Empirics of the Half-Forgotten

Just so much manflesh
Riding the "T" in the five-o'clock crush:
an item on a bill of lading,
a fact for the statistician,
the bulk necessitating the measures taken.

Never had I less a sense
of this integument of fiction, this "me" of me,
than while on the train to Braintree.
Perhaps what I experienced was ego-death,
but it seemed at the time like just plain death.

I imagined a subway mis-en-scene:
a passenger, most prosaically fell,
slips a blade in me, then withdraws expertly,
as I sag wordlessly;

Or: sweaty in the chilly car,
a passenger jerks his breast and
I see myself flying to bits.
In these situations,
no tragedy,

no soil soaked in startled gore,
only me, mute meat merely;
the confusion, police, stampede, relief
simply elements of an event, no more —
pure sequence, empirics of the half-forgotten.