As Far as I Go

Mingled in dark hoops of time, moving faster against lashes of space drawn out then foreclosed as the speed of light calls, casting shadows of reality into the heat of the moment to cool against that woman, Eleanor Rigby, who waits at the window but doesn’t answer the phone, her breath condensed on the glass.

Well, I just had to laugh and laugh at how much it looked like you, but it wasn’t you, was it? Still, we’ve met before, haven’t we? Look around, what have you got to lose?

We sit on this train, you think it’s just going normally along, but I tell you, it’s approaching light speed.

Tracks through a train window, west of Chicago

See how the green trees stretch, turning brighter than all the colors of fall combined, before giving in to brown as we pass through sonic vibration into light incantation; spy the houses and buildings blend into a long blur of human construction, wrapped around consciousness like a sentence that goes on longer than a reader can recall, abstract expressionism on a horizontal axis; watch the wires along the tracks slide into lines, a staff for your notes to harmonize the melody of metals, set to the rhythm of the wheels; observe this spatial expansion and contraction related to the velocity of our hearts as they beat, wondering what will transpire before the next station stops all time and space on a dime, your heart beat, mine.

I’m trying to tell you, I’m just a station on your way, I’m not your lover. That sex we almost had in our imaginations as you looked at me and I thought of you, that sex was the most fun I’ve ever had without laughing. And it would be again, if we laugh together.

And you? You, too, wake up each morning to the groundhog repetition of bedroom community living, follow the money and find the cheese at the end of the maze, Bob’s your uncle. And so’s Carl.

I tell you, you see that line there moving through the station? We could slip out, just on our way, and disappear for an afternoon in a rented room, who would know? I told you, I told you, I was one of those.

Yet even as I tell you this, I watch you slip away. Who are you waiting for? Will he come to you today? Tomorrow? I say hello, you say good-bye.

You glance out the window, down at the floor, avoid my eyes and the words flowing out of my irises like bees to and from a flower. I’m on the edge and falling off the edge and clinging to the edge with each word spilled over the edge, the cutting edge, slicing the thin remnants of sense and sensibility into the canyons. Lover, lover, lover, come back to me.

It doesn’t matter. I’m another manic Monday depressed Tuesday psychotic Sundae melting as I fly along the rails, keeping my foot off the live electric jolt of execution, waiting to hear from someone that, yes, this light-speed train compressed time to a point where we could expand into orgasmic eternity like back when smoking pot or doing a bit of acid and making love all night to music from a stack of vinyl records six feet tall.

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No. No, officers, I wasn’t bothering the lady.

We were just talking, you know, about physics and relativity and the prevalence of mental illness among passengers of this particular line. I spoke of soft seduction and the early Twentieth Century avant-garde so easily forged into ten-million dollar fakes nearly a century later.

No, I don’t have a line to use on her; no, I don’t snort lines of anything; no, I don’t mind walking on that imaginary straight line on the platform as the train pulls away, and I watch her eyes following me, longing to be free, longing to join in the moment of exploding suns and imploding stars, black hole singularities denser than flour-less chocolate cake at the high-end cafe in that fancy hotel by Central Park, you know, the trumped-up dump owned by a dandy lion escaped from the Eden Express zoo.

No, no I won’t be getting back on the train today. I won’t bother anyone. This is as far as I go, the end of the line. The is where I get off.

Train ride, as far as I go…