I’ve been outside
and I’ve walked these streets
and looked into all those car windows as they went whizzing by
and I’ve seen the man staring blankly ahead
and the woman who’s mouthing along to a song
(and maybe her voice is light and sweet
but maybe too it is raspy and half-choked from nicotine use
smoke coating her lungs in tar
those lungs that used to produce
such a tune of beauty--)

and I’ve seen the dogs straining at leashes
in fenced in backyards
and toddlers stooping, squatting,
rustling through cropped grass
for an undiscovered Easter egg
and two middle school boys leaning
against the tic-tac-toe board
on a kid’s playground
smoking with eyes wide and mouselike
under ruffed up fringe

and the lady jogger whose husband
wants her to invite her sister to church
to try
to reach out
even though she is sure, even though she knows
her sister won’t come.
And she glances at those boys, one chubby, one thin,
asking themselves “what the hell is wrong with us” but
neither knows and the woman might look back
once
twice
three times, even,
but even then she just keeps on jogging over the mulch
and away through the neat suburban houses and in one of those houses
one of them with the trimmed hedges
and painted flower mailboxes
and a fence, maybe just wood, not white picket, for the family dog,
maybe in that house lives the mother
of that mousey boy and maybe
she knows and maybe
she doesn’t
but either way here he is
on a watercolor Saturday
like summer bleeding back into Spring
with his back against beige plastic 
and a long thin white stick in his short thin white fingers

And I sit and I watch them and the man and the woman in the cars and the dog and the jogging lady and the toddlers

and I’m wrong about all of them, of course
because I can’t know
that they’re allergic to shellfish
or collect old chess pieces
or still suck their thumbs at night
or hate their own dog because owning a living creature
has weighed them with responsibility more than any debts or jobs or stresses
and the first thing they think of in the morning
is the dog’s death
and the second
the overwhelming guilt.

I can’t know that and won’t
know them
and will live with that snapshot
that freezeframe identity and copy it
until their life in my head
is a movie with minute long clips
repeating endlessly on a loop.
And there are a million snapshots
of each of them out there
and thousands of me
each catching me in a different angle
that isn’t wrong yet isn’t right either
and who among the Earth’s billions
will ever see the full length
motion picture, complete and full
of original minutes
but myself?
Or can I ever see more than a few glimpses?

and then when I pass the jogging lady on the sidewalk
how am I to feel about the fact
that I’ve just stepped past a compilation
of thoughts and memories and feelings
of such complexity

and all I see is a face

scrunched in concentration
Ipod wires swinging
rubber soles bouncing

and I am searching for a glimpse

and get nearly nothing

compared to all that there is.