No routes ever list it.
No drivers discuss it.
But every once in a while,
a rusted old bus
rumbles in sputtering,
its lights dead, but humming,
its doors yawning wide.
It was there,
at that bus stop,
that I first glimpsed:
a blue rose
that didn’t exist.
It grew from a crack—
a split in cement,
from broken mirrors
and viscous black blood,
from burning beams
of a black hole sun.
And every once in a while,
I think back to that bus,
go back to that flower.
I like to keep an eye on it—
see if it remembers me.
And every time I stop by,
I’m astonished anew.
I watch the rose,
and it watches me too.
If you stood there you’d know
this inscrutable scene
exists only in passing,
a vague, hazy dream—
a bus stop
that clings
to where reality forgot.
A blue rose in its shadow,
it’s hard to believe it.
It remembers all souls
who have waited beneath it.
