If hip-hop is the night club of music,
The place where everyone wants to be,
Then, metal, you are the abandoned trainyard,
The gritty reality of close friends,
Bonding over empty cans.

Bluegrass might be a picnic,
With blankets in the park.
And rap might be the ghetto,
Urban streets,
Perpetual fear.

However, you have a different touch.
Sure, phat dubstep beats sound great,
When blasted by waves of bass.
But what of the feeling,
From uncountable bass pedal strikes.
Creating a wall of hard-pressed consistency.
And when the bass drum stops,
You know you'll hear a well-practiced,
Well-executed,
Well-written fill.
From the snare, to the toms,
To the chinas and splashes.
32nd notes all around.

And if punk is a bunch of teens,
Landing one out of twelve tricks,
At the local skate park.
If reggae is a house party,
The place your parents don't want you,
But where you feel happy.

Then metal is where you feel REAL.
A darkened elementary school,
Yours for the weekend,
Reminding you where you came from.
Years and years of practice,
All leading up to a perfectly nailed arpeggio.
You don't even hear the pick as it sweeps,
String to string.
You only hear notes and scales,
Arranged just so.
Pure dedication,
Displayed by the clean solos,
And harmonies,
Which fall back into downtuned chugging,
Rhythms,
Simply rhythms,
True unison,
The brotherhood dynamic,
Of a lesser-liked genre.

And the sounds of the world,
Are the way you go to school,
To work and home again,
And silence,
Is nights spent alone,
Silence is the absence of passion,
Silence is suicide,
Death.

Metal, you are my resonance.
My threshold.
And the words,
Repeated throughout my mind,
Are not shrill notes on the treble-clef.
They are not auto-tuned, worthless.
The words I feel,
The words I live,
Are the common words and phrases,
That no one can understand,
The deep grating and churning,
Of vocal chords that learn not to ring,
But to shout.
To scream.
To growl, like the guttural and primordial calls.
Of our wild side.
This growling echoes,
From throat to mind.

Metal is my flag,
My skin,
My pyre.

4:11 am - The nighthawks are starting to resemble pigeons.

Train station is deserted.
An employee checks the bins as the tunnel fills  with the ringing of a distant bell, heralding the arrival of the morning train.
42  minutes till my train.

I can smell the acrid fumes of the Ferny Grove train.
The behemoth pulls away-
empty.

At least I'm not existential anymore.

There is an installation of a coffin made from old bits of railroad,
"Not everyone makes it across the tracks"
This reminder of mortality is strangely fitting in a place of transit.
The true face of memento mori is  shown.
Remember that you too will die, and everything will come to pass.

It's times like this that make me wish 'The Sound of Silence" was never written.
For its perfection in this moment comes as a burst of pure divine bliss.
The kind you wish would never fade away. But inevitably does.
And all we are left with is a memory of that bliss,
everytime we hear the song (after the first time).
As if we are recalling the curves of an old lover from the shadow of yesterdays gone.
Dancing beneath our fingertips, always out of reach.

Memory is never as divine as the moment that burnt it in.

----

4:29 am - It was ephemeral.

The trainyard announcer has a cultured voice.

----

4:41 am - I fear the muse has left me, beauty fled.

DEAR GOD - PLEASE LET THERE BE A CAB AT THE STATION FOR ME.

Selection 11 gave me the water i desired.
11 minutes till the train.
D.O.B. 11/2
Aquarius,  11th  sign of the Zodiac.

Will I see the dawn rise from the train?
There is no light at the end of the tunnel from where I sit.

Inexplicably: I recall the cool river air that bathed us as we lay naked in your apartment,
the smell of cigarettes on our skin, the evening peppered with
scurrying, fighting possums
that danced upon your balcony.
I recall being inside you.

(Then I imagined you being eaten out
by a woman
her lips inside yours,
her curled tongue
inside your hot, bald
golden ****.)

And I came.
Warm and glorious
my children of pleasure
caught in a latex coffin.
Your heaves of pleasure pushing against my chest
with the rhythm of waves.

----

4:46 am - On the train.

Fluorescent lighting is the devil.
Everything is garish yellow.

We  pull up to the station near where you lived.

Your blue  rose lives in a Chinese vase
and no longer smells
of Marlene Dietrich.