Nikola Tesla was right

"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more. "

8:44-9:38 Wednesday Night

I arrived at the station three minutes after my train had departed. Now I had to figure out a way to smoothly pass the time while trying to avert stares from this years model of suit and tie, befuddled tourists and the tween hustlers trying to make a buck off stolen mars bars.

I deflated in a seat next to a lumpy schizo' bag lady that I recognized from monday evening. She was still asleep and gnawing on the filter from a Newport cigarette I watched her pick up from the floor. Or maybe it was her own tongue; I couldn't tell the difference. The glowing board looming above us all sputtered and flicked to let us know that the 9:07 train to Trenton was departing on Track 4. Like cows being electrocuted to the slaughter, an undulating wave of humans gushed forward. I watched them bottleneck through the scuffed gold door, refusing to try and open the other half which would increase their spillage. At 9:08, only those left behind remained. Slowly, people trickled back on to the waiting room floor, staring at the board, fidgeting and directionless. Anticipating the illuminated god above to tell them where to go.

The bag ladies head slipped off the armrest and lolled onto my forearm. Yellow drool leaked out of her pigish orifice onto me. Disgusted, I wiped my arm up into her hair. There the globule sat and stared at me, while I could feel  other eyes making themselves at home on my character, in their abhorance of it. 

Two seats to my left sat a red haired man, with an awful goatee hunched over a mall sized pretzel. I only noticed that his grey t-shirt was tucked into blue pocketless sweatpants when he stood up to throw a monster sized bag full of pretzel wrappers in the trash. When he rose, his entire being groaned.  A gut hung over the elastic with the authority of a toddler attempting to escape the confines of their play-pen. Fidgeting for a moment with the draw-string of his sweats, his stubby digits managed to get the knot untied. Thumbs locked in place, he flung his arms forwards and exposed an entire panoramic view of his genitalia. Paying careful attention that his  shirt did not get tucked back in, he pulled it up to expose breasts a size shy of my own.  He threw his bag in the can and cracked a joke about LeBron James, and his eyes met mine. His grin quickly turned shit-eating. Putting his left hand back in his pants, he grabbed around for a while then showed me what he had been trying to find. An un-circumcised dick laughed harder at me then his friends had. They got tired of the joke when I observed that if that was the only thing going for him, he better finish getting his GED. Red-faced, he relocated at the other end of the ever narrowing room. I heard the clunk and clatter of the plastic numbers and letters again. Another heard rushed to their track to be crucified. As before, the remnants who missed the train found seats amongst the already tardy in the room. 

Two confused old ladies in slippers and hair the color of robins eggs shuffled past me with a mountain of luggage chattering in hopes of catching their train. Someone near the gate notified them that it had already left. One took the empty seat beside me, while the other went to find somewhere to relieve her bowels. I watched a young man offer candy bars to tourists. I laughed when they fell for his trick. For those unaware; Once you take the candy from the seemingly generous youth, they ask you to pay for it. When you try to give it back, they won't accept it. A few maneuvers and smooth talking later, they force you to overpay for candy you could have purchased from the vending machine near the ticket booths. This went on for some time, until the station police chased him back upstairs. He'd get more money up there anyway.

The other old woman re-appeared in front of me, so I stood up to offer her my seat. Without letting me finish my sentence ( and without stopping hers...) she pushed me aside to slump into the depths of my seat. She didn't so much as look at me, or offer a ' thank you'. Seatless and annoyed, I roamed in and out of clumps of humans. One shoved me, another made a sound of contempt at my passing. A third threw their McNugget container towards the the trash can but bounced it off of my head instead. No apologies, just a shrug and an about-face. I picked my nose and wiped the bounty on his PRADA bag as I strolled by.

Again, the board fluttered for the last time. The New Jersey Coast line to Long Branch left from Track 1. Pushed and trampled over, I quickly became one with the mob. We were forced into a long, white, sterile hallway with cold rectangular fluorescent lights. Tripping down the stairs, I felt a hand grab my ass. Another teared at my ribs. Someone else grasped at the back of my neck. I was just dead meat to them.

Sitting next to the window in the sixth seat, of the fourth car, it dawned on me that I have to spend the next seventy-five minutes confined in this sardine can with this lost, tired, disgusting, valueless mob that I had slowly become a member of. 

We pulled out. 

I fell asleep. 

And dreamed of overly-salty sea air that smelled of rust and garbage.

Who Taught You?

You gave me punishment, it lasted an hour
It made marks on my skin
I'm just a bundle of misery girl
Did you see my cheeks fall in?

Weeping Willow

He found himself face-down again.

This time it was somewhere between New Mexico and Nevada. Chugging along at 80 miles per hour, the trains' whistle bellowed him awake.

He could feel the sandy air crawling around his skin; finding its way up his ankles, across his chest, enter his nostrils and down again through the entrails. It sat in his stomach like a diseased brick. He had been sleeping all day, but still found himself feeling sunburnt and exhausted.

What little clouds the desert had that night clung on the power lines in a desperate loving embrace. The moon's permanent, twisted, howling face lay full and judgemental far beyond the arid hell that had enveloped both the train and the man inside.

Grasping the bottom of his Levi's pockets in search for a lighter was when he felt it. Thin and worn between his fingertips, his digits slid comfortably into the grooves of where he had held it time and time before. Every atom in his body stopped moving as suddenly as he realized what he had found. He slowly pulled his hand out of his pocket as if the folded up photograph was the hunter and he it's prey, all the while convincing himself to not let it sail out the open train car door. As much as he wanted to let it go; he couldn't. He hesitantly unfolded it and the second it was free, he knew what he had really opened was Pandora's Box.

There she sat. Even if there was no light to resonate off the moon, her face would still be illuminated, and strongly resonate through any viewers ribcage and twist their heart into a knot. Her long brown hair coiled softly around her throat while her cloudless green eyes happily stared out through the cellophane. Her skin was smooth and pale, and looked as soft as the field of wildflowers she sat amongst. The color of her dress matched the sadness in his heart. Memories came washing back as fast and hard as the tide of the Atlantic crashed onto gnarled jetties.

He lost his job a few weeks back, and gambled the rest of their savings away at casinos and liquor stores. The baby cried, while he got off in the crusty yellow motel room down the street with another pair of tits. Blonde, red, or brunette; it never mattered to him. The baby went hungry while he heated up a spoon, and tied another balloon. She said she'd leave if he didn't clean up his act. He never believed her. She needed him too much, was what he thought. On a muggy Thursday evening he pulled up to their house in his brown beat up Buick, from losing another hundred dollars at the race track. The house was dim, and all too quiet. The front door was left unlocked; luckily for him since he couldn't even begin to recognize which one of the four keys on the ring were to his house, in his extreme inebriated state. Flicking on the lights, his heart sank. All that was left in the room was a yellow note curling on the dusty wooden floor.

" You have failed both me and your daughter not only as a functioning, loving parent, but as a human being. I would never want our daughter to know a man like you her entire life, and in turn you have lost your right to know her. You are lower than the rat on the food chain."

Flipping the note over, he realized the only paper she could afford to leave behind, was the back of a photograph of herself sitting in their yard. The picture was taken the day they moved in together. Stupified, he stumbled back out the front door and passed out in the holly bush underneath the living room's bay window, puking the whole way down.

Shaking his head to free himself from his thoughts, the train bobbled along the tracks even faster. Sick at himself, he lay his right hand palm down against his chest; the photograph of her wedged between. With his left hand he reached in his other pocket and found his green lighter. There was a quarter of whiskey left in the bottle he had been carrying with him, and he emptied it out onto himself. Already in agonizing pain from how he had destroyed everything he had ever cared for in his entire pathetic life, and realizing that the only thing he couldn't lose was his broken heart, he knew this wouldn't hurt a bit. Lifting his right hand to his face, he kissed the photograph, folded it back up, and let it nestle in the well of his palm.

The family of jack-rabbits that lived along the tracks looked up as they heard the train passing by, and continued to munch on whatever desert vegetation they could find. They sat as eyewitnesses to the yellow-orange glow of the third to last car. Black smoke curled around the top of the open train door, and flames licked the lips of the roof. It caught on fire almost as instantly as the man inside.

Once the train had passed, the smell of a deer carcass roasting in the desert sun lingered, although the minutes were catching up to midnight. The rabbits continued to gorge, as the scent made them salivate each time they stopped chewing to catch their breath.

Daughter Of Sin

Born into the hatred and the guilt,

Before one God you've always knelt;

He could never bring me to my knees,

For there is no God I could appease.

I am the solitary daughter of original sin,

Cursed by the name of my father's kin.

Hell is the only home Ill ever know,

As it's the only place I'm destined to go.

In his eyes I would do no wrong

Once the veil of life expired, pure memories could not remain for long.

When he found me lying in the garden of Eden,

Only then he realized I was merely a heathen.

I have inherited my fathers eyes

Fearful of living a life of which I despise.

Slowly rotting from the inside out

Is quickly filling my head with doubt.

The sands of time have fallen through my hands

Leaving me to face cold, evil, barren lands.

A world of which I have created for myself,

Through unrighteous acts, my virtue lacks.

Born into the hatred and the guilt,

Before one God you've always knelt;

He could never bring me to my knees,

For there is no God I could appease.

I am the solitary daughter of original sin,

Cursed by the name of my father's kin.

Hell is the only home Ill ever know,

As it's the only place I'm destined to go.

For I am the daughter of my fathers sin's

Forced to face an empty life

Devoid of love, and filled with strife.

I refuse to live life on my knees

For there is no God in which I could appease.

His apartment was in the lower east 30 somethings of New York City. The dining room, living room, and bathroom overlooked the east river and the hell that lay beyond, also known as Bayside, Queens. The bedroom and kitchen however fell in the shadow of other mile high residencies.

Tonight was the night she first noticed that his enormous bedroom windows had never wore curtains for as long as he lived there. Or, for at least as long as she'd been coming over; which wasn't very long at all. She could feel the rotten springs digging into her exposed spine, but she had been visiting frequently enough to know how to jostle them back into the depth of the stuffing with a simple wiggle of her butt; which caused the ashes from her joint to flake onto the sheets.

"Will you quit wiggling around like that please? Every time you do, I lose it" He huffed into her forehead.

" Well then maybe you should get a new mattress. This one is about to implode on us". She grumbled back into his chest.

He put his enormous hand on her face to signal her to shut up. She bit one of his fingers, so he slapped her across the face.

"Can you hit a little harder next time, please?" She spit on floor and took another swig of whiskey out of the bottle. More ashes accumulated between her breasts.

"You're fucking disgusting". He clasped his hand around her throat as he continued to pump away at her.

Boredom clouds the mind. She allowed her head to loll to the left, and out of the way of his dripping chest. There, the buildings stared back at her.

Halves of living rooms, cut outs of bedrooms, key-holes of kitchens stared right through his part of the microcosm back at them. She was disgusted at how they watched. Her body feigned interest in what he was doing to her, but her mind remained outside. The lights in the surrounding buildings flicked to the beat of the Stones album that he put on every time before they started this charade.

One woman folded laundry. Another dried dishes. A man beat his wife. A son did his homework. Two younger lovers in a loft on the 18th floor. A widow illuminated by QVC on the 25th. A teenager fresh out of the shower, blow-drying her hair in the penthouse. Just a bunch of ants in their farm. Waiting for their food to be deposited and heat lamp to turn on. Continuing to mull about mundanely until they get what they want, only to complain some more.

She felt him flop on her and she let out a squeal. He killed the joint she had allow to burn between her fingertips, finished the rest of her whiskey, rolled over and passed out. After a few minutes of laying in his sweat and filth she sat up. Pulled her hair back into a bun and got dressed.

The needle of the turntable thudded along as she proceeded to pull on her jacket, and walk over to his dresser. She opened the sock drawer and rummaged around until she found what she was looking for. His money jar. She took enough to cover the whiskey and some quarters for the bus. Wrapping it back up in a pair-less red tube sock, she placed it back in the same position she found it and closed the drawer.

Tippy-toeing back to the bed, she leaned over and kissed him on the head. Her hand grasped his expensive watch on the bedside table, and she wondered how much she could get for it.

As she held the brass knob to return the room to its original state, she took one last look over her shoulder at the galaxy of windows she was temporarily leaving behind. The sight made her wonder how the starry night sky made people feel as insignificant as she did then.

Snake Amongst Me

I'm lookin' for love in all the wrong places,

With a heart full of hate down on worn out faces.

You're quite the sweet talker, with nothin' to offer

Except a fair-weathered hand for me to try and hold on to.

Sweet as honey

Palms up like the Virgin,

I'll still take the west-bound train

Out and down to your coffin.

Since you got what you wanted

And threw me away

My brain's since been haunted

Heart full of dismay.

But I'd pack all my bags up

And do it again

Bone's a-rattlin' down over

To your west-bound coffin.

Fool me once shame on you,

So it goes, or so I've heard.

Still, I love your "crooked little heart"

For helping me feel like I ain't "dancing in the dark".

But I'd pack all my bags up

And do it again

Bone's a-rattlin' down over

To your west-bound coffin.

Because I'm lookin' for love in all the wrong places,

With a heart full of hate down on worn out faces.

You're quite the sweet talker, with nothin' to offer

Except a fair-weathered hand for me to try and hold on to.