12:58 p.m. Just when this car became most crowded at Seventy-second Street, just when I’d begun to nod a bit—hoping to snag some rest before my next words of kindness aimed toward the newest oblivious Iowans—just when I felt one moment’s civilian privacy for the first time all day, I readjusted the weight of both rain-sogged sacks and there came such a sundering rip.

I stared forward as, all around my feet, thirty-odd sickening thuds. Thwunk, plonk, fwawp! The bags’ string handles heaved upward, sudden weightlessness. Then strangers’ screams, the gagging started.

Penises struck rubber floor matting with hideous rubberized zest. Many bounced so. Thirty dildoes are a lot of dildoes to try and catch on the move. Yippee oh cayyah! Git along little dildoes …

Rods hopped knee high, others achieved unsuspecting strangers’ thighs. All leapt toward/at people. Who jumped real fast elsewhere, several shrieking.

I turn: One older lady in black—lower body pelted by several humongous disembodied peckers—stands atop four to six. Hands pressed against her cheeks, staring down at sudden unleashed dickdom, she resembles someone riding a disorganized log raft right over Niagara. The aged virgin hollers those around her into early deafness.

Pink domes, large as the cups atop thermoses, plop across people’s fashionable skinny shoes. One Spanish boy drop-kicks a black prick halfway down the car. It strikes an ad for dental surgery, then thuds against a businessman’s shoulder, ricocheting. What this gent screams down here at me, me—already fallen on all fours, intently hunting/gathering—is extremely unpleasant. If probably accurate. All I can say is, “Yikes, little spill here, definite spillsies. Oopsie daisy, so sorry. ’S not like me, folks. Butterfingers.”

I am kneeling among these many ankles. Collecting, I am so alone with loads of logs of Lincolnly homeliness and lank. I find I suddenly have much space here at the train’s south end. Forty people herd off from me, quickly gather at the car’s north quadrant. Strangers are united in their rage, completest sputtering disgust; they act abruptly joined, as only jaded New Yorkers can during some annoying natural disaster. “Don’t we have rights? And on a workday. Do we deserve this?” one chubby businesswoman shouts.

I now assemble stray cocks by hand, spurned, an unloved zucchini worker, considering giggling, too tired to care (no, never that tired: see, there’s the rub), I am mainly mortified at having zero resistance in a world so tetanus harsh.

I count the seconds till the train’s stop at Ninety-sixth Street. Bent here, I seem to be farming these; I feel unzipped and peeled and sickly, for once in need of someone else’s harvesting. Mother Mary, lift me, tuck me underarm, quick, gir’friend. I keep pickin’ up poppas and stickin’ ’em in my pockets. Pockets prove too virginal to accommodate this many.