On a Platform

He thinks about the people compelled.
Now he is charging someone or something.
He is getting cached.
There is a dubious Googling.
He waits several years.
The Fates eat Tastykakes
or do something equally disquieting.
He is blameful.
He is ironically spiritual.
He watches clouds drift. Ironically.
He is supersaturated with greetings.
Society does this. Renders you a bell.
Sleep is like a retarded train
from which nobody (no superhero even)
can retrieve that unplayed Stradivarius
which is attractively burning up or down.
(Ask your therapist which preposition applies.)
He stops lamenting this.
He finds "mere thinking" too easy.
He gives gnomes his false eyelashes.
He coddles fleas, puts apples in a hospital window.
Knowing that buying a novel
is not the same as buying intentions
grieves him one Thursday.
He teleports when work requires it.
He watches his soul grammatically derail
while explaining the train to a doctor.
The doctor is allowed only five questions.
This limit makes the patient feel
like a millefiori glass paperweight,
something floral and preposterous.
A paperweight always looks a little bitter,
doesn't it? Spiteful. Be honest.
Especially when it is placed upon a novel.
The patient finds himself sitting on a novel
written by a Russian saint who was largely
an unfeeling turnip of a human being.
He holds his knees to his chest,
becomes a strain of thrift that is not beauty.
He looks fourteen, but fourteen in marble.
When self-pity goes past, it's like a cloud
too slow to create a noticeable Doppler shift.