Break Bound Train (A poem of College Misery)

Break Bound Train
Here in the flat country, we get by on grits
and long nights with red pens,
staggering towards the end of things,
and something between death and resurrection
pulls you onward day by day:
a slow moving train going to a place you bought a ticket to
but don't yet believe in.

It might be Oz or Narnia or
(most likely) Winter Break,
But for now, all you see is flat land and trees
outside windows clouded with a thousand dusty days
and dew streaks tracing snail tracks in waves.
"The windows need to be cleaned,"
you think to yourself. You know you
won't be the one to do it.

Your hands are for bleeding.

Your fingers hemorrhage ink on paper;
the conductor collects it every few days.
When the coal ran out, it seemed like the best idea we had.
You don't know where they get these papers;
you are sure you already covered this.
The bleeding red is reflexive at this point.
You unfriend your college roommate
because she still butchers semicolons;
your fingers never stopped aching around her.

When the conductor stops coming by,

you worried but kept working.

Without you, the train wouldn't move

at all. Someone made a new conductor's hat

from a blank title page. We take turns wearing it.

The papers were piling up, so we started taking them

for burning. The engine was gone. I found the dragon

that had eaten the engine liked paper marinated in red ink.

I wonder if we summoned it when we started burning

student papers just to keep moving.

You keep grading. We are running low on red pens,

and the dragon eyes the one who wears the conductor hat

peckishly.

"One more week," the oracle whispers, and you find

one

more

wind.

-- Poetical in Pensacola

A previous poetical 

spasm may be 

found here in the archives