"Railroad Eyes"

“Railroad eyes”

It’s noon. I am riding on a train for the first time.
I pull out a pen and pad from my bag
And soon, I’ll be writing on a train for the first time.

Out of the window, my railroad eyes peer.
My train steers over steel through valleys of ruined trees;
their splintered hearts probably art in heaven, hollowed be
thy wooden communities. Empathy comes truthfully
because I look at my skin and find their hues in me.

I place my pen on the pad
and give the muse some room to breathe

The conductor speaks “We are currently moving..”
Twenty-five miles per hour glass hot tornado sands spilling
Filling the half empty alleys of my brain is a sponge
absorbing sound waves ebb and fade ebb and fade

Tonight, the moon will be
the closest she’s ever been to me—or not to me.
I strap on my headphones and rock in peace.
Then I hear her lullaby and rock to sleep.

Wake Up!
I am the— Amtrak insomniac, heed my ding-dong-dinging
But don’t stop, join me at the railroad crossing song singing
I am the horn and the flute that the Moon’s blues blew through!
Get up and groove to this! Lose your cool like a lunatic!
TICK—TOCK TICK TOCK BOOM to this!
Move your hips, to this Music!

But my muse is sick; I feel lunar eclipsed.
I’m a writer sentenced to a mental cage
Barred behind barbed wire, I stare for days
and dream of black unicorns and night mares that graze
on green in terror because I pluck their hairs
not to confiscate their DNA, but
for the sake of making a paint brush
to pull words from the dark wells of creation.
And my ability to feel is trapped in tin plated steel,
But I think I can, I think I can, so I think and can-open my mind.

And words stream like hot steam
from my Coltrane of thought,
Trailing back, Wailing Jazz.

I wake up and follow the path of my ink,
my hand floating down the page like a falling leave.
And the poem wrote itself as I slept to the beat
of Blue O’clock and night-colored calligraphy.