Rider
Rider comes in.
STRIDES in.
Not a swagger.
Not a shoulders back front out puff up bowl down the bus.
A grit of teeth, sure,
a won’t blink look right ahead.
Down the bus.
Down the middle of the wrong bus boy.
The wrong color bus.

And he settles in a seat and grips the bar in front a little too tight.
Riding.
In his neat suit.
A proper suit.
With neat hair,
a little blond flick
at the regulation length.
And at some stage he says he’ll get off first when the bus stops.
And at some stage he wins the half-hearted argument.

So when the bus pulls up,
he’s there,
at the door,
and steps into the
swing of a hate-swung baseball bat,
and a motorcycle chain…
and a metal bar…
and a painful dinosaur bone of a table leg
which is studded with nails
that rip into wrong color skin
that steps off the wrong color bus.

As it swoops
to mix spittle with blood
they whoop
“betrayed your own kind boy”
even though he can only grunt yelps like a kicked puppy in return.

But they don’t see the legendary camera flashes.

They don’t see that sodium white
bouncing boy’s jelly-blood dripping face into history:
the day the buzz-cut white boy
rode the colored bus.

He said “I just prayed I’d survive“.
“But why did you do it?”
“Because…because it was the right thing to do“.

Sometimes when you ride the bus
you don’t ride it for you…
you ride it for freedom.

To the sound of screaming,
turns the eyes and the ears of the ordinary
agape in horror at the desperation of a jumper
as he splashes through the glass
fixing a final flickering gaze on tear-welling faces who,
with tightened lips let pass a whimper “oh no, oh no oh no”.
The rain of rock crashes chase away trivial reality,
the lattes, the must-do meetings,
the synchronization of calendars
in a kerosene flash; thanks to religious brutality.
There, urgent amongst the
surging clouds are those in
black turned gray. Gold-hatted
knights who shout for your own good.
Scared like the brokers,
fathers like the chairmen,
rushing like the insurers
but they choose to run the other way.

Marching men who sound out songs
and epithets like the “happy throng”
the “band of brothers” and “alpha force”
ignore the facts as a matter of course
that war is bad and people die
and tragedy is what makes us cry
not actor’s looks or the jutting chins
of handsome heroes with perfect grins.