06 Yugoslavia
- No sunset to be seen from the train that day,
- just fluorescent light flickering overhead;
- … & now a dusk of cigarette smoke gathering in the stale compartment.
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- Serbia’d blurred into motion & into bubbles rising in a bottle of beer.
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- Some Yugoslav soldiers on leave, who were the ones who were smoking, talked as they smoked, & their conversation, (which they were trying to draw me into [though I knew none of their words]) was almost visible,
- like the dialogue above the drawn-in heads
- of a cartoon-strip –
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- But a cartoon strip to which an eraser at the end of a long yellow pencil had been brought, making it a gray smudge in the air –
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- and I was coughing.