Britain makes loneliness a Cabinet-level concern.
    —Los Angeles Times
    
I take round trips on the Tube
during morning rush hour. I stand up,
for maximum contact—for the warmth
and  pressure of other bodies—
and inhale the steam  
of coffee-and-cigarette-breaths.

I offer to walk my busy neighbor’s kids
to school. Their brittle voices ring
in the icy air, as if belonging
to another universe. 

I try to strike up conversations
at the market where I buy
a single item daily, a bun
or tart. I stick to apolitical
topics:  the BMW’s windscreen smashed
by a flying cabbage, Saddam Hussein’s
romantic novel.  

Then I am home alone again.
I put on the kettle for a cuppa.  
But the quiet is not lovely. 
Nor the enclosure 
of my own body. Everything’s
supposed to be relative—
unless one’s loneliness
is absolute.

What if, in my papery skin,
I am disappeared into one
of so many duplicate, remote
and solitary rooms—
quiet as the cells of abandoned
wasps’ nests, or beehives?

What if I roll
to the floor in my sleep,
and there is only the squeeze 
of the blood-pressure cuff, the cold coin
of the stethoscope on my chest?

What if, when my busy children
clear an hour to visit, they must “hug”
their brittle progenitor
at the window, like palms
arcing over in a wind?

What if I sit
with their gift of a robo-kitty
in my lap, and stroke
and stroke its back,
and coo in answer 
to the answering mewing
and VibraPurring, and stroke
until the kitty rolls over
for a belly-rub—the warmth
of my own undiminished affections
flooding me—
and stroke until it  
closes its glassy eyes and snoozes, 
as I do?

The cast off, my wrist 
is twisted, the arm I broke
a flipper, bruised, sallow,
and distant, 
unclaimable—like someone
I cannot place,
a foreign phrase
I can’t absorb, 
an item in the lost 
and lost, 

its fingers barely able to wield
the pencil to tick off
the class list,

though hope knows
it will come home, 
be unremarkable again.

Then the boy’s rolled into the freshman
writers’ workshop, slumped
in his wheelchair like a duffel tossed
from ship to alien dock. Great drops of slobber
rope from his mouth as I wait
for him to speak. His self’s been lassoed, 
reined in, choked—by his triumphant
foreign body—yet it is still not
broken. And begins.