Early Morning Train

The train moves slowly coming out 
of the city, passing landscape dark 
and industrial, cluttered and 
crumbling with the sort of disrepair 
two or three generations of civic
neglect can take on century-old 
buildings, now lit only by the light
of a moon fading into the first glow 
of an early morning sunrise.

From where I am I can make out
figures gathered around a 
smoldering fifty-gallon drum, 
rubbing their hands to catch the heat 
of dying embers, and looking ever so 
much like those groups you might 
see gathered around an office water
cooler, sharing stories about last 
night's whatever it was, these 
squatters, down-and-outters, drunks 
and surly teens, those who see things 
that aren't there and others who've 
seen too much of what is, people 
without homes or families and others 
seeking freedom from homes or 
families or those who find their thrill
in escaping the tedium of the steady 
march from people and places they 
don't want toward other people and 
places they won't want—the job, 
the marriage, the children, 
the lover—moving out of the nothing 
they find in one space and into the 
nothing offered by another, as if the 
moving itself made all the difference 
in the world. 

I watch the train as it moves along 
its track, winding through this 
wilderness of spirit, and I think of 
how alike we are, each of us a 
passenger who pays little mind 
to what we pass or what we see, 
each of us going toward a destination 
we think we have until we don't.