Thursday, I rode the evening rails,
Silver tracks hissing under the city’s scars –
Ordinary, almost, but for a man:
Threadbare, hair wild as winter grass,
Clutching a cardboard plea –
$33 for shelter, for one soft night
Away from the howl of rain and exhaust.
He spoke not in grand, operatic despair
But in small, tired syllables –
Voice tattered as the sleeves he wore,
Carrying his need like a wound
He did not choose.
We sat, silent islands
Averted eyes — each of us a fixed constellation
Orbiting our private orbits
Screen-lit, self-bound,
Guarding our own warmth
As if kindness were a coin unspendable.
No one looked him in the face.
We leaned into the cold discipline
Of disconnection,
That learned invisibility adulthood demands –
Numb to the soft weep
Of someone else’s war.
Where has all our humanity gone?
Did it stall in monuments,
Fade between headlines,
Drown in the slow drip of indifference
Passing from hand to hand
Like loose change no one parts with willingly?
Outside, the city blurred:
Lights streaming tears on glass,
A requiem for what we used to be –
Capable of shivers not only for ourselves
But for each trembling stranger
Crossing the hard threshold of our attention.
Is this the cost of surviving –
That each day, we bury a piece
Of that old, vulnerable ache –
Until, one Thursday on a dying train,
We realise an entire species
Has learned to look away?