Different Ways of Surviving Indifference

 

As American as the band who made it
Is the band
Who barely started
Before injury

(No health insurance)
Ended it
Discovering poetry is anti-American

On the walk from the apartment to the café
Toting a gym sock of coins
A second self is born
To diverge
And navigate roads you'd have taken
He is distant

As impossible to glimpse
As the second self
Of the Andean rebel -
Made to flee to Bolivia
To the States finally -
Who traverses mountain pathways
In a second world
Where time is divided differently
The land the second self
Moves through is not ours
But we collide with it
At times
In our dreams
And the other I

Looks at us
Bewildered
But not indifferent