night

northbound freight trains rumbled by shaking me out of warm bedding and onto the frosty steel deck of one empty flatcar where light rain was stinging brightly my naked body through a wintry mist and passionless stars aglitter as tibbets droned overhead and wobbling beams of locomotive search lights looked to be miles ahead where the screech of air horn blasts were little more than a single toot through the onrushing darkness which was broken in places by industrial fires and lights of many large and small towns along the tracks and children and manson families romped noisily at school playgrounds under cold and weak winter sunshine which wasn’t sufficient to produce electricity from weedy solar farms dotting hillsides sporting bright spring buttercups and skeletal families waved from lichen encrusted concrete crypts as four of us rode the open car through farms of amber waved plenty and ancient detroit suburbs where pungent scents of newly mowed hay was cocktail blended with the stinks of big cities decaying beside a moonlit riverside just as the train crashed into the station awakening me with a startled spasm lifting me back into my warm place and the night remained quietly normal