The Guy on the Train
Martha Strom
do you ever feel
like just giving up?
cooed a voice in my head
you can give up now
but it was time
to go to the pool,
the last time slot of the day
you will begin
a slow slide
toward easeful death
i wanted to call my friend
the one who seems so sad
do you ever feel
like just giving up?
i would say
i stood in the plastic bus stop
and next to the plastic wind shield
a fat gray quite lovely pigeon--
was it asleep? or dead?
the pigeon looked clean
and beautiful but dead
a lady on her cell phone
came by and kicked it
as if to question, dead? or asleep?
and walked on, talked on--
won’t somebody please
help me, cries the guy
on the train
Martha Strom received a Phi Beta Kappa key when she graduated with Distinction in English from Boston University. Soon afterwards, she earned a M.A. and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton. (That was during the first decade of women at Princeton.) Later, she taught English and Writing at Princeton, Brandeis, and Harvard, before moving to New York where she taught Adults with Psychiatric Disabilities; and ESL at Pace University. Now, she writes and lives in Brooklyn, New York.