Ron Kempton Poet Ballad

Last Train Running

Last Train Runnin’

                                      For Bob Dylan

 The nickel-plated moon howled outside my window like a bullet missing from its sleeve

A lyric tore through the autumn wind on a smokestack through the trees

Like a ghost that whispers metaphors and won’t tell you what they mean

It fades into a whisper while you’re stuck with what you’ve seen

It was a song about a storyteller with a verse about the past

Hung long inside my restless mind and hid in shadows cast

The metal grinding six-string guitar like wheels on the tracks

 A songster told of flights and journeys playin’ down the facts 

I rose so slow from my humid sleep sat stone still on the bed

I just let that smokestack lightning ring inside my head

That blues harp whistle horizon deep, rumbled, then it rolled

Like that midnight hour at crossroads’ edge Robert Johnson lost his soul

I heard union men and the coal-black din of ******* on the road

Capos working  a child to death, and never payin’ what they owed

I heard a folksinger storyteller whisper dreams inside his sleep

Hand out lighting from a whisky bottle with lyrics meant to keep

Its melody was awful sweet as that train rode through the dark

And the music from that locomotive left these visions on my heart

I saw lonesome hobos warm their hands saw travelin’ roads-men too

Saw Mississippi John leaving home before his song was through

Now that singing storyteller made me rise and through my window peer

I loved the sound that whistle made, the music I could hear

I looked through the high lonesome sound that made that whistle cry

I saw a train on the edge of midnight, I saw Woody Guthrie wave goodbye

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