Derailed

Cups on their hooks rattle the train rumbles through the town icebergs crack and fall off the roof, they crash through two stories of chilled air. Dad heaves himself off the sofa, empty plate in hand. Mother has a new electric carving knife, the turkey is in meaty ribbons already. The train is still rolling, its high-pitched horn blasting through wallpaper. We are all a little upset, for our little terraced home in England has time-slipped into rural Ohio, and the only person still alive sits on a rocking chair in a post turkey stupor. Thoughts plow through a turgid brain. He begins to imagine that all his poems have been derailed in a train crash somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. The incongruity if this vision does not strike him as at all odd. Intuitively he understands, that If the Cloud bursts now, he will never be existential. The idea is almost appealing.