So some days you need to be on the bus or off the bus and if the only bus is a metro you grab it, like: the last lollipop in the dentist's candy bowl a last chance to piss the last orange tic-tac in the tic-tac box you grab that bus like the last way out-- and I stepped into the squarest shadow moving on the sidewalk-- and on I go-- across from a kid standing taller than himself in the nook you make when you hinge and lock back the seat and, standing taller than him, his upright bass and like it was waiting for me, across from him the final spot, like it named you to grab the bus to grab that spot  so in I slid like a tongue between two raw teeth still mourning the tooth between themselves spat out at the crossroads to speak the name you came there to speak-- and all of this so I could look up at him stare through his glasses and smile like temptation on the other side of glass and that glass moving away, you left on the sidewalk because you didn't grab the bus but I grabbed the bus and all so I could say: “Hey kid, tell me what you would think of playing the world's very saddest song on that tall deep stick you got with you?” “I don't know,” he said neither on the bus or off the bus-- “I got it!” cackled the large lady to his side “Like, the world's saddest song on the world's smallest violin!” she cried like an electrified crow that got fresh with one too many telephone poles-- and he smiled like toffee melted on a dashboard like a Velveeta Wonderbread toasted cheese sandwich just burned enough you still gotta eat it: the ace of bass finally meeting the joker in his own deck and I pulled the cord like I was grabbing a final need with the last set of fingers in the world because she had sang it out, that song and you are on the bus or off the bus and I I was off the bus. Benjamin Norman Pierce is a professional dishwasher with BA's in Philosophy, History, and English. In the mid '90's he lived in Sofia for two and a half years, teaching history at the First English Language Gymnasium and participating in the expatriate writing circles there. He self-published a novel, Snuck Past Death and Sleep, and has an album of Lovecraft-inspired ambient music, Al-Azif, available on Spotify, Bandcamp and Soundcloud. Among other places, he has published poetry in Lilliput Review, Poesy, Dragonfly, Raintown Review, Red Owl, Scifaikuest, Free Verse, and Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition. He practices Hermetic magick.