Long Boxcars Poems
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Travel once on a haunted train,
a taste may make you lose your mind;
Railroad tracks leave the world behind
dismantled boxcars keep rolling;
Phantom mouths continue screaming,
they show you tickets that were signed;
Pure horror here is well defined,
you’ll visit with those who were slain;
Now you feel even more confined,
travel once on a haunted train;
Take the seat that you were assigned
surely they’ll be no arguing;
When a covered scab starts bleeding
don’t pick at it like you’re inclined;
You’ll visit with those who were slain,
to their curse pain is intertwined;
Get there early or they’re unkind,
a disturbing ride you will find;
Travel once on a haunted train
get lost in the way it’s moving;
Spontaneous can be soothing
you’ll visit with those who were slain;
The Dining car feels so refined,
relax the ghosts are on the grind;
Disobey? Idle hands they’ll bind,
probably should never have whined;
Restless spirits sit there waiting;
Travel once on a haunted train,
you’ll visit with those who were slain;
It’s real the nightmare is growing,
by the end you’ll be undermined;
It doesn’t matter if you’re kind;
Conducted by a mastermind
evil has now become streamlined;
Old clock ticks it becomes chilling
you’ll visit with those who were slain;
Travel once on a haunted train,
where they lived you’re now exploring;
Not really knowing how they died
only pieces have been outlined;
Racing down a track that’s unlined;
The length of this trip? Never mind;
You’ll visit with those who were slain,
strange feelings have you believing;
Your heart won’t ever stop racing,
travel once on a haunted train;
High anxiety undefined
for any relief victims pined;
Purity will become maligned
you’ll visit with those who were slain;
They were just trying to unwind,
surely safe where they were going;
Never thinking about running
to the obvious they were blind;
Travel once on a haunted train
see the dark nature of mankind;
You’ll visit with those who were slain
sitting back in a chair reclined
listen closely to tales enshrined;
As long as you keen on sharing
there will never be an ending;
Fallacy and the truth combined,
curious how we were designed;
Travel once on a haunted train.
Hark, Hallow Dark my dear pal, Titans Mars
rally Martian stars, tag team game Play--Card
Black, Naturals -- rare place reason, Blackguard
quandary, battlescarred, halt? Pass? Have cigars?
Smart-aleck, hmm! facial--compact, boxcars,
ugh! gawdawful. Beauty Triathalon,
He'll be back straightaway, mayhaps papers?
Your facial pasted atop Front page! Bazaars
trains, sidecars, racecars, famous! Alas, Shawn,
lad go faraway places, imagine!
Wanted to ... look balanced, thats it, smart-like
Cameras I take it! Fair and Square, dawn
speaking of that man, time has no passion
I want you meet mama, familylike
All aboard the Rhode Island Line!
We're guaranteed to be on time
Grab your suitcase, grab your coat
Let the railroad be your host
Write a postcard, you will boast
about what you've seen from coast to coast!
We will make the traffic wait
stuck behind a crossing gate
Boxcars, hoppers, and sleeping cars
strung together, and going far
rumbling down the railroad track
Don't bother looking back
Up the slippery slope
Engine takes the lead
Picking up some speed
Convoluted smoky trails
Consolidated silver tails
Contemplating railroad tales
Whistles blast!
Whizzing past!
Gone!
______________________________________
10/17/14 For Andrea's "I Don't Know" Contest
Form:
Choose moment foiled
Over moment gone or none.
Penance paid all bard alas anon.
Bars of boxcars rolling down
Canals of clotted wax;
These are the facts
As I know them to be;
Sum total me.
Scratch barleycorn
For earth and inch for truth.
All tiny, tiny words
In huddled masses gathered,
Shouting to lexicons of legion
To be heard;
Dismissed among the ignorant,
Ravished by the mute.
Small signs a-stirred,
Greater eye to bear.
Greens of noble painted
On a dolly rode in blush.
Gathered, huddled masses moaning,
Leaders gone in rush.
Each laddered youth
Hurled and hurtles trying;
Downward where were depths
Of others dying.
Stalwart soldiers any age,
Refrained of vigor,
Each enabled page to what advance,
Their worried families charge.
For some day one be stored
In someone’s garage,
To this day or that,
This club or bar
Or water cooler chat,
Between the sips and drips
And pressing, passing lips
Of death stood still.
A word of faded quill.
Sometimes times will reach
Into each soul
To wrench a tear;
Not so often fear,
But poised and posited,
Twirling dance
Of darkened hope.
Spoke and spake
And speak and leak and leave;
Never grieve for what it never was.
And huddled, muddled,
Gathered masses weep and cheer.
Gasses bottled. Grasses mottled.
Leopards changing spots.
Dots connected,
Sinners unprotected;
Searched until their eyeballs bled
Yet could not see their own with same
That flicker once, until the flame be out.
Done by water cooler spout
And with the masses tiny, huddle now.
Looking back helplessly
at every foible like Epimetheus.
Born like a weed in the steamy morning,
I was an aimless, crude creature spinning
flamboyant cobwebs like a confident fool.
I slathered prismatic patterns, grinning like a jester.
Then, civilization impounded the measures of my dreams.
I became an embarrassed, lying chowderhead, concealing
my crayons.
I lacked language, locution, or parlance.
I sat absent, a prisoner in rote computation.
My night dreams merged with day-dreams.
My solo island became a continent.
I tried phoning out with phony phonetic fumbles
but everyone could see.
So, I slipped away, deserting, fleeing,
riding the rails in boxcars.
My passage through nocturnal town and village
untraceable, uncertain, preoccupied with the pigments
of my polyscope.
Later, I reappeared, reconsidered, and revised,
replicating the decorations of acuity, imitating
profundity like P. T. Barnum.
My spectacle drew crowds until I was discovered.
My retreat and retraction now heavy with
fatigue, I know not the lens of my psyche.
In sobriety, I recall all my splinters and ruptures.
But my rearranged reissues of adornments
will persist until I am expelled.
Published: The Opiate Journal, July 2020
Celtic Outlier, Lexington, VA
By Sarah Emmett
To Moor – to tie up, to steady, boat
The day of unmooring
Untying
Oh, I try not to sneer: “So you didn’t grow up here?”
The reply “Overseas, yes.”
So you over see what is happening
How we fall apart
“Learn from it” you say
But yet it is immortalized
Huge statues
On even bigger columns
As big as the boxcars that took my people away
Overseeing people going about their business
Being overshadowed
A cause long since lost
A Barbaric civilization
Written in dusty tomes
Tucked away in musty libraries
Upended crosses on motorcycle men
Banalities “The South Will Rise Again”
I cried for days
Great-Great Grandmother’s will
Faded Presbyterian eyes
“Do not sell the boy from the mother until he is 10, then he will choose a trade”
Worried more for her eternal soul than the lives in her stead
I seek for her grave in town
Wanting to rip the marble from the parched earth
Seething over my legacy of enslavement and death
Here are my comments on the creative process that you requested. As a poet, The moment really chose me; I was in Lexington, VA, specifically to write poetry. I’d been writing a lot about COVID, the political, economic, and social ramifications of which took up a lot of my time.
The hardest sentence to write was the sentence about the actual talking with the woman in the store, and how I had to write about the time it happened as well as to bring up the painful memory.
In the first draft, I had a hard time separating myself from the content, I felt it was overly soul-bearing. I kept the part about crying because I did, and it seemed to fit. I also kept the anger, and I never have found her grave. I wanted the poem to feel unsettled. I am still unsettled.
Come and Find Me in My Solitude
four fingers in a water glass
to keep the “creep” away
four fingers in a water glass
to keep the curse at bay
no ice, let’s keep it quiet,
hard bite of whiskey’s sting
“hair of the dog that bit ya”
as the dying grey wolves sing
rocking inside the boxcars
camping beside the track
drowning dreams of a yesterday
that’s never coming back
huddled beneath “newsprint” blankets
curled in pain’s fetal ball
dreading the sounds of the sunset
fearing the crash of night’s fall
praying for death in a doorway
shivering against marbled stone
a vision through slow closing eyelids
of somebody calling him home
12/2/2016
submitted to – COME AND FIND ME IN MY SOLITUDE – Poetry Contest
She lit candles
in her empty kitchen.
Burnt air disappears
through the back door.
Pale and wild,
brittle street witch,
shy, wide eyes.
Her mind like a weathered epitaph,
left alone in it's quiet mystery;
but her spirit roams
gentle and porous.
City sorrows like ashes
cling to her rags,
sting her eyes.
Their faces burn inside her
like dim candles
giving warmth
to her own melancholy.
The cafe windows are boarded up.
She walks home
with November chimney ghosts
and a dying sun,
while she conjures visions of love.
Love is the sad hazy eyes
and cigarette swirls
that swallow the haunted dusk ruins.
Old souls in the streets
waltzing across black gardens.
Dazed escapists shedding lonesome
and tired teenage skin.
All their secrets out,
kissing their willow bones
licking and scorching their dirty feet.
The hymns of a thousand hobos.
The wind with it's cinders, bells,
and organ chord lullabies.
Fleeing boxcars cradle drunks
with tangled hearts.
Junkies smoking by fountains,
paint their reflections angelic in the water.
Graffiti stains the walls
in abandoned churches,
where wild haired children
wrote their names.
Misery missed this place.
Love evoked their bone yard to flesh.
"Got your fluff again"
(for purpose of this poem
pronounce last word uh gain).
The missus uttered
aforementioned phrase
as she pulled a clump of my hair
from out the clogged shower drain
for no rhyme nor reason lemme explain
how so many globs of these strands
linkedin to scalp courtesy hair follicle,
which hair follicle essentially
a tube-like structure (pore)
that surrounds the root
and strand of a hair.
Hair follicles exist
in the top two layers of skin.
The average individual
born with over five million hair follicles
in their body and over
one million hair follicles
on his/her head, and as I aged
about that many seem to
get loosed when washing then rinsing hair,
nevertheless more hair continues
to grow out of hair follicles
smaller in size than sand grain.
I surmise that if laid end to end
each hapless hair that got plucked
out me noggin since birth
would fill many a railroad car,
(extending from Schwenksville,
Pennsylvania to Ukraine)
railcar (American and Canadian English),
railway wagon, railway carriage,
railway truck, railwagon, rail carriage
or railtruck (British English and UIC),
also called a train car, train wagon,
train carriage or train truck;
a vehicle used for the carrying
of cargo or passengers on a rail transport.
Said locomotive boxcars full to the brim
with globs of hair (mine)
after lathering locks
(each filament evincing
fifty shades of gray fibrous)
composed of 95% keratin,
a fibrous and helical protein
(in the shape of a helix),
which also comprises
composition of the skin
and of all the phanera (hair, nails, etc.).
Synthesized by keratinocytes,
keratin insoluble in water,
thus ensuring waterproofing
and protection for hair.
A funny thing happened to or with me this morning during the 11 O'clock hour. During the few moments that I was watering our lemon tree, a train went back. This was the Amtrak and not the commercial cargo locomotive. For the most part, I had always thought upon the trainline behind my property as an annoyance and not an asset. But today, for reasons unknown to me, I was forced to acknowledge my selfishness, the variety that does not always focus upon the common good.
With regards to the sound of trains out back, at one time my prayer would have been, "O Lord, deliver me from the pain of the trains. O Lord, what was I thinking when I bought a home within two football fields from a trainline?
But this morning as I watered the plum and lemon trees, the flowers and the Rose of Sharon, I was not so inclined. As I listened to the sound of the train making her way down the east bound railway line, it dawned on me that I was without the usual whine.
I then, in a moment, refrained from my usual way of thinking and saw the trains as rolling wheels of commerce and many tons of economic activity. There were seeds for the sower and food for the hungry. There were oil tankers, logging cars, and automobiles. Today, I heard the infrequent sounds of horns as safety measures, and found that the rumbling of loaded boxcars behind the protected sound barriers was not so annoying.
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