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With Every Step The tracks are here, twice the size, twice as wide. It takes a tremendous leap to bridge the gap. Sometimes the train can be right on top of you before you hear it, but not me! I live in that moment.... here, on this bridge that spans an ocean, than encircles the world without stop or station, Here on this train where you either live and die on it, live and die in a compartment of a train built to large, built for other sized people, built for split minds. Live and die with a horizon that never moves, and a motion sickness you can not explain in the still captivity of an empty train. The wheels pound constantly and silence is the unending shrill whistle of steam through a steel pipe. Even the one upon the tracks, running before the iron horse, was born to captivity, is trapped to her effort of escape, has nothing but the pounding of her heart, the spring of the boards, the salt of the sea and the howling steel hardness of his pursuing fate. Like me, she lives in that moment, that moment when life's hot breath becomes fire, when experience becomes death, but, unlike me, he won't cross over, he won't change, .... he runs from his fate. - - - and the one inside is not like me for he rides his fate as if helpless, as if trapped, as if the howling whistle - is silence, is truth, is inescapable. I cross, and have crossed many times. Death to me is less effort than the next leap across the boards, the effort to escape myself. I stop. . . . and the dark metal catches me and crumples me, smearing my body across the tracks, spraying my blood up onto the windows to mingle with the blood of my previous deaths. ..... then is see it! The fog out across the ocean. Once, I threw myself out after it, trying to catch it in my hand, trying to find insanity. Plunging into the ocean where the salt burned my skin, I swam until (i) drowned with each stroke reaching reaching out for what I could not grasp...... | |
| Damon Wyle |