The Last Ride

Onto a lush green mire the train rushes,
hitching and jumping on the track
marred by uneven patches of rusted steel.
The train, it jumps, the passengers pitch
forward and back, their stomachs heaving.

One man is pulled violently--slide
         weightlessness
                                       tumble
  spiral     forward, the world is in a black hole as he is,
              smack
                            crack and the spiderwebs start
                            growing, and the man is caught
in that web, deliriously moaning, undetermined of
the direction the train is moving, and strung
a paraplegic before the lurking, pinching, invisible spider
as it ejects its stiffening venom so steadily
into him...

he fears, he stabs, he rolls, he turns
so that his head is beneath his feet, he flies
screaming down the length of the train head first,
feet following loosely behind,
he sits, he stares through the window on the moor
again at rest, he realizes that he can't call for help,
a new tumble comes... through the cracks,
the webs softly glistening over the stretch of the green
evergreen bog, the deep mosses that hang low
from the branches of each conifer,
like so many beards on old men, tall and quiet,
the man smells something--the fine grasses,
wet with winter and the trees in their hunched stature,
       and he smiles.  He's in his seat.
He can't trade his seat with anyone else:
he'll never get off, but he'll be ill, motion sick,
and only imagine that he ever moved.
He smells the mire, and no longer knows
where the train is going,
through the peat lying dead upon the track.