One day I boarded the Orient Express
and rollicked across an entire continent.
I felt content to the degree there was air
enough to inhale amid the train’s rattle.
It couldn’t be as splendid as I recollect
sloshing inside my mother’s womb,
but that was in another dimension when
the square Earth spun in triangular orbit.
My seat was nothing less than luxuriant,
caviar and vintage merlot most delicious.
They even had an eighty-inch television
mounted at the front of my executive car.
All those possessions I thought so precious
disappeared as the dream encasing a dream
reeled round within my head and landscape
outside fled by faster than a speeding bullet.
Kiev shone majestic as ancient Byzantium;
I could dive out and swim in the Black Sea,
but the train would then leave me there to die
unless I found a way to grow wings and fly.
Europe appeared suddenly like an apparition
and I captured it with keen peripheral vision,
coddled it like a grandiose good luck charm,
one that would potentially thwart any harm.
I’m spawn of Ireland Germany and Poland
with some Belgium tossed into the equation,
so what harm would it be were I to depart
the train once arrived at my headquarters?
As it pulled into the station I understood
the Express had proven an ideal vehicle
shuttling me unto roots where my resolve
was to savor a life of perpetual invention.
Grey Sparrow Journal 