Planes, trains and automobiles

The sight of bridges and balloons
makes calm canaries irritable;
they caw and claw all afternoon

When I'm nervous, or sad, or scared, I like to watch a train.

I don't know exactly why. I think, in some way, there's something reassuring about a train. It's industrial white noise is something good to fill my worried ears. Metal wheels pulled along metal track, ancient smoke blown into the endless sky. Strength.

Trains are dependable, too. There's something reliable about a train. It stretches across my vision like the horizon; a train is like the earth. It carries goods and people and love letters and cows and conductors and fuel and food and everything, to everywhere.

When I watch a train I can't help but remember my place in history. I can't help but wonder where its going and what it's taking and where I'm going and what I'm taking with me. A train, however, always remains nondescript. It has no identity, it is just a train. Metal and smoke and steely screeching. It feels endless but it always ends, pulling away and growing smaller and less important and eventually I can't see it anymore and I forget about it. But for a few minutes, a train can be all thre is in the entire world.

Someday, I'd like to grab onto one of those rusty rails and ride to the end of the earth, and I know a train is the only way to get there.

Here is a poem I wrote on the light-rail, while thinking about trains. It doesn't rhyme.

I was riding the train today
and a woman came up to me and said
You're Beautiful.

For a moment
I thought she was talking about something else.
Humanity, poetry, music,
but I was wrong.
She was talking about me.

And all I did was smile
because I didn't know what to say.