Through the bus window
out in the night
another bus runs along
precisely adjacent.
A ghostly world
it seems to exist only where
the fluorescent lights cast
their shine.
Everything in the twin bus
is normal; everyone
is bored.
No one notices that everything
is wrong.
The woman thumbing through
the daily rag does not notice
that she is thumbing backward
and reading from right to left
and the man hunched beside her
seems to be a friend
but does not warn her
there is something wrong with her
face:
it goes up in the down places
left in the right places
and right in the wrong places.
The bus stops.
A kid slurping pop from a can
steps out of the bus’s left side.
The drivers behind them do not mind
that they are nestled next to
the right-hand doors of their cars;
they just honk and press down
their left feet, accelerating
around the bus and through the yellow
light.
My doppelganger tries to explain
to anyone who will listen,
“Can’t you see this is all backward?
Will no one say anything?”
but he loses the thread of his own logic.
His words fit right into the other passengers’
backwards ears,
ergo he is backwards too.
The other passengers ignore him
as they do all backwardness.
He gazes at me helplessly
through the window pane.
His face looks all right to me,
not backward at all.