A THING by JON DOUGHBOY
Diamonds in the Mine
On the bus I’m listening to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate and falling in love with every other passenger and hating myself for this, for these dreamy obsessions I form—Leonard sings that man in white, that’s you, says he has no friends—because I’ll never actually talk to or touch or in any way enter into the lives of any of these people, the college kids with those huge headphones that make them look like frail landscapers—Leonard sings the river is swollen with rusty cans—or the young man in the poor-fitting suit in front of me, immediately in front of me (and immediacy is the problem, one of the problems, is the inability to be immediate) with thick neck hair and I want to pet it and to tell him to shave because it looks like he’s going to a job interview and not everyone appreciates a good carpet of neck hair—Leonard sings there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore—or the old woman in the front row chewing on a brick of white cheddar as if it were an apple, either demented or just secure in that elderly I-don’t-give-a-shit way that I admire—Leonard sings there are no grapes upon the vine—and a thin old man in a Holden Caufield hunting cap shuffles down the aisle and sits beside me, towards the back, I don’t know why, and he smells good, like wool, but also bad, like maybe he peed his pants but not recently, a while back, and left them on the back of a chair in his kitchen and meant to wash them but never got around to it and then eventually just thought they were clean because he’s not the type to crumple them, he probably folded them neatly (look, there’s a pleat) so it’s an honest mistake—Leonard sings, no, sings isn’t the right word, growls, maybe, or howls, that there are no diamonds in the mine—and the old man, my secret friend for one stop, is rising already, is leaving already and I want to hold him and kiss his forehead like some sort of bus ride benediction because maybe he hasn’t touched anyone in a long, long time either, but that’d be strange and I’ve gotten in trouble for strangeness before and have no desire to repeat the offense or reexperience the punishment, but he’s slipping, falling sideways so I rise to the occasion, Leonard, I rise, Leonard, there are, Leonard, you’re wrong, there are, here is one, and I catch the old man my friend and hold his wrist in my hand, a thick wrist, fat from a lifetime of labor or a ganglion cyst and he says, “oh, thank you,” and I say, “my pleasure,” because it was.
Jon Doughboy (li/ili) transcribes poems, stories, and ephemera that li finds written on the walls of dive bars in lia native Dubai. Lia first language is Esperanto. Tune in @doughboywrites for free Esperanto lessons.