Another work (whine?) in progress

Dawn didn’t break like a clap, just gradual gray, then day.

I came halfway to life with it, armed at the train station

with stones, water-warped notebooks,

half-eaten candy, condoms and no toothbrush -

meager evidence of life on my own.

The 8:20 express ate still air with a shrieking mouth.

Traveling from my parents’ house to the city, I always hang on

for the boxcar yard. I have pinned my heart

to its peculiar perpendicularity:

boxcars’ rusted right angles, power lines dissecting the sky

with ragged clouds trailing from the lot’s asphalt edge.

All laid bare to steel-hard sunlight, and safe

in the idea that things are sorted, transported,

get there. That the world streams clean

down a silver streak of track, clear

points at either end, open to be understood.

The past six months have been a Rube Goldberg machine

that clicks, whirls and hums with a logic too large,

too complex, churning out events I know nothing about

except that they happen. Real things

fracture, fragment, skew: a man in flames,

black-charred skin by black newsprint. Friends I knew who

flared, burned out, fell. The same gravity

clings to all questions – why I can't balance my checkbook or

keep my apartment clean, why I can't speak

to strangers, or clearly, or at all

sometimes, why figures recede on a dark-growing road,

why fucking feels like breaking

as if the hymen were a heart, or why

I am scared. The aisle filled with elbows

and unknown commuter faces, closed.

I pushed and leapt off the train, watched it lurch from the station.

I called my mother. Come back, come get me.

Safety and strength are solid things, hard as pebbles

but as easily lost. My plum heart shrivels.

I cried in my mother’s car, in anger, in fear, for the train

rolling out, without me.