In Transit

Take me anywhere. We’ll leave our hearts in overhead compartments and forget the things that break us. We’re aimless– strangers on a train collecting miles on a map that we lost somewhere between Saint Cloud and Santa Fe. We’ll forget who we are and who we’re afraid to be, and just be. Mad men chanting savage battle cries, beating our knapsacks like war drums, loud. Orphan gypsy dance with me, let’s listen to the vagabond and hear him sing, that this life is everything it ought to be. Serious men with cross faces cross their serious arms and belittle us. We cross our eyes and laugh about money, cause we ain’t got none, So we puff on cheap cigars, and sleep on each other’s backs as we gaze at the stars and wonder how the hell we got so lucky. Doesn’t matter how we got here, don’t care where we’re going, just save me a seat by the window. We’ll people-watch, and watch people watch Strangers on a train. Lovers quarrel, left in the lurch Young-love hearts beating visibly from young-love chests, breasts, and adulterates –brown nose perverts off the beaten track. Smooth, Rasta, one-love, baked in the baking bohemian sun. Hippies and hipsters and maxi-dress flowers, as floral as floral coin purses, pick pocket princes and baby mama queens. Pretention, priority brazen fast into the big shot capitalist and aftershave miasma. More familiar to his touch are briefcase buckles and neckties, than the greasy-haired babies sketched out in his laugh lines, more moments spent with his tailor than his wife, I bet he used to be happy. Potato sack beauty, Newport Red behind her ear, combat boot baby with a daisy in her hair, traces obscenities onto warped window stains, thick with deep breath condensation: Fuck You, and farce genitalia dripping and dripping and melting away. You claw at your heart and say, This is love, and This has got to be love, and I’m going where she’s going, and I tell you to shut up, and Stop swooning over strangers on a train, but so are we, So are we.