Seated on the bus.
This cruising assemblage of rubber, metal, and wires, holding humans in its belly as it rolls through space, I in turn hold as ‘bus’; it obediently folds its motion, its taking of us from our As to our Bs, transparently inside my grasp of it as ‘bus’. For a moment I see the secret machinery translating the bus’s metal and gears, its controlled explosion of gas and its careful flesh and blood piloting through streets, into the electric linguistic bubble of Bus, neatly resonating within itself all the other sub-bubbles it holds (wheels, gears, line-ups, starting and stopping, get up for the elderly and infirmed, watch for your stop) outside of time, as a neon glow in cognitive space, a phantom of electric attention that could vanish with a firm yank of the cord from the outlet.
In the electric bus bubble, scenery collapses into ‘scenery’, seats into ‘seats’, passengers into ‘passengers’, all filed away within everyone’s private bus. His bus isn’t mine, but he and I include each other, in a hidden pact, on each other’s busses.
Adhering without touching, because inhabiting the very marrow, I persist as a ghost in these machines within machines, wheels within wheels. The bus driver is his own island of turning precision, tracing us through mapped time schedules onto real concrete streets, carrying us to phantom goals within solid walls. And he is my avatar up ahead, manipulating through my remote control, the arcane gears of the electric bus bubble engine, transmogrifying scenery, collapsing space between my A and B.
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