Thursday, April 8, 2010

For Denise

The train is there, stuck on the tracks. Again. It's got us all blocked in. Boxed in. Again. Nobody cared when they laid the damn things, nobody cares now. Nobody that matters. We're just the little people in the wrong part of town. Shoved in the garage. With the trains. And the tracks.

They're shakin' it up. Rattling and rolling, with the high-whistles and the low-horns and the way the two blow loud and discordantly. The traffic is stopped. Cars just sitting there in the streets. Nobody can move. The train is there. Why? What's it waiting for? Car horns now, mixing with train whistles. It's been there for forty minutes. Just sittin'. Once a week at least.

Maybe they're experimenting. Sociological experimentation isn't that much more sophisticated, they're just better at hiding it. One day the train cars will open up, and gas will pour out, and we'll all be dead.

Except then who will tend their bars? Who will cross the tracks to clean their hotels? Who will paint the art they croon over in their lavish uptown galleries? Guess we're not lucky enough for the gas.

Fuck if I know. Fuck if I care. I just can't stand that damn whistle, or the way it makes my bones rattle when it passes. Like it's grabbed hold of my marrow and is shaking me from the inside out. I can use a good shake, you know? But from the outside in. That's all I'm saying. Forty-five minutes now, and we're still sitting here. We're sweating on bar stools, listening to horns and cursing, and watching the slow-moving ceiling fans push the cigarette smoke down.

It's the kind of shit that drives a man mad.

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