A faint train blows
Sliding along the Earth's shore

Your pillow rustles against your head
The noise competes
With that distant blurrly breath
Don't let

Because just when you lay still
And leak into slumber

You'll forget its existence
You'll hear the faint train blow
You'll remember then

Not the express train –
The uneventful
Quick-trip to decay

We’re on the Limited;
Confined within limits
On life’s platform
Night watching
Brief recognition vanishing outlines
Illuminated windows, They stare ahead
Silhouetted profiles against flashing light
Glimpsing the gold coins of
The Paradise Express

We remain for the day
As we see ourselves
Age and wisdom
In separate cars
On that same track
Tearing through
A landscape of
Scattered grace

Everyone you see is the main character of their own story
With their own plots and supporting casts
Friends are just people with overlapping narratives
That's why train cars are fascinating to me
The entangling of so many narrative threads
So many people that i'll never see again
We are a series of rivers
Thousands of tributaries flowing and converging
For a single shining moment

I wait for peace to find its way into my bones and hair ******* with bows
by the train tracks.

I throw stones
that skip over a river like
r-r-records;
Sublime,
Bradley Nowell, slurring out
the same line
over and over and over,
something about a corner store,
a collection of words that when I sing them,
taste like July.
1, 2, 3,
the rock disappears.

A train passes by,
engine huffing,
wheels churning out a steady rhythm of
"Please don't leave me, please don't leave me."
Dead reggae and dead love,
tangled in its underbelly,
rusted metal guts.

I look into the river to try to find the stone I skipped again.
I think I almost see it,
dead weight,
a speck under the surface.

(Do you believe in ghost trains? I hear something howl every night.)

I so often get lost on the train
my mind wonders – to strange and thoughtful places,
I seep through the carriages and people like a gliding ghost
half existent in transient memory,

a translucent thin veil membrane separating me
from this reality,
and the shifting worlds of imagination.

My imagination overwhelms me often, it is powerful and I feel lost
in my internal worlds and can't connect to anything external from my own process,

my own neurosis – I want to get beyond my neurosis,
my fears, my stupid little set backs.

Fear itself becomes a huge beast in my mind,
a multi-limbed Kali staring at me with half crazed eyes,
meeting me with the intention of true chaos – a challenge.

I wish to climb the ladder that suddenly appears and become myself;
Infinite in direction and potential

I want to love myself and be loved.
I want to love,
I want to love.

I stare out of the window again, streets, signs and derelict buildings
zoom and melt into one huge encompassing space,
one straight up urban landscape.

And as I am enveloped in this concrete world
via the mechanistic medium of train

I wonder:
/
Will I ever feel better?
will I ever feel peace?
Will I ever know love?
will I ever understand?
and do I really want to?

Truth is such a hard pill to swallow in the end.
I imagine anyway, I imagine.

Do you ?

Oh no a heartbreak! The original heartbreak of the world and I must tell everyone, warn them all about the precipice that exists on the other side of love. They’ll never know if I don’t take off my red petticoat and stand on the tracks waving it, calling bird-voice, ‘Watch out!’
[the train gets nearer]
‘Dear People, I, cloistered soul, fear you have been misled regarding the nature of existence. It is in fact PAIN!’
[the train gets nearer]
‘All the golden days are over since my lover left my arms.’
[the train, you know]
‘Heed my words and do not trust…’

The train runs me over.

She is not a paper doll pressed between
Sheets of cellophane in my notebook for
The world to undress with their eyes.

She elbows me out of dreams featuring
Peter Pan with his Lost Boys, and leaves
A bruise the shape of Illinois on my ribs.

She sews on the Metro without a thimble and ******
Her fingers stitching buttons onto her black pea coat—
White thread bleeds red in her hand.

When she rides the North Line in the winter,
She sails past her stop for the thrill of surveying
New parts of the city bundled in winter clothes.

She collects deserted train tickets with expired
Destinations, and passes the minutes between
Stops speaking with strangers.

Most of them grumble that the Cubs won’t win
The series until they let a goat into Wrigley.

I would trade her every canceled ticket stub
In my wallet to buy her hot chocolate at the
Next random stop she chooses.

But she and I will always be passengers on
Opposite trains traveling to different cities.