My Usual Commute to Work/Mall #WriteAPageADay #325

The train arrives, except it doesn’t—
A gaping metal jaw that swallows
briefcases, regrets, sale alerts, a child’s unraveling shoelace.
I step inside the stomach of the city.

Advertisements sing to me in tongues,
BUY. SELL. SPEND. WANT. BE LESS.
Be someone with shinier teeth.
The LED screen flashes:
"You are not enough but you could be for $5.99!"

A man clutches his phone like a drowning poet,
typing his escape in 280 characters.
I see him. He does not see me.
We are algorithms now.

I stare at my reflection in the smudged window,
where ghosts of yesterday’s commuters blink at me, bored, pixelated, somewhere between past and departure.
I look like someone’s distant cousin in a parallel dimension.

The train stutters, hiccups, groans.
Bodies sway in unison—
a choreographed ballet of exhaustion,
the morning pilgrimage of capitalist monks.

I count the tiles on the floor, the sighs per minute,
the weight of 87 human silences pressing against my eardrums.
Someone smells of burnt coffee and unfinished conversations.
Someone’s eyes dart like hunted mice.
Someone’s knees tremble, an unsaid earthquake in their veins.

My stop arrives with a thud.
Doors yawn open, and I spill onto the concrete,
reborn into the machinery of routine.
The escalator hums its funeral song for lost ambitions.
I pass a man screaming at the sky.
I pass a pigeon with one foot in the grave.

The mall greets me with icy fluorescent arms,
a cathedral of consumption where meaning dies under a neon glow.
Plastic mannequins whisper secrets of body dysmorphia.
A perfume sample assassinates my senses.
A sale sign begs, pleads, seduces:
"BUY ONE. GET ONE. BECOME SOMEONE."

I see myself in a fitting room mirror,
and suddenly, I am a stranger trying on my own skin.
I do not fit.

Outside, a bus exhales passengers like unclaimed baggage.
The world continues its unbroken loop,
and I wonder if I am the commuter
or the train,
or the track,
or the silence between stations.

#CommuteChronicles #UrbanLife #Poetry #DailyRoutine #ExistentialDread #Consumerism