Amber drips from the 60’s-style lamps
on two end tables.
Brassy-orange and bulbous,
they illuminate the tangled tracks.

The light spills onto the floor
like heavy freight abandoning its car.
It spawns the locomotive shadow
cast by my grandmother’s sunken-in couch.

I nestle myself snug between the pillows,
dense and flattened by years of Sundays.
Sundays that bring my father
close to his brother, not a brother at all.

I peer over the edge
and heave a hushed “all aboard.”
Grandma sleeps to unwind
the day’s knot of exhaustion.

Each bone-bleach white fiber frays
from the chemotherapy that robs
her gnarled hands of their strength.
This one-way ticket marks the end of a journey
of a once well-oiled machine.

The exhales of a CSX
spout its peppery breath out in opaque puffs.
I am a conductor, tearing the ticket
of tonight’s traveler.

Rising to my bare feet now,
I sink into the cushion like wet sand.
The train thrusts and in a single bound,
I leap from the ledge and leave my lone passenger.

The cars whir and hum alongside me.
Deafening metallic wind rusts the edge of the rug.
I’m still waiting for her return,
and in denial that it was her last train.

It's 9:30 p.m.
and the CSX train Jericho blows
its Doppler horn
across the black flow
of the Cumberland River
skimming  the rafts of rippling light
lapping the west bank of early revelers
gathering  in the streets and bars and ***** tonks,
spun together by an invisible attractor they're calling
"Happy New Year."

Gypsy smiles with aching minds put forty ounce bottles to pursed lips,    and we're still not drunk enough to have excuses in the morning.
Our lives have become the lyrics to a Tom Waits anthem.

Dusty Carhartts and broken knuckles beg the question: "What kind of collective living exists when nobodies home?"
My mind is racing like the CSX flyby out of Baldwin, and I'm tempted to jump in front of that ******* tonight cause I'm too scared to change the world.
She walks up and hugs me and I pray that it's more than the beer hugging me.
"Another World is Possible" is painted behind us in strokes of motivation the others just don't have.
There was no dust kicking up behind me as I walked away. There wasn't even a break in the conversation.

You had a friend
who worked on the CSX railway
and he told us about how
he killed someone once.
He knew it wasn’t his fault
But still, he was awfully calm
when he talked about it.
He told us he’d blow the horn
the next time he was riding by
the crossing behind the apartment
that I let you move into.

The tracks seem to follow me and
when I feel the rumbling in a different city
I half expect to hear the short tune of a horn
followed by your lighter flick in the living room.
It keeps me on my toes
and reminds me how
I can’t seem to move into a place
without ******* train tracks nearby.