Sour breath gritty men, lost apostles
On double rails to nowhere
But warm. They gave up addresses,
Families, jobs, birth names, sheets.
Men with faces like relief
Maps the color of smoke.
High Rail Red,
Woody, Memphis, all lamented
El Paso Pope’s failed leap
Leaving his lower legs on the tracks.
And Boston Bobby found blue in a boxcar,
Doors slammed shut on a Rockies’ siding.
Apple wine, cigarettes, canned
Peach halves and saltines
Could get Red to his twenty dollar
Bills stashed in Folgers cans scattered
From Hope, Arkansas to Portland.
A summer in the saddle of a big Cat,
Government checks for a mental breakdown,
A man could stay gone for years, forever.
Who sleeps on cardboard, wheels going sixty,
Steel to steel roar and teeth rattling
In heads loosed by blackberry wine and regret
For something they chose to forget.
I was a student hobo with an Am Ex,
Import beer in my backpack,
Love letters from my Italian Princess,
A knife for killing. They laughed.
Diesel soot stories of ghostly men disconnected
Still mystifies. I watch from the interstate now
Six engines disappear in a dark West Texas storm.
I nod and push homeward for bed.