Mystery Train

[J Hillenburg]

Mystery Train



The dogs begin to bark

from a half deserted city street.

I emerge from an open window

into twilight heat.

Restlessly yearning and absolved

from voices and memories I cannot name.

A sour taste in my mouth from the enemy of dreaming

who I saw you with from the windows of a mystery train.


I heard voices in the breeze,

and vapor collected in my eyes.

Faces flashed before me,

featureless forms I did not recognize.

The tremendous, recurrent image evolved,

and dark fears upon me came.

I swear she was once something to see,

once upon a time on a mystery train.


In this hypnotic state of being

elevated above a canopy of stars.

I saw a man and woman I once knew

who had bore terrible scars.

He was a man of no fortune, but with a name to come,

and she full of the fury and mire of human veins.

Both of them travelers from afar

once upon a time on a mystery train.


He, dressed for the recessional, descended the stairs;

I remember the story now as a remarkable dream.

She was all complexities, but they traveled as a pair,

he, to mend some ancient feud, her to bless the troubled stream

that ran beneath lime and cobblestone streets

where a ferryman waited, soaked by a pouring rain

spreading throughout the underworld

slowly, on a mystery train.


And I brought forth the theme, the image,

but it was just a vision

of a world I loved and once knew,

and a young woman for whom I made desperate decisions.

In the shape of your form, the bone of your being

is the source of where all hunger remains.

This is how I remember you

once upon a time on a mystery train.