The woman next to me is rocking

In a spindly chair that does not rock

Forward and back again and again

Her belly bunching up and flattening out

Her eyes focused blindly on a spot

Three feet below the blaring television

Her lank gray hair closing and opening

Over her face like faulty theater curtains

On the other side of the stained carpet

A goateed man is conducting a fierce debate

With himself on the state of political America

His hands drawing graphs in the medicinal air

His dark brows jumping at each other

Like fighting gamecocks and beside him

A female form with her face fully eclipsed by

People Magazine nods politely at intervals

In the corner a boy of six or eight hard years

Methodically pounds a toy car with his bony fist

A partial smile etching his angular pale face

His mind possessed by enemy bombardment

Or meteorites or rampaging dinosaurs

His left shoe untied and his hair a tuft of weeds

I surreptitiously scan the occupied chairs

In vain for a genetic similarity

Then the room comes to abrupt attention as

A steel-haired man appears draped in antiseptic blue

His shiny black shoes oozing prosperity

The television blanks and the goatee is silent

The woman stops rocking and the boy stops pounding

The magazines are closed and the man stops in front

Of me and he is not smiling and he says nothing

And the gray woman pats my knee and I am cold