Underneath a row of ads – “It’s just not about ending up where you want to be,
it’s about making the most of the trip there” and “We do it because if we didn’t
work, our lives wouldn’t work” – a brown man, Hispanic, perhaps black, gropes
for the pole, knees buckling infinitesimally, eye lids closing, slowly. He calls
to mind the men who leaned on cars thirty years ago, 5th Street between A and B,
men who shifted slowly, downward, along dented fenders, jerking awake
before the fall, nodding again, eyes closing slowly. Today’s man clutches
a plastic bag pulled tight against small items. Above his head, someone
has lettered in ballpoint, “Capitalism robs me of my life.”
Published in Struggle