You know, when I was little, I loved trains.
I remember we had this one little house,
I think this was before I was in school,
And the tracks ran along this hill just on the other side of our backyard,
And it seems like every house we had in Kansas,
You could hear the engines and horns somewhere in the distance,
As sure as crickets,
When I was little, I loved trains.
I could tell you every kind of car one could find on a freight-train,
And the little book came with a little toy-set,
And I had a conductor’s hat,
And a whistle.
I’m 22, and I’m taking the BART to Berkley.
–We don’t have much mass transit in Kansas,
–And it’s worse in Arkansas.
I watch a man check the coast, the cameras,
Pull out a cheap plastic liquor bottle,
Take one deep swig,
Hold it,
–I can taste whiskey,
–I can feel it burning down my throat
He catches my eye,
I smile,
And hope to god he understands,
That I understand,
And I’m not going to say shit.
–I can barely understand the conductors
–Over the conversations,
When I was little, I loved trains.
Things go from one point to the next,
There are switches and turn-tables,
But your path is always, always linear.
They are complex machines with simple paths.
You know where a train has been,
And where it will be,
By the tracks they’re always hounding down.
We’re in Berkley, and I’ve been handed a judges white-board,
With the promise of a free beer.
–I promised myself I wouldn’t drink this morning.
–I’m tired of waking up more wrung out than I went to sleep
And the poets are beautiful.
They are ripping themselves apart on-stage,
That I might better understands the moments that forged them.
They are bleeding truth into that microphone,
And every time I write down a score,
I can’t help but wish I was up there with them,
Not because I’m as good,
But because I wish I could roll around in their truth blood,
And it might wash off some of the fiction in mine.
–I can taste whiskey,
–I can feel it burning down my throat.
And they are touching me in ways that I can’t help but tear up at,
And the beer is making me heat up,
And it’s like my body is becoming this mass of liquid,
–I can feel the gibbering on the other side
–I can hear the teakettle in the distance.
I can’t help but wonder if my perfect score would mean as much,
Lifted from my crumpled form,
The fantastic background musician trio,
Replaced by my accompaniment of sobs and sticky wheezes.
When I was little, I loved trains.
One Christmas, my dad bought me this model train-set,
Electric, so I could watch all the lights,
And see the engine moving along the track.
We laid the tracks out. Once.
In the basement of this rental in Topeka,
And in all the years since,
There has never again been enough space or time,
To lay a path for that train to take.
It’s dark outside.
And this man is neglecting his copy of A Farewell to Arms,
My favorite Hemmingway,
And I want to ask him,
Beg him,
That he not give up before the end.
That striking moment,
When a man turns away from his dead wife,
New born child,
And walks away into the rain, without a word.
That moment that broke my heart,
Before I even knew what it would be like,
What it would be like to force that loss upon yourself.
–That’s just a work of fiction though.
–It’s just that it seems like it’s never what a man’s running towards,
–But what he’s running from.
I want to beg him to never forget the heartbreak he feels,
In that moment,
When he too is left in the rain by this novel,
With absolutely fuck all resolved satisfactorily.
When I was little,
When it was just my mom, my dad, and me,
We used to hike along these historic trails,
Where the trains used to run.
The ties still there,
And tossing rocks at the switch,
Seeing if we could change where we went.
Seeing if we could change where we went.
