too a desiccated vein to the city’s moldering heart. But biology this isn’t. The city sucks from us the oxygen we carry and, when done, expels us in the glare of the setting sun’s mirror. Depleted, we stare dead ahead, sway with the bus’s every lurch. Though I hold out hope of engaging your gaze, of looking at and through you
and having you look at and through me to find there a different station, the state of play prevails. Power is hard-‐wired. Frequent, random surges move, heat and light the world. Our view is defined for us. If you see something, say something. Yet the original design was meant to be humane -‐ it would matter less that we’re watched than that we thought we were, our behavior regulated, our productivity insured. My father admonished: always act as if someone’s watching. Perhaps he was right. Lights come on in the offices one by one, the pattern on the blue building haphazard, like a punch card’s. It seems we work later and later for less and less, razor thin margin, razor thin tower standing sentry over the city that encircles it. Any day I’m busting out. Want in?