Two trains are racing as two trains
are wont to do, one at 50 mph
from Memphis, engineer chewing
on a blues tune, flicking it around
his tongue like a toothpick.
The other train is hustling up from Albuquerque
at 70 mph, engineer longing for his darling,
singing an empty-saddle song, tipping his hat.
Which train will arrive at Tulsa first?
Memphis is on Central Time,
Albuquerque on Mountain Time, and between them,
heading west, a tornado is expected
though it’s guesswork which train track
will be ripped up, and besides,
heading east is a fleecy green sedan
blasting rap, windows down, bass thumping
while prairie dogs, terrified,
hump it back to their holes. In my eighth grade
Rate times Time equals Distance problems,
it was always two honest trains chug chugging,
no railroad company wanting a government bailout
or union concession. We never had prairie dogs
or tornados. And there were never any
rapper wannabes distracting the engineer
as you know that engineers are wont
to be distracted down the track at some
railroad crossing in some town where some
baseball player who can’t hit a pig’s ass
with a banjo, bears down at batting practice
in a semipro league and smashes
a slider over right field into the window
of an oncoming train. And which train?
And what’s the rap distraction?
And why do trains want to race to Tulsa in the first place?
We never asked why the trains were racing.
So, between the blues in my backyard someday train,
the darlin darlin my stallion’s named Marvin train
and the rapper wannabe Yo homie don’t smoke my sedan,
America’s children are solving the story problems
of tomorrow. Call them the M generation:
children IM and TM in the AM and PM and listen
to their FMs, or is it their iPods? Their problems
are Greenland and Antarctica melting, raising
the world’s waterline by twenty feet. Which Philippine island
will flood first? And how will children resolve the music
of Muslims and Jews? They will create clichés,
find that the good old days are still good, and still
old, find that fewer people ride trains when they
could be burning up fuel and fooling themselves
most of all of the time as people are wont to do.
April 21st, 2010 | Category: Gigs | Comments (2)