A photochemical pool drifted from the sloped edges of the wondering
box car's corporal frame. The morning spine is exhausted and shaking,
rocketing against the Summer heat of Washington's corrosive veins,
still running since rummaging across the city throughout the night
like a sharp tipped arrow sewing together the great run away truth of being.
“God bless the railroad,” he would have said. If only I could
have shown him the trains of New York or even better Europe. I
thought about my mom and dad back down south looking into my
reflection against the wall of the buzzing subway car. I saw them
waving. It was a sad picture I had seen before when leaving my
grandparents house. They would walk outside and wave also. It
wasn't a train but it was the closest I have ever become to seeing
one. Even more so than being near the miniature set my father had
built. He knew his set was too beautiful and worked too perfect to
be real.
The vibrating hums of magnetism shook the metallic rib cage. The
electronic nerve cells transporting the cornerstones of every street
corner. The buyers and sellers are searching for cold hard Alaskan
days with hats hiding their halos and horn so everyone looks
beautiful. The city is young, free liberal papers litter the floor,
but there is more room for politics outside the street cars.. No one
carries a briefcase anymore unless they are up to something. Rattling
and bowing heads riding the long mechanical wave.
The machine pours its neck into the station, laying down, the
underground torpedo shuts the steam from invisible gears and releases
a drown out sigh reminiscent of a burning wick on the fourth of July.
The space is kept and marked in use by the metallic banter of
mechanical scars torn wide open even while standing still. Growing
old only happens out of motion.
Lean glowing shadows pour their milky darkness onto the platform.
Escalators stack up to the transient lullaby of violin music, lifted
to universities beyond a million blood sucking sirens. Rolling
laments stretching with the help of iron spider webs, the tower of
Babylon is lit up so plains don't run into it, the peak is the north
star, the escalator makes riders disappear, I can't see where they
are going, most the exits I have never entered, but sitting alone in
the dark moving with the tin parade, I feel at home. I feel at home
the most when moving. In these catacombs Jesus is born every stop
just before he or she leaves collapsing into the spray painted walls
and periodic tables.
The sliding doors open, and the inside comes up for air. a quick
yawn and the picture frame rotates in a Surrealist funnel. The wrong
destination does not exist, and neither does the cost to change
trains, only to leave the station. The doors close again with a
rusted insect hum, chatting in a monotone plume of enchanting
underground fairy dialects. The train needs riders like the
miniatures need the trees and mountains that are more real than the
cosmos because we could touch them and no one ever claimed they were
anything other than portraits of nature, and I was so happy to be so
close. The subway is an immortal chemical being that listens to
everything; a domesticated predator; model for wires that go under
carpets; a shark sailing along the bottom of the concrete forest;
incapable of error in any way; the train is an island predator moving
to infinity.
