When you leave (or: I like trains way too much)

When you leave, always leave
in the dark. In the pre-dawn hour
of orange-burning, humming streetlamps

you will drag yourself down
blocks of silent sidewalk –
yours. Not quite empty,

but filling with everything you know
or imagine about whistles, arrivals, you
with your suitcase and your dizziness.

When you rest at last, rest
on a southern-bound train.
The car rocks, and you pretend

the way you pretended, a child
reaching for sleep, that the mattress
was a raft, the room an ocean.

Rock now, through dreaming
and black country. Wake up
someplace new and strange, a stranger.