#47 Kevin Brophy 'Angel' (Perth)

You board the bus and buy a ticket from her.

Helpfully she tells you what number to catch next

To get out to the University

On the other side of this city.

She rejects the next customer’s date-smudged

Monthly ticket. Not worth it, she says,

To save three dollars you risk three hundred.

He buys his ticket and tells the rest of us

No other bus driver ever had a problem

With his date-smudged monthly ticket.

You tuck your bag, which contains your life,

under the seat out of people’s way.

No one will fall over it. An hour later

You get to the terminus and leave the bus

Leaving your your bag behind

Tucked neatly under that seat

And you get on the next bus

And buy a ticket from him.

You feel a lightness as if you’re floating

Above the floor of his bus by a few inches

And you remember your tucked away bag.

You beg him to open his door

And let you out of his maddening bus

And he does, shaking his head, and he

Drives away without you.

You run back to where the other bus was.

Nothing.

Then you see her, the first bus driver,

At the other end of the terminus

Open a door in a wall. It locks behind her.

You rush towards the door, shouting something

Like, Hey, can you save my life for me,

My bag is in your bus and my life is in the bag,

Hey, hey, it’s me.

You climb over the wall and you see her

Sitting in her bus daydreaming

Of going somewhere

And you jump on her bus breathless and coughing

And pointing beneath the seat at the zipped up

Little case of your life lying there

Waiting to be taken home by someone else.

You can’t stop smiling at the bus driver

And she can’t stop smiling back at you.

She says she had checked for people’s lost lives

Under every seat and hadn’t seen it.

It’s small, you say, easily missed and easily forgotten.

You take it up and carry it away with you

Just as the bus driver grows wings and floats up from her bus.