The Passenger

Soundtrack made for kicks. I recorded this while imagining me imagining myself reading this out loud, occasionally the tone and rhythm of the words intersect with the music. Sorta.

The Passenger

The final car approaches
You sit among the passengers
Each scared they'll be the one to crash the train

Posing as they were
On shelf-like seats
They blur the line that runs between commodity and sentience

He enters from a stairway
It's the kind you don't
descent or climb, but take
They disappear like cold sores past his shoulder

He sits facing backwards
And searches you
From eyes to heels for a stamp card
Like you're some library book he lost

You recognize that look,
And want to take out a distraction
But all you have is arson and your scrapbook

Your scrapbook was for butterflies
Whose wings grew so vibrant and dry
You find no further use for color

But fate has always slammed it shut
Before they're finished with their bodies, so
The book hurts far too much for you to open

This man pries apart the pages
Calls them gorgeous
Terrifying you,
And following you, ranting, into the next car

In search of safety you sit down
Within a dealer's blast radius
And fall asleep with one eye open
It must have been the wrong one

Several tunnels later
You start to envy those
With just one stop to watch out for
You're weak,
But not as weak as they are

The dealers arm around you,
No longer your protector,
Is tickling the threshold
Of what
You'd live lawless to be rid of

The arm extends, a lustrous blue,
Up past the sky and then into
Your pocket
Elbows God's ribs
Before He takes credit

Excusing himself
The dealer pulls
A familiar stairway from his lapel
You take a sudden leap
Before his words can
Curl your efforts inward

Now floating
And so forgotten is
The nonsense patter
Of the train car's tiny bouncing
Like a million disused truths
Trying to break out of a coffin

Your frayed strips of thought
Are the socks of every atom
Our minds are only so
When they forget they're raindrops
Counting backwards as they go

The train, it carries passengers
Between knowledge
And paying lip service to facts
Its route an oblate spheroid
We chuck paint on
As we land back on the tracks

Impact shakes the glasses
In another wannabe inscrutable Orpheus' loft
Orpheus pours another round of gin
For himself and lovable fuck-up Pete
and says,
"An unfillable absence has saved me"
Pete knows he's on about Eurydice again
And slits both their throats to change the subject
And keep him from his fucking guitar

The blood pools and seeps
To the first lair of the underworld
Where the walls echo with "They're a good person, but"
Networking with the dust kicked up by the trains
The avant garde rhythm of their passing
Inspires light exchanges
Legs sprout, and tokens form
They board the train
Sorting out memories that might as well be theirs