That’s a beautiful poem; now get the hell away from me.

I’m reading Dante’s Inferno and you hand me your poem consisting of the single line, “Amanda is hot” and you ask me if I get it? Well, gee wilikers, TJ, I’m stumped. It wasn’t enough that I had to hear the guitar renderings of a complete stranger for the last three hours, or that you always manage to run your dirty fingers through your grease-slicked hair before you try to touch me. “Amanda is hot.” Well, you wrote that so beautifully I wish you would write a song next.

I was kidding, TJ, not that that would cross your mind. I’m suddenly far more interested in talking with the convict, still in penitentiary orange, sitting just a little ways in front of me. Perhaps he killed someone.

“Ladies first,” he had said to me earlier, probably to check out the first hairless ass he’d seen in ten to fifteen, but at this point it seems flattering.

Please sing something else, like “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” If I head to the front of the bus, you’ll surely follow me; and any further back, and I’ll be sitting on the urine-drizzled commode. I guess there’re only eight more hours anyway. So “Amanda is hot,” and “Danty was a pretty cool guy,” and “Greyhound sucks.”