Bus Adventures

A woman sits there, not far from me
Her face blotched, her body bloated.
Her piglike eyes look at me, unseeing,
a permanent sneer twisting fat purple lips
in an impartial grimace.
Her hair sprouts from her head, dirty dishwater brown
with scattered bits of gravel grey.
Threads are strewn
about the frame of her expression, and,
at the back,
all individual strands are lost
in a thick, matted clump;
a gourd of hair, whose tip
falls just below her neck.
It seems a cancerous
untended growth,
bloated with years of neglect
textured by an eternity of dirt
and the grime that clings to her clothes
like moss to a dead tree.