There are railroad tracks That run through my town And at night when I finally receive The silence I wished for during the day I can hear the faint whistle And hum against my bedroom windows I hear the whistle now.
All my life I have heard the trains And I find beauty in the fact that even when I'm not listening, they are there The trains carrying coal, chemicals, lumber, and the better parts of my childhood As a child I loved the idea of the caboose Allowing any stretch of rail Any length of land To be your home Your bed And it was probably through this my wanderer spirit grew.
All my life these trains meant something Escape But not without possibility of return I romanticized the long web of rails connecting all the land and Souls in the American night I have always loved such pieces of antiquity
So in the latter years of my childhood in high school it's no suprise the love I had for Steinbeck, Sandburg, and Woody Guthrie I would lament to friends that the trains became too fast to hop, but I never tried I always sat back and watched Or listened on quiet nights
Now my childhood has passed I am nearly 20 but wrapped in my head is the idea that the young boy who had train posters and pictures covering his walls was nothing but a stranger or a character in just another awful coming of age rerun But deep down that child turned to Ginsberg who wrote of boxcars boxcars boxcars And Kerouac who followed the long stretches of road to the western edge of America And it was through Kerouac I found Thomas Wolfe
I feel I have Thomas Wolfe in my bones Thomas Wolfe who left home rejoicing train rides to the North Then realized he couldn't go home again Thomas Wolfe who never wrote a bad train scene Not all of Wolfe is in me Not the 1900s Southern prejudice Or the raving accusing of friends of great treasons, only to have to apologize the morning after But I can feel his need To write all I can To never take away To add add To never reduce because who tells Van Gogh "yes yer paintings alright but I need you to reduce the amount of stars by 30 and I expect it on my desk Monday" I won't take anything away from myself Only add So at nights When I hear the train whistle And soft rattling on my window Thomas Wolfe is with me And he loves the sound too
A look into my childhood and a comparison with my contemporary interests