In dreams of trains
our faces are pressed up against the glass.
Images strung together
through a film reel
of inseparable memory.
In the intervals of freights
passing strings of suppertime light,
we’ll meet by the makeshift fires
like hobos in eternity
on abandoned beaches and under bridges,
amplified by the boxcar musicality
of the past brushing against the present.
Wheels fill the gaps,
the click clack continuity of dreams
becoming the vessels through which trains
connect myriad lives on parallel tracks.
Restless spirits, wayward rambling
to an alarum of shrill yells
that usher in a collision
of chance meetings.
The seared impressions,
through metal and iron,
are the first sparks of insight,
that oncoming light that floods
the narrow rooms of domestication,
a midnight special that breaks the isolation.
We’ll measure the width of impact and expanse
by rails that clear fields and walls,
all the demarcations of a hemmed in life.
The far off grain towers
were the outer reaches
of the imagination
that motion pierces
to separate lives from careful decisions.
Left in the wake of smoke and vagrant coil,
the scent of diesel that evokes travel,
trains were the sudden revision
before all would unravel,
before blackbirds would pick through and scatter
like storm clouds to the periphery,
harbingers of the necessary renewal
that disperses to the four directions
all the stagnant energy.
We’ll gather once again on a tiny sliver of land,
at the end of our youth,
in the mystic continuity of
long shadows and laughter,
in the beach fire’s theater
we become the protagonists
no longer constrained by time.
The ocean waves through the fog,
motioning to the rites of passage
going thousands of miles
if only in consciousness,
towards the far reaches of a folded map
stuffed in the pockets of a weather beaten pack
these disparate lives will always overlap
at the charred edges they’re seared together
in faded photographs
film reels and
windows
yakskinpocketnotes 