Dispatched From The Lounge #1

Many of you receiving this email know that I sometimes mumble something in passing about poetry. Consider this my little flash to you of what goes on under the overcoat. Hide your eyes and look away, or stare and enjoy. If it doesn't affect me noticeably, I might write another of these. I'll just be picking random selections and passing them on.

That's enough introduction. Just like Mayor Bud many years ago, I'm exposing myself for art's sake.

-MVK

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You got there too late, and the town
had gone, the bar closed, the last
failed settlers moved on in their
tattered wagons, with so much left
behind,
baby pictures left on the muddy floor of
the shed, baby pictures taken when there was
a dream, an idea about how life
slowly gets better over the years,
But you've learned better, and they've
all gone, and you're there to find
a ticket back to the stomach-turning
hopes shattered in younger years,
you thought this all would grow into
a real home, a place both comfortable
and crazy, a place where you
could drink like mad and howl at
a blind moon, then wake up and
slowly warm in the autumn sun.
But you got impatient. You left it when
you thought you knew every board,
every pothole, every face.
You went away- you'd lied to yourself
and the now-impossible truth leaves
you lonelier than ever, choking on
the dust of a summer wind.

(written 12/11/2005)

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This giant steam locomotive gasped its last
oil-powered breath nearly fifty years
ago, its brute strength inert against
the will of industry and the crushing
assault of soulless technology,
And yet it still smells of oil, the
strong, sweet, acrid smell of a steam-driven
monster, lying dead in the museum,
scaring children in its immobility,
children who have no sensation of
what the heat in the firebox felt like,
the small earthquakes at each pounding of
the cylinders, the shrill whistle piercing
the snowbound silence of the Sierra
Nevada mountains.
The black metal beast slumbers, history
travels by outside the museum
and it still smells of oil.

(written at the California State RR Museum, 8/5/2005)