Riding Rails
Share Article The trapped mother realized her ice reality. Concise crying crystals reflected clarity. Suffering from fate and free will she danced in flames seeking her SAVE key.
Hearing a child say, “I need help,” she received a blessing.
A child whispered, “The ending is the middle.”
“The middle is the beginning,” said a child. “You can start the story anywhere.”
“We are all orphans sooner or later,” said Rose. “We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.”
Death and the gravedigger agreed. “Everyone comes to us.”
Rail music sang click, clack, click and clack.
In a dome liner, children ate watermelon and spit seeds into sky. A red haired female magician made poverty disappear. Passengers formed quick intense transient relationships between whistle stops before, during and after industrial wastelands.
We zoomed past small town wrecking yards with cars and trucks collecting rust, abandoned swings, toys, dishwashers, gardens, guillotines, baskets of severed heads, shredded tires and water soaked concave fences collapsing into community soil.
I hammered word spikes while waving to strangers stranded in their present perfect tense seeing trains carry perfect continuous tense strangers into new futures.
Down the line riding the rails. Further along the road of iron deficiencies.
At a remote train station, a furious man with his shopping cart home and a whiskey bottle in a bag sagged against a brick wall yelling at his slumped wife.
Her old sad eyes stared far away wondering how she managed to get herself in this fucking mess away from social services, respect, dignity and love. Her heart knew if she had any common sense (not very common) or any strength or power she’d get up and start walking.
Her dilemma was to find a way out of the quicksand swallowing her life. She was conditioned to having someone save her. She loved being a victim and needed a martyr.
Clear cold thin Rocky Mountain air quickened blood streams. We’ve enjoyed rail’s clicking clacking trestle music exchanging laughter and awareness. Visions of starlight sky blends with engine headlights shattering blackness. We arrive at Union Station in Denver.
I know the field behind the station where the headless homeless heartbroken hoboes, drifters and transients exist, hide and run for their lives.
It’s a tricky place at night. It runs north way up to the stockyards near the old Coliseum, not to be confused with the one in Rome where they fed you-know-who to you-know-what. Where every cold frostbitten February, cowboys, cowgirls and plain old city folk put on the Stockman’s extravaganza awarding prizes to animals and the field runs south past the main Post Office Terminal annex and westward toward immigrant hopes and dreams up to Federal Boulevard on a rise with a church and laundromats and renovated upscale posh neighborhoods overlooking a gleaming screaming downtown Silver City skyline. The killing field is filled with tall weeds in the Platte River flood plain.
There’s a fine view of the Rocky Mountains from the field amid random acts of pre-meditated violence around small fires as drifters pray to stay invisible long enough to ride rails out of town away from the mean old street.
In the summer, children scream on the roller coaster at Elitch Gardens up on 38th and Tennyson where my aunt and uncle ran a drugstore and pharmacy after WWII. They worked their fingers to the bone, sweated their lives out and never asked for a thing. My aunt was so scared by the Depression she maintained thirty-seven folders budgeting the cash flow by counting every penny every night.
It ain’t no field of dreams in that big lonely weed choked undeveloped tract of real estate where freights and Amtrak dome liners blow long sad whistles as buttoned waiters serve blood red Colorado tenderloin down wind from the smell of meat grilling at Coors Field where boys of summer play hardball.
The Coast Starlight sliding toward Kansas curves into a space-time bend.
Moon drinks rainwater.
Walking rails I sing with Robert Johnson…“Woke up this morning and looked around for my shoes…I got them walking blues.”
I savor impermanence. Cool blood decorates hot black keys as I bleed words.
