This Train

This train…
I’m blowin’ and I'm chuggin’…
Chuggin’ and blowin’ like this train…
It’s the brake block moan I’m singing
The one note, two note tone I’m bringing
This black-heart, black-art bell I’m ringing.

This train…
Ain’t got no… this train
Don’t stop. No stations
No platform souls, no destinations.
This train is deep and dark with gamblers
Red-eye sharks and late-night ramblers.

And this train…
Don’t have  no stock for rolling
No cars for riding, no saloons to hide in
No locked cabooses, just  pipe-hot steam, like hell, for burning,
No crumbs of comfort, hand on heart, ask who’s consoling
Who down here in the freight-yard railway siding’s
Never-never-never land on this hard steel road that has no turning.

This train’s…
…coming like a ghost train…
Where boxcar stragglers, bogey hagglers, hock their sorrows
For all their hard-rock jiving, never-arriving, drowned-in-gin tomorrows
Closed-blind windows lock out the daylight;
Till darkness shrieks the names for midnight.

No signs, no signals, no lights, no engine, no start, no stop, no happy ending
Black like a tunnel, a dirt-deep hole sucking down the bones of every soul we’re sending
It’s the scream train, it’s the nightmare express,
It’s boogie-woogie coma time, more or less.

We laid the line and the bed it runs on; can’t look forward, can't look back;
We made the grade and now can’t climb it, rain and dust devils undermine it;
We raised embankments, cut out the cuttings, put down the sleepers, fenced it, bridged it.
We're hammering out the railroad blues, we're the chaingang drumming it down the track.

This train…
Ain't real… never was… it is here no more… the train’s the journey, forever travelling
And our threadbare lives, their slow unravelling
All our days and all our years, all our deluded hopes and fears,
Our wants and needs, what we desire, aspire to, our first cry, last laugh, joy and sadness.
Give up inspiration, choose which obsession, which compulsion, embrace the madness.
We come aboard like squalling children, grow up, grow old, grow strong, grow twisted
Close down the mind, open  up the vein, bleed  too  much away, tourniquet,  tight-fisted.

This train’s…
Imagination time-warp, it’s a pipedream, it's brainwaves, alpha, omega running in our heads
Spinning round bends that can never come straight or straight-on, full-steam till we’re dead.

© BH 2015

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The analogy of railroad. Combined with spoken-word rhythms. After my mini-stint at the Rio in Glasgow over a month ago, hearing so many different deliveries, I thought I’d try for something rappier. An older word would be ‘declamatory’. For me, that suggested performance, polemic, with attitude. Then there’s the rhythm of it, punchy, staccato, almost.

So out it came. Over several days, well weeks, really. It rhymes but they’re often embedded or hidden. The idiom is a kind of Mid-Atlantic to US. The train motif is the one you find in blues and folksong. Everybody’s a hobo, and the endless mile-long freight-trains are an off-grid highway across the nation.

But it’s just travel, and a metaphor for the lives we build on these shores and beyond. Going places. Hobos nonetheless. Lots of pretensions. All human life is there in the train-tunnel.

We all think there’s a journey’s end. Never looking beyond the windows, we fail to see through the illusion. The train is going nowhere; we all travel in it; the train is our own dream of ourselves.  In it we are all figments of our own imaginations.