Hmm. The transition is stark, yes. I don't want to exactly recommend anything specific... maybe add a line or word of transition? You could also perhaps use repetition somehow to pull the two stanzas together. I may just be silly, though.

Thanks for the feedback - I appreciate it! I'm open for suggestions about how to make the piece more overall coherent/consistent. Conceptually, it's about being forgotten, feeling inferior/unimportant... the first and second stanzas certainly have a different purpose. In the first, I was trying to mix vague surrealism with a certain tangibility, and to give the reader an intuitive sense of the overall message without spelling it out, particularly with the first word in each line (passenger, peripheral, damaged). In the second, I wanted to draw those images abruptly to reality and speak directly to the reader, in an attempt to make them feel like those images that seem distant in the first stanza... I was definitely going for a sudden/stark transition, but I had hoped it would be effective like that... I wanted the emotional impact to not really hit the reader until in the last two lines. Would you recommend a stanza in between the two perhaps, to more effectively and gradually link them? Or something else perhaps? I'm open to any suggestions (from thesouth_star or anyone else who would like to give feedback).

I love where you were going with the first stanza. I feel like the second stanza kind of falls apart? Separately, the two stanzas are great, but together... I just feel like they don't fit?

But I absolutely love the first stanza. The imagry is great.