He, gentle no one, opens the driver’s side into traffic, careless, without so much as a glance and I wonder in my quick reaction swerving what can I do to change that dumb shit the dumb shit we the great grand so many people do without thinking without heeding without even seeming caring, piled on top of each other and entitled to our disruptions, to the very air we breathe

—or just forgetful, perhaps, if I were to excuse it with a complaisant head-patting pardon, forgetful and too loud inside, too many of us around. I’ve opened that door too, you know, right when I shouldn’t right like him. But that was then and I instinctively suppose that “then” in there exonerates me the way we suppose time heals wounds as if healing is traceless so I feel unreflectively free to judge him like I’ve never been cut before, free even, later, back home in the night, to go so far away from the day’s busy crazy stacked up and tangledness as to read a poem about a lavender farmer like I deserve it, my day’s judgment passed and healed, receding self back into safer, quieter spaces stacked up high in human honeycomb or decorated crypt with running water and amenities and it’s funny how idyllic thinking can be so heedless. And feel so far away.

Maybe that’s what my gentle no one had on mind directing hand at end of arm to pull lever and push door directing foot out to street and body lean to rise, unlooking at the oncoming, whether in eye or aura just a maybe mindful mind full of wander and otherness silent set on something faraway like the farmer and his sweet lavender and the sweet sun and sweet hills and sweet smells we most of us only get from too-sweet candles and quasi-idyllic distant shit like that-in-a-box because we won’t sit in the kind of silences that are letting me write this right now, the silences all through us with our cacophonics perfunctorily down from heavy gurgling overflow boil to quiet unobtrusive simmer like that’s what truly allows for speech.

Maybe he thought so too, my heedless no one, was thinking. Maybe he didn’t forget at all, maybe he just couldn’t.